The following answers to this artful question each win a random book. Art is something we do, a verb. Art is an expression of our thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and desires, but it is even more ...

Massimo Pigliucci surveys the views of ancient schools. As we all know, the telos of life is eudaimonia. Or to use English, the goal of life is happiness. This immediately leads to two crucial ...

Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad, lawyer and theologian, is well-known in Iran for bringing religion closer to the people, AmirAli Maleki asks him about Islam and philosophy. What is Islamic philosophy? What ...

Michael Allen Fox argues that old approaches to the problem don’t work. Who am I? That’s a difficult question to tackle, and each of us must do so for him- or herself, if it is to be tackled at all.

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 ...

Mikhail Epstein sees a bright future for metaphysics in the hi-tech age. “Numerous universes might have been botched and bungled throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labor lost ...

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 ...

Shamanistic shyster or intellectual innovator, creative charlatan or exalted pioneer of philosophy – however one views him, Pythagoras remains the most famous name at the starting gate of Western ...

Bernard Down explains how two ancient Chinese philosophers explored new perspectives on matters of life and death. Daoism (or Taoism) is both a religion and a philosophy. The religion mixed magic, ...

Markus Gabriel one of the founders of New Realism, talks to Anja Steinbauer about why the world does not exist, and other curious metaphysical topics. I’m talking with Markus Gabriel, Professor of ...

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 ...

Why do some physicists now believe that there are many parallel universes very like our own? And if there are, how will this help us build faster computers? Quantum mechanics was developed in the ...