Do you think that there is a computer screen sitting in front of you right now?  It would certainly seem so if you are reading these words online, but in fact you are not actually “seeing” the computer screen in front of you.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

To anyone who met him in his prime, Friedrich Nietzsche looked like a genial old-style man of letters: a quiet, dapper, unworldly bachelor, kind to children and exceedingly polite. But those who kept up with his prodigious output of books – he wrote more than one a year once he hit his stride in the 1880s – knew that the mild manner concealed incandescent ambition.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

In God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, the latest in a number of recent books critical of the modern research university, the influential Irish-born philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that “neither the university nor philosophy is any longer seen as engaging the questions” of “plain persons.”  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Interest in “trolleyology”—a way of studying moral quandaries—has taken off in recent years. Some philosophers say it sheds useful light on human behaviour, others see it as a pointless pursuit of the unknowable.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The West’s confusion arose because it wasn’t prepared for such a fundamental unsettling of postwar geopolitics. During four decades of ideological confrontation, theoreticians and journalists had argued about how a society should move from capitalism to socialism. There was no research on the opposite question—that is, on the transition from socialism to capitalism—apart from a few inconclusive studies, most notably in Poland, concerning the possibility of introducing some elements of the free market into a Communist society.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

A friend and I are wandering through the lush gardens of a grand country home. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live somewhere like this?” I ask, stopping to admire the view of the house over its lake. “Summer days on the lawn, grand parties, cocktails.” My friend mutters something about having a social conscience, but I’m not listening. “Lazing about,” I continue. “Wonderfully bored.” My friend’s face swivels towards me like the ventriloquist’s dummy in Magic. “Bored? How could you be bored if you had all that?” he exclaims.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

American bioethics was born out of a desire to be relevant. The philosopher Daniel Callahan has said that he and his colleagues founded the Hastings Center—the premier bioethics think tank—in 1969 because they wanted to give philosophy “some social bite, some relevance.”  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The reason women love to spend hours browsing in shops while men prefer to be in and out of the high street in minutes is down to their hunter-gathering past, claim scientists.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

It is a sign of these confused, amnesiac times that a straight-faced discussion can be held across the liberal-leaning pages of the New York Times and the Chronicle Review about whether to burn the books of one-time Nazi and full-time philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

If you examine philosophy-department offerings around America, you’ll find staple courses in “Philosophy of Law,” “Philosophy of Art,” “Philosophy of Science,” and a fair number of other areas that make up our world.  Why, then, don’t you find “Philosophy of Journalism” among those staple courses?   <<<To read full article, click here.>>>