Marina Gerner on a thought experiment about consciousness. Imagine a girl called Mary. She is a brilliant neuroscientist and a world expert on colour vision. But because she grew up entirely in a ...

Omid Panahi finds that finding a solution is not the problem. The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment first devised by the Oxford moral philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967. In her paper titled ‘The ...

Peter Benson critiques a liberal but nationalistic brand of identity politics. The American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama is still best known for his 1992 book The End of History and the Last ...

Shakespeare never met Wittgenstein, Russell, or Ryle, and one wonders what a conversation between them would have been like. “What’s in a name, you ask?” Wittgenstein might answer “A riddle of symbols ...

John Kennedy Philip goes deep into the search for (post-) human heights. Throughout our history, we human beings have been trying to transform ourselves with a view of overcoming our limitations, even ...

The following answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. Sorry if your answer doesn’t appear: we received enough to fill twelve pages… Why are we here? Do we serve a ...

Jeff Mason on Kierkegaard’s three forms of life: the ethical, the aesthetic and the religious. Why get up in the morning? Should we get up for ourselves, for others, or for the Christian God? If we ...

Antonis Chaliakopoulos offers an intro to Heraclitus, and to Hegel, via each other. When Euripides asked Socrates his opinion on the book On Nature by Heraclitus of Ephesus (c.535-475 BC), Socrates ...

“…my first observation… will be found very nearly true; that the sublime is an idea belonging to selfpreservation. That it is therefore one of the most ...

Raymond Tallis dreams up a flight of philosophical fancy. The story of Zhuangzi and the butterfly must be one of the best known anecdotes in the philosophical literature. It is also, for me at any ...

Know the name, can’t quite recall what he thought? John-Francis Phipps explains the surprising ideas of the philosopher of vitalism. Bergson’s name is not usually included on shortlists of the ...

The following answers to this question each win a signed copy of How To Be An Agnostic by Mark Vernon. Sorry if you’re not here; there were lots of entries. True beliefs portray the world as it is; ...