There are a couple of solid reasons to doubt that parents are justified in lying to their children. The first is one many philosophy students learn about when they study what’s known as the ethics of ...

The following responses to this basic ethical question each win a random book. To understand how acquire have moral knowledge, we first need to understand what sort of thing we are talking about when ...

The story of Russell’s philosophical account of the evils of German politics starts with the chaotic jingoism of the First World War. Prior to 1914, German scholarship had been widely respected in ...

Ed Fraser argues that the theory of recollection presented by Socrates in the Meno is circular. The primary objective of Plato’s Meno is an inquiry into the nature of virtue. Accordingly, Socrates, ...

Our intrepid philosophical investigator Grant Bartley files a conference report. The London School of Economics (LSE) is a complex of buildings hidden in the heart of London, sandwiched between Covent ...

Chad Trainer on the limits of Russell’s views on space exploration. Bertrand Russell was one of the best at chronicling and lampooning history’s opponents of science. Surprisingly, though, he himself ...

Our philosophical science correspondent Massimo Pigliucci asks. The philosophical study of consciousness is chock full of thought experiments: John Searle’s Chinese Room, David Chalmers’ Philosophical ...

Debra Trione encourages American leaders to make their visions of utopia real. The idea of ‘America’ is the idea of a perpetually perfectible world: “a more perfect union,” states the US Constitution; ...

The philosophical counseling movement started during the early Eighties in Europe and the US. It seemed to be a zeitgeist phenomenon: the time was ripe, and a number of people around the world who had ...

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 ...

Roger Caldwell responds to an analysis of Nietzsche’s morality. For many, Nietzsche and morality make an unlikely conjunction. Certainly, for all his challenging views – or perhaps because they proved ...

Hans Lenk relates to different types of responsibility. In his The Devil’s Dictionary (1911), the well-known satirical writer Ambrose Bierce defined responsibility as: “a detachable burden easily ...