Structuralism arose on the continent, in particular in France, in the early 60s. The first ‘big name’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, who took on Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French ...
Have you ever wondered whether everyone talks about you behind your back? Whether they are all keeping something from you? John McGuire discusses the Cartesian nightmare that is The Truman Show. Every ...
Peter Saltzstein finds that Chaos Theory yields unexpected philosophical results. The future is not what it used to be. I mean, an intriguing implication of the branch of mathematics called chaos ...
Peter Benson deconstructs the moral intrigues of Dorian Gray. “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” Wilde added this preface when the novel was reprinted a year ...
Mary Daly is a world-renowned Radical Feminist philosopher, theologian and author. Professor Daly, what is Radical Feminism? Well, I actually define that in my Wickedary, which is a ‘dictionary for ...
Phil Badger guides us through the varieties of liberalism, historical and philosophical. The big ideas of political philosophy are often hard to get clear in our minds, and there is no better example ...
Rui Vieira thinks of a number. What exactly are the objects of mathematics, and how do they relate to our knowledge of them? Since Plato (427 BC–347 BC) such questions have been central to the ...
Michael Antony argues that the New Atheists miss the mark. “A wise man,” wrote Hume, “proportions his belief to the evidence.” This is a formulation of evidentialism – the view that a belief is ...
Valerie Mackenzie pins down the difference with some examples. What is the difference between believing and knowing? When do we know when we believe or know and do we know when believing becomes ...
Not as much as some people think, says Phil Badger. What is being referred to when we speak of ‘The Enlightenment’ is not always easy to pin down, but in broad terms, it can be considered as an ...
Michael Faust reviews this film in the light of eternity. Is Groundhog Day one of the great philosophical movies? Viewed on the most trivial level it’s just another Hollywood rom-com, but on closer ...
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 ...