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 ...

She browsed further up the aisle, and stopped to consider the plastic deer: cutouts, less than an inch thick but nearly life-size in height and length. The bucks held their antlered heads high. The ...

Films Falling Down Thomas R. Morgan considers how personal identity is maintained, and how it is lost. Falling Down (1993) is ...

Articles Wordsworth & Darwin Christine Avery wonders whether poetry can help us to deal with science. In his poetic autobiography The Prelude (1799), William Wordsworth describes ...

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 ...