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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Our movie maestro Thomas Wartenberg plugs himself into The Matrix Reloaded but says that philosophically, it was destined to be dull. In The Matrix, the Wachowski Brothers update this scenario by ...

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 ...

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 ...

Psychiatrist Eva Cybulska provides a psychological interpretation of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return. “Even as ‘a philosopher’ I still did not express my essential thoughts (or ‘delusions’).” Friedrich ...

The following philosophical forecasts of our fate each win an unforeseeable book. From the onset of the Industrial Revolution, human progress has been unprecedented in its sheer speed and scale.

Paul Edwards disagrees with Kant in this recently-discovered paper. All Enlightenment thinkers who wrote on the subject – Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau among others – agreed that the religious ...

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 ...

Sophia Gottfried meditates on the emptiness of non-existence. In philosophy there is a lot of emphasis on what exists. We call this ontology, which means, the study of being. What is less often ...

Peter Benson tells us what language is and isn’t according to Jacques Derrida. Early in the Twentieth Century, philosophy diverged into two camps: analytic and Continental philosophy. Since then they ...