Not so fast. Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (35-95 CE) would say to all this noise: “Been there, done that.” The notion that rhetoric or speech-making is at the center of public life and therefore should ...

Massimo Pigliucci is moved by a 2,000 year old letter. The time is around 90 CE, and Plutarch of Chaeronea in Greece is travelling when news reaches him of the death of his two-year-old daughter ...

Generally for existentialists, one is not born anything: everything we are is the result of our choices, as we build ourselves out of our own resources and those which society gives us. We don ’t only ...

Richard Floyd explains a notorious example of Wittgenstein’s public thought. Wittgenstein is certainly a special case. He is perhaps the only philosopher who could have produced an argument for which ...

John Greenbank searches history for answers to persistent questions. The history of philosophy must be understood as a series of serious intellectual and moral claims about fundamental issues. For ...

Nick Bostrom tells us a philosophical parable about death. Once upon a time the world was tyrannized by a great dragon. The dragon stood taller than the largest cathedral, and was covered with thick ...

Mark Conard reveals the metaphysical truths lurking under the rug in Tarantino’s cult classic. Nihilism is a term which describes the loss of value and meaning in people’s lives. When Nietzsche ...

Psychiatrist Eva Cybulska provides a psychological interpretation of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return. “Even as ‘a philosopher’ I still did not express my essential thoughts (or ‘delusions’).” Friedrich ...

Gordon Giles asks whether the national lottery is immoral. It is impossible to contemplate the ethical value of something unless one knows what it is. Where the National Lottery is concerned, this is ...

The first English version of a classic essay by Peter Wessel Zapffe, originally published in Janus #9, 1933. Translated from the Norwegian by Gisle R. Tangenes. One night in long bygone times, man ...

Van Harvey reflects on Huxley’s and Clifford’s reasons for not believing. In the struggle against obscurantism and the appeal to blind faith that was rampant in Victorian culture, it would be ...

Abdelkader Aoudjit reviews a book of essays by Martha Nussbaum. This book is a collection of fourteen essays Martha Nussbaum, a professor of Classics and philosophy at Cornell University, has written ...