Explore philosophy through its most famous quotes! Today: Socrates on knowing that you know nothing. (more...)

Explore philosophy through its most famous quotes. Today: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: “It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul…” (more...)

Explore philosophy through its most famous quotes! Today: Immanuel Kant on how to treat human beings. (more...)

Review of Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2020: This is an excellent volume on an important topic. It should help and stimulate anyone working within the philosophy of consciousness. (more...)

Robert Rodriguez’ “The Book of Hermits” is a work of impressive scholarship, covering the global history and lore of eremitism from antiquity to the present. (more...)

Altogether this is the most comprehensive account of how the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ came to attain its current ubiquity that has yet been written. (more...)

The creation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds great promise, but with it also comes existential risk. How can we know AI will be safe? How can we know it will not destroy us? How can we know that its values will be aligned with ours? (more...)

What exactly do we mean when we say that “nothing matters”? More than sixty years ago, the British philosopher Richard Mervyn Hare attempted to answer this question in an early essay. (more...)

The question whether machines can think is more complex than it appears at first sight. The Turing Test attempted to provide a way to judge whether computers are intelligent, but pretending to be human in a chat is not the same as being intelligent. AlphaGo is undoubtedly intelligent in its domain, but couldn not pass a Turing Test. (more...)

From the Garden of Eden to urban allotments, gardens have accompanied and enriched human history and culture from ancient times to now. In this article, Ian James Kidd traces the spiritual history of gardens as places of refuge from the world. (more...)

We saw how, for Heidegger, we let things be what they are through experiencing them in the full compass of their relations to nature, human life, and the ‘holy’ and mysterious. Chōmei, steeped in the Buddhist conception of the interdependence of everything, would concur. (more...)

In her honest and entertaining book “One Hundred Days of Solitude: Losing Myself and Finding Grace on a Zen Retreat,” Zen teacher Jane Dobisz recalls the three months she spent as a young person alone in a hut in the woods, bowing, chanting and meditating. (more...)

This a systematic survey of the arguments and counterarguments that are most commonly in play when considering the ethical rights and wrong of euthanasia and whether it should be legally permitted. (more...)

The name “deontological” ethics comes from Greek “to deon” = “that which must be done”. So it is about actions that must be performed (or must not be performed) because the actions themselves are intrinsically good or bad. This is in opposition to consequentialism, which judges actions according to whether their consequences are good. (more...)

Hedonism is the thesis that happiness and pleasure are the same. But is that true? Does the enjoyment of pleasures like good food, chocolate, sex and a myriad other things that we consume everyday — do these things really make us happier? (more...)

How far does our responsibility extend? What can we rightly be regarded as responsible for? This matters because, looked at negatively it coincides with what we may be blamed or be held culpable for, and looked as positively it coincides with what we might be praised or given an accolade for. (more...)

Vaccination ethics is a surprisingly rich field of philosophical inquiry, and it covers issues from all major moral theories, reaching into world politics, poverty, the role of the state and the morality of taxation and car seat belts. (more...)

For Aristotle, the moral development of a person progresses in three stages. From the child, which cannot resist temptation, through the intermediate stage of the grown up, who is tempted but resists temptation, to the final stage of the wise person, who is never even tempted and always, spontaneously, does the morally right thing. (more...)

John Horton Conway (1937-2020), mathematician, inventor of the “Game of Life” simulation of cellular automata. (more...)

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) was a British philosopher, primarily concerned with the nature of the mind and the role of philosophy in the world. (more...)

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC-65 AD) was a celebrated Roman writer, public speaker and philosopher and is today seen (alongside Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius) as one of the three greatest ancient Stoics. (more...)

One way of thinking about and getting an understanding of Kant’s Categories is to draw an analogy with the Stevenson Screen. This article sheds light on what Kant’s Categories are and how they function in our understanding of the world. (more...)

The limits of free speech have been discussed since ancient times. Particularly today, we find ourselves confronted with the need to weigh free speech against other values like inclusivity, respect and tolerance of other viewpoints and religions. (more...)

Is abortion morally right? We look at the main arguments for and against abortion, considering whether abortion can be said to be murder and whether (or why) the mother’s rights might be considered more important than the fetus. (more...)

I tried out Jasper AI, a computer program that generates natural language text. It turns out that it can create near-perfect output that would easily pass for a human-written undergraduate philosophy paper. (more...)

Looking for a life-changing summer read? Here are Daily Philosophy’s recommendations for five of the most inspiring books that everyone should know. (more...)

People as well as large-scale events, for example the Durch Tulip Mania or the technology crash in the early 2000s, are sometimes said to be irrational. But what exactly do we mean by that? (more...)