Yolanda De Iuliis looks at how Roman Mithraism incorporated Stoic philosophy. Mithraism’s adoption and integration of Stoic virtues is compelling and noteworthy. These virtues not only shaped the ...

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 ...

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 ...

Dr E. R. Klein says we should reconsider the value of space exploration and start getting ready to leave the nest. Everyone is familiar with the giant stone heads of Easter Island, a tiny and remote ...

Jesse Prinz argues that the source of our moral inclinations is merely cultural. Suppose you have a moral disagreement with someone, for example, a disagreement about whether it is okay to live in a ...

Martin Jenkins looks at the life of an influential early political philosopher. Etienne de la Boétie is probably best known in the English-speaking world through a footnote in his friend Michel de ...

Stephen Leach considers what Bertrand Russell thought about common sense & reality – and how the one does not necessarily show you the other. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) believed that reality is ...

Alessandro Colarossi says that Artificial Intelligence is in danger of a dead end. French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) claimed that to understand human awareness we need to focus ...

Jim Moran explains why saving the planet will be an uphill struggle. The recent development of the branch of philosophy called ‘environmental philosophy’, or as it is sometimes referred to, ...

Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess. This year’s centenary of the First World War coincides with Ludwig Wittgenstein beginning writing his Tractatus ...

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 ...