The following readers’ answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. What’s the problem? Isn’t it enough that things are as they are? No, because we are sometimes deceived. We ...

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, ...

Alan Brody reviews The Metaphysics of Mind by Anthony Kenny. The most famous theory in the philosophy of mind is René Descartes’ view that each human being consists of a mind (which is a non-physical, ...

Richard Rorty is perhaps the best-known living philosopher in the Pragmatic tradition, and one of the most talked-about thinkers of the present day. He is a philosophy professor at Stanford University ...

A short story by Katherine Power. How odd that Descartes should be right after all! (Well, almost.) I so wish I could let you know, sweetness, but, without a body, us souls are quite useless. You are ...

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 ...

Susan Lucas on how words gain meaning from their context. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is perhaps one of the most startlingly original pieces of philosophy ever written. It has been ...

Alejandra Mancilla uses an example from Robert Nozick to question the claims to ownership made by breeders of genetically modified organisms. John Locke’s justification of property rights started with ...

Angels, humans, the leaves on a tree; is each one unique or just an example of its kind? Peter Pesic explains why Leibniz thought even leaves are individuals. In the long debate on these issues, ...

William Rowe is a professor of philosophy at Purdue University. Though an atheist, he spends much of his working life thinking about God. Nick Trakakis recently chatted with him about God and evil and ...

Richard Floyd explains a notorious example of Wittgenstein’s public thought. Wittgenstein is certainly a special case. He is perhaps the only philosopher who could have produced an argument for which ...

Michael Philips on the shaky foundations of the most popular philosophical theory of modern times. Most academic philosophers these days will tell you, without hesitation, that they are materialists.