Raymond Tallis argues intently against universal intention. The idea of a cosmic purpose is one which many of us are familiar with from religion. What happens in this world, so the story goes, is ...

Derek Harrison compares radically alternative visions of the absolute. “I saw eternity the other night. Like a great ring of pure and endless light.” – Henry Vaughan Vaughan’s simile is an attempt to ...

Our philosophical film guru Thomas Wartenberg is charmed by Before Sunset but thinks it fumbles an opportunity to examine one of the genuine philosophical problems of growing older. Going to the ...

If I were to announce at the outset that what we call popular music is not art, I could expect two reactions. Some people might say that the idea is absurd – of course pop music is art, how could it ...

Ralph Blumenau reviews Bryan Magee’s philosophical autobiography. Confessions can be of two kinds: confessions of faith and confessions of failure. Bryan Magee’s vividly written intellectual ...

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 ...

Dave Hangman on a crucial lawsuit taking place the day after tomorrow. “Mrs Portman, we regret to notify you that our company will not be paying the sum insured for your husband’s death,” the suited ...

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 ...

Raymond Tallis wonders what the world is made from. There is a much-quoted passage near the opening of Richard Feynman’s famous Lectures on Physics (1963): “If in some cataclysm all of scientific ...

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 ...

This paper argues that whatever mechanism is responsible for precognition, at least one can be ruled out on conceptual grounds. That mechanism is backwards causation. If it is possible that events can ...

Baroness Mary Warnock is one of Britain’s leading moral philosophers and has also chaired several official commissions of enquiry, including the Committee on Human Fertility and Embryology in the ...