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 ...

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 ...

Marina Gerner on a thought experiment about consciousness. Imagine a girl called Mary. She is a brilliant neuroscientist and a world expert on colour vision. But because she grew up entirely in a ...

James Sirois gives us a strong warning about overusing the net. The internet has become so all-pervading that even the word seems a little old-fashioned now. No-one really uses it much anymore. We ask ...

Daniel C. Dennett on the Richard Rorty Factor. In a paper published in Synthese (#53) in 1982, ‘Contemporary Philosophy of Mind’, Richard Rorty wrote an enthusiastic account of the revolutionary ‘Ryle ...

Scott Remer thinks we arendt happy without a community and considers the complete reconstruction of the modern world to be well worth weil. In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah ...

Peter Flegel highlights possible connections between early Greek philosophy and the ideas of the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. Just over a year ago an eager team of archaeologists scoured through the ...

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 ...

Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces. I have in ...

Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson argue that artificial moral enhancement is now essential if humanity is to avoid catastrophe. For the vast majority of our 150,000 years or so on the planet, we ...

Katie Javanaud asks whether there is a contradiction at the heart of Buddhism. Two of the most fundamental doctrines of Buddhism are firstly that the self is illusory, and secondly that we can achieve ...

Hedda Hassel Mørch asks: what is IIT all about? Consciousness is something with which we’re all intimately familiar. It’s the thing that goes away every night in deep sleep, and comes back when we ...