I know that we’re about philosophy here, not religion, but perhaps we can make an exception and get into the right mindset for Christmas. (more...)

Plato’s ideas about the eternal world of perfect Forms provided a template upon which Christian philosophers could build their vision of the eternal, transcendent realm of God. (more...)

Zeno of Elea (490-430 BC) is famous for his paradoxes that seem to prove, among other points, that no movement is possible. If an arrow in flight is standing still whenever we take a photograph of it, when is it actually moving? (more...)

German Romantics, much like their English counterparts, valued spontaneity and naturalness, in part as a reaction to the beginning loss of the natural world due to industrialisation and urbanisation. (more...)

Erich Fromm and Richard Taylor on the perils of capitalism. (more...)

The Turing Test wanted 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. (more...)

Technology, at least in the way that it is deployed in capitalism contradicts the essential simplicity of the ideal Epicurean life. (more...)

In utilitarianism, stealing would only be immoral if it leads to bad consequences for the stakeholders. For Kant, it would always be immoral. (more...)

Deontological ethics is about actions that must be performed (or must not be performed) because the actions themselves are intrinsically good or bad. (more...)

Love is characterised by: 1. Exclusivity; 2. Constancy; 3. Reciprocity; 4. Uniqueness; and 5. Irrepleaceability of the beloved. (more...)

The “Fair Innings Argument” assumes that there is such a thing as a fair share of life. But can we compare different lives in this way? (more...)

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that we can recognise the highest good because we do everything else for its sake, while we never say that we pursue the highest good for any other thing’s sake. For Aristotle, the highest good is the happy life. (more...)

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) distinguishes three types of work; Labor, work, and action. (more...)

Are we ever allowed to kill one in order to save many lives? Utilitarianism would look at the overall benefit and conclude that this might be permissible. (more...)

Peter Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment: If, on the way to the office, we saw a child drowning in a pond, would we think that we have to save it? (more...)

A Stoic is an adherent of Stoicism, an ancient Greek and Roman philosophy of life. Stoics thought that, in order to be happy, we must learn to distinguish between what we can control and what we cannot. (more...)

Social media affect our society in many ways: addiction, democracy, the decline of journalism, privacy, surveillance, and effects on friendships. (more...)

Whistleblowing might be wrong because it violates one’s obligations to one’s friends, relatives, co-workers or superiors. (more...)

Economist Daniel Kahneman studied the effects of memory on our perception of past experiences. He distinguishes experienced from remembered happiness. (more...)

Eating small quantities of meat that was grown in a sustainable way might be morally justifiable, while large-scale animal farming is probably morally wrong. (more...)

Robert Sternberg thinks that we can best describe love as composed of three “primary” components that combine to produce all the kinds of love that we observe around us: intimacy, passion and decision or commitment. (more...)