A comic by Corey Mohler about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Side note: The existentialists in this episode are philosopher, novelist and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre ...
Musa Mumtaz meditates on two maverick medieval Muslim metaphysicians. Islam’s scriptural foundation, the Quran, unequivocally asserts as its core metaphysical tenet tawhid – the uncompromising and ...
The most famous book by Plato did not win its fame by accident. Plato’s Republic has something to say to every reader, whether advanced in philosophy or a beginner. It has so many layers, and has been ...
Raymond Tallis wonders what the world is made from. There is a much-quoted passage near the opening of Richard Feynman’s famous Lectures on Physics (1963): “If in some cataclysm all of scientific ...
Anja Steinbauer introduces the life and ideas of Immanuel Kant, the merry sage of Königsberg, who died 200 years ago. “Have the courage to use your own reason!”, (in Latin sapere aude!) is the battle ...
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 G. Yacobi asks if it is possible to live authentically. We are told: “To thine own self be true!” But what do we mean if we say that somebody is an authentic person, or a very genuine person?
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 ...
Christopher Macann explains the basis of his ‘genetic’ system of phenomenology. In Raphael’s painting The School of Athens, we see an elderly Plato pointing upward and a middle-aged Aristotle standing ...
David Macintosh explains Plato’s Theory of Forms or Ideas. For the non-philosopher, Plato’s Theory of Forms can seem difficult to grasp. If we can place this theory into its historical and cultural ...
Ralph Blumenau on why things may not be what they seem to be. Before Kant, philosophers had divided propositions into two kinds, under the technical names of ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’. Propositions ...