Also includes philosophy titles from other presses distributed by Cornell.

Massimo Pigliucci considers the usefulness of philosophy. Philosophy, as you probably know, means ‘love of wisdom’. However, if you wish to learn how to become wise I highly recommend you don’t walk ...

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 ...

Angels, humans, the leaves on a tree; is each one unique or just an example of its kind? Peter Pesic explains why Leibniz thought even leaves are individuals. In the long debate on these issues, ...

Gisle Tangenes describes the life and ideas of a cheerfully pessimistic, mountain-climbing Norwegian existentialist. “This world,” mused Horace Walpole, “is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to ...

Christopher Norris presents a case for the defence. Stephen Hawking recently fluttered the academic dovecotes by writing in his new book The Grand Design – and repeating to an eager company of ...

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?

Terri Murray tells us about a Hollywood hero beyond good and evil. If Hollywood genre movies can be depended upon to deliver one thing, it is a good hero pitted against an evil foe. Simplistic though ...

Philosophers rarely get worked up about clothing. Clothes can be a source of aesthetic pleasure, and few philosophers are adamantly opposed to pleasure. (They may object to pleasures too dearly bought ...

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 ...

The following answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. Sorry if your answer doesn’t appear: we received enough to fill twelve pages… Why are we here? Do we serve a ...

Chris Wright ponders Plato’s masterplan. One of the purposes of Plato’s Republic is to put forth a conception of the ‘just state’. Plato describes how such a state would be organized, who would govern ...