A few weeks ago I bought two chrysanthemums for my windowsill. After giving them the dose of water they clearly missed in the shop, I started musing on how closely plant care and philosophy are ...

Having to face new, foreign, or simply different ways of thought is not an exclusively 20th Century experience: “You cannot put charcoal and ice in the same container,” once declared an 12th Century ...

Ben Trubody finds that philosophy-phobic physicist Feynman is an unacknowledged philosopher of science. Richard Feynman (1918-88) was one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Chad Engelland philosophically analyses the experience of being at the seaside. At the beach, we soak up some sun, frolic in the surf, and swim with the waves – to name just a few of the activities ...

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 ...

Duane Cady tells us why pacifism isn’t sitting back and letting the masters of war have their way. Pacifism rarely gets taken seriously due to a widespread cultural bias: ‘everybody knows’ that ...

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 ...

Scott Remer thinks we arendt happy without a community and considers the complete reconstruction of the modern world to be well worth weil. In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah ...

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; ...

Frank Martela relates how science destroyed the meaning of life, but helps us find meaning in life. If you had everything else you wanted but your life lacked meaning, would it still be worth living?