These days it seems like everyone knows that we should do something about climate change, but there also seems to be a lot of inertia to take action. (more...)

In this series of posts, BVE Hyde presents a short but complete history of Japanese thought. This second part focuses on Confucianism. (more...)

Joseph Harris (2022). Misanthropy in the Age of Reason: Hating Humanity from Shakespeare to Schiller. Oxford University Press. 304 pages. Hardcover: 73. (more...)

This is about humour. I shall not make any clear distinction between humour in general and jokes, only to say that jokes are archly and tightly structured set pieces and a subgroup within humour. (more...)

A Dialogue between Socrates and ChatGPT on Intelligence. (more...)

Seemingly intractable paradoxes involved in speaking of the ineffable are based on a mistake. (more...)

Author’s reply to a review in Daily Philosophy of: Josh Milburn, “Just Fodder. The Ethics of Feeding Animals.” (more...)

Plato’s Apology of Socrates is one of the greatest speeches in the history of mankind. It shows Socrates’ personality and humour, as well as being a meditation on justice and honesty. (more...)

Miguel Angel is the founder and editor of Filosofia En La Red, a Spanish-language philosophy magazine and website. (more...)

In this series of posts, BVE Hyde presents a short but complete history of Japanese thought. This first part focuses on Japanese Buddhism. (more...)

We can change the way we perceive ourselves by a simple switch in our first-person perspective, argues author Brentyn J. Ramm, following Douglas Harding and Jean-Paul Sartre. (more...)

Sartre’s discourse “Existentialism is a Humanism” can be broken down into five concepts: Existence precedes essence, Freedom, Responsibility, Anguish and Bad Faith. (more...)

They’re saying Brian was never alive! They’re treating him like he wasn’t real, like he never existed! (more...)

Hobbes’s conception of humankind in a state of nature begins with the idea that everyone is more or less equal and free. (more...)

A dictionary of philosophy with one exatly entry for each letter. (more...)

What is postmodernism? A physiotherapy professor explains how postmodernism changed his views on medicine and health. (more...)

Technology might lead to widespread unemployment. But will this necessarily be a bad thing? Professor Michael Hauskeller on the future of work. (more...)

We all want our money to serve the right cause – but how can we make sure that it will? Catherine Greene on what is involved in ethical investing and ESG considerations. (more...)

In our societies, an impressive array of vices is on display. Hypocrisy, greed, cruelty, prejudice… But what if many of these vices were necessary for human life? (more...)

According to Immanuel Kant, practical jokes would be considered immoral because they treat the subject as mere means to others’ enjoyment. (more...)

What sort of rights should a fetus or embryo have? A clear, comprehensive review of the arguments. (more...)

According to Kant, we wouldn’t be able to talk about ethics at all if we couldn’t see us as free beings who are capable of deciding. (more...)

Shane Epting is an assistant professor of philosophy. In this interview, we discuss the philosophy and future of cities. (more...)

Does an ‘engaged’ Buddhist really have to draw on this picture of the Buddha as a ‘social activist’ to find support for their own activism? (more...)

I focus in this final piece on a neglected aspect of Buddha’s teachings: the condemnation of social activism and political engagement. (more...)

A poem by Professor Michael Hauskeller. (more...)

Changing the world, challenging patriarchy, revolution, and the whole ethos of radical reformism is nothing like what the Buddha taught. (more...)

Buddhism is widely admired in the West for its commitments to progressive social activism. But is this really in the spirit of true Buddhism? (more...)

What are the books that brought us to philosophy? For John Shand, philosophy professor at the Open University, it was Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and Its Enemies” (more...)

Miguel Angel, editor and owner of Filosofia En La Red, interviews Andreas Matthias, editor of Daily Philosophy, about being a publisher of a philosophy site today. (more...)

In these days of crisis in the humanities, as well as in the social sciences, it is crucial to distinguish valid from ill-founded criticism of any academic effort. (more...)

The pursuit of happiness has always been one of the main driving forces of human lives. This article recounts the amazing history of the concept of happiness, from ancient times to today, from Eudaimonia to Gross National Happiness. (more...)

Paul Lodge, Professor of Philosophy and songwriter, sets philosophical poems to music. In this interview, we discuss his background and whether philosophy makes for good songs. (more...)

The poems of Homer, the Ilias and the Odyssey, mark the proper start of Greek civilization and can be seen as what shaped Greek identity, argues ancient philosophy Professsor Livio Rossetti. (more...)

An insightful new book sheds light on how a rich tapestry of religions answer life’s biggest questions. (more...)

A Short Story on Epistemic Humility and The Best Possible Life, All Things Considered (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...)

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...)

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...)

Review of Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2020, by Prof. Robert Zaborowski. (more...)

Adam Davidson describes the “Passion Economy” in a book released in 2020. This article shows why Davidson’s proposal is not a sustainable solution to fix our current relationship with work. (more...)

Awareness of the knowledge-effect is important because it is something we need strongly to guard against if we are to make good normative judgements. (more...)

Disclaimer: This is an article about the definition of mental health. It is not meant and should not be used as advice on how to treat mental health problems. (more...)

Compared to other Hellenistic schools of thought, like Stoicism and Epicureanism, Pyrrhonism was systematically neglected throughout the history of Western philosophy… (more...)

The main epistemic concern in the light of the potential ubiquity of deepfakes is not that we are going to be massively deceived. Global distrust and not global deception could be the ultimate consequence of deepfakes. (more...)

The limits of language are all there before us in the everyday. For there is no description or account of the wind on your face (nor of the experience of seeing a red rose) that could give you any idea at all what the wind on your face was like to have. (more...)

According to Shénnóng, rulers had a limited number of very simple functions, mainly concerning agriculture. A ruler should teach people agricultural arts, inspect their fields, and keep a grain store. (more...)

What is pure awareness? Douglas Harding (1909-2007) proposed a series of simple but surprising experiments that one can perform to learn more about oneself as the subject of one’s own first person view. (more...)

Since governments are charged with pursuing the popular well-being and not state power or prosperity, wars of aggression are illegitimate. - David Cockayne on how classic Confucianism would see wars. (more...)

In 1964, Bertrand Russell wrote that the philosopher’s duty was now to forget philosophy and to study “the probable effects of a nuclear war.” (more...)

A history of philosophy in its most famous quotes. Today: Jeremy Bentham on the suffering of animals: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” (more...)

Are we driving ourselves insane? And have we been doing so for over a hundred years? To understand this, we need to understand how we came to think of ourselves as depressed. (more...)

It is often supposed that greater empathy is a good thing. But this is a mistake, unless one assumes that being empathetic will inevitably bring it about that one treats others better. (more...)

Radical scepticism has a good claim to be both the longest lasting tradition in philosophy and the consistently least popular. There’s a lot to be said for it. (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...)

What makes our death bearable? How do we create meaning from the certainty of our own deaths? Prof. John Shand analyses the question. (more...)

What is especially intriguing for students of eremitism is the intimate interplay of personal motives and philosophical commitments behind Nanavira’s decision to live alone. (more...)

Luis de Miranda is the founder of the Philosophical Health movement, author of Being & Neonness (MIT Press) and Ensemblance (Edinburgh University Press). (more...)

I know it’s got to be done. Even so, I still feel bad about it. If it were up to me, we would cancel the whole thing. Fortunately, it’s not. It’s up to Mother, and Mother knows best. (more...)

Plato’s use of drunkenness, mainly in the Symposium but also in the Phaedrus, is a metaphor designed to defend Socrates’ philosophical inspiration. (more...)

We discuss Plato’s description of Socrates’ philosophical inspiration as “drunkenness” and/or Dionysian mania; Plato’s metaphor draws on earlier Greek poetry. (more...)

What if the Second World War had turned out differnetly? This article explains why counterfactuals and alternative histories can be misleading. (more...)

Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy, professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Louisville, speaks about the future of AI. (more...)

Why do we have a criminal justice system? What could possibly justify the state punishing its citizens? Retributivism is the view that we ought to give offenders the suffering that they deserve for harming others. (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...)

Dr Simionescu-Panait talks about his research on the phenomenology of elegance, about ‘Socratic’ approaches to philosophical counseling and about his new book on elegance: “The Reconciled Body.” (more...)

A rhetoric of slowness and speed has been used by philosophers since the ancient periods to characterise and assess different ways of life. (more...)

For Heidegger, we let things be what they are. Chōmei, steeped in the Buddhist conception of the interdependence of everything, would concur. (more...)

Wael B. Hallaq (وائل حلاق‎) is a leading scholar of Islamic law and Islamic intellectual history at Columbia University. In this interview, we ask his opinion on the tension between Western and Islamic conceptions of governance and human rights. (more...)

The overall aim of Descartes’ philosophy is to found science on a secure and absolutely certain footing. Without that anything built by science would be open to doubt following from the weakness of its foundation. (more...)

Luca M. Possati is researcher at the University of Porto, Portugal. Educated as philosopher, he has been lecturer at the Institut Catholique de Paris and associate researcher of the Fonds Ricoeur and EHESS (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales). (more...)

For the first time in history, an AI called DABUS has been granted a patent in South Africa. This article analyses the metaphysics of attributing inventions to non-human agents. (more...)

In a book published in 2008, R. H. Thaler and C. R. Sunstein define nudges as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way.” (more...)

If we are natural beings who evolved with everything else, why have we had such a hugely detrimental impact on that biosphere, which also happens to be our home? (more...)

How far does our responsibility extend? What can we rightly be regarded as responsible for? (more...)

Luis de Miranda lives in Sweden and is a philosophical practitioner, founder of the Philosophical Health movement. (more...)

The creation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds great promise, but with it also comes existential risk. (more...)

I’m not gonna lie to you: when I finally received the cybermail notification that my purchase was approved and I could pick it up from the Companions ‘R’ Us warehouse in Manchester, I was literally electrified. (more...)

The rhetoric or metaphor of refuge from the world has largely disappeared from religious, social and ethical debate. The contrast with the past is striking. (more...)

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who, because of his Jewish descent, spent the last six months of World War II in a German concentration camp, which he barely survived. (more...)

Can artificial intelligence discover new laws of physics? Possibly. An article in Technology Review suggests that data from a swinging pendulum experiment allowed a neural network to discover some of the laws of motion. (more...)

We’ve heard it all our lives — size matters and bigger is better. But David Velleman wants you to believe that shape can matter more! (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...)

We are not water pills. We are highly scientific magic pills based on an ancient organic recipe. (more...)

Why is it so difficult to make predictions about society? The problem is not the complexity of the task, but the concepts we use to think about the world. (more...)

Imagine waking up every evening, putting on your happy face, walking over to your immaculately laid out recording studio and… Enthusiastically unwrapping that mysterious package someone just sent you… You have no idea what it is, no really! (more...)

If you explain to a friend that Hedonistic Egoism advocates the pursuit of one’s own pleasure, the first reaction you may get is: “so why not kill a person, steal his money and buy a new phone?” If you do get this reaction, it may be time to get a new friend. (more...)

The terminology of ‘nihilism’ and ‘the meaning of life’ emerged among a small group of German philosophers at the end of the 18th century who were worried about the French Enlightenment. (more...)

According to Psychological Hedonism, we are all just looking for fun. Psychological Hedonism is a theory about motivation. (more...)

Can two people’s experiences and outlooks on life be so different that meaningful communication between them is impossible? Recent events suggest so. (more...)

Nozick asked readers to imagine a machine produced by “super-duper neuropsychologists” that could give you any experience you could think of without you realising it was all a computer simulation. He called it the Experience Machine. (more...)

Hedonists believe that pleasure is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go well for us and that pain is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go badly for us. If that’s true, why are so many hedonists into BDSM? (more...)

In many of Bradbury’s stories we can find an entire philosophy of life that is well worth discovering and adopting. (more...)