Structuralism arose on the continent, in particular in France, in the early 60s. The first ‘big name’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, who took on Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French ...

Paul Doolan attends to our culture of attention demanding. ‘Listen’ is composed of the same letters as ‘silent’. Listening to another person means falling silent while the other speaks, opening ...

Anja Steinbauer introduces the life and ideas of Immanuel Kant, the merry sage of Königsberg, who died 200 years ago. “Have the courage to use your own reason!”, (in Latin sapere aude!) is the battle ...

Rogério Severo looks at the brain to see the world anew. It seems there was a time when metaphysicians were all of a single species. Now they appear to make up at least two. Of the newer kind is the ...

In his Introduction to Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837), Hegel argues that there are three ways of doing history. The first of these is original history. Original history refers to ...

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 ...

Tim Madigan on scientific versus religious explanations of ethical behaviour. “A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with ...

Kelvin McQueen asks whether minds could directly influence physical reality. It is widely acknowledged that there is a problem of explaining how subjective, conscious experience could arise out of ...

Farah Abdessamad wonders if it is a function of responsibility. One Saturday late morning I came across the loud brunch crowd around Gramercy in New York. After the eerily empty streets of last year, ...

David Macintosh explains Plato’s Theory of Forms or Ideas. For the non-philosopher, Plato’s Theory of Forms can seem difficult to grasp. If we can place this theory into its historical and cultural ...

“…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 ...

Bernard Down explains how two ancient Chinese philosophers explored new perspectives on matters of life and death. Daoism (or Taoism) is both a religion and a philosophy. The religion mixed magic, ...