For years debate has raged among African philosophers: does Africa have a distinct philosophical tradition, and if so, what is its nature? Rick Lewis asked Emmanuel Eze, who though based in the United ...

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 ...

Structuralism arose on the continent, in particular in France, in the early 60s. The first ‘big name’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, who took on Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French ...

David White contemplates a life of sex and sermons. Those who know his name at all associate John Humphrey Noyes (1811-86) with the Oneida Community, an experiment in communal living in the tradition ...

Tim Delaney relates how Herbert Spencer, inventor of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, originally applied evolutionary thinking to human society and culture. I cringe whenever I hear the term ...

Mark Daniels introduces a whole millenium of ideas. Let us start by considering three points. First, medieval philosophy came from a period when philosophy was under attack: the proponents of ...

Peter Caws considers how much is lost in translation. There’s a story about an American evangelist who was challenged about something in his preaching that didn’t agree with the Greek of the New ...

Can gene-culture evolution, rather than philosophy, answer our deepest ethical questions? Torin Alter on moral values and the appliance of science. The choice between transcendentalism and empiricism ...

Barbara Hands considers whether it is ever right for the law to limit your freedom of choice and action, for your own good. Fred and Bob are a gay couple who have been together for 15 years. Fred is ...

Graham W. Boyd argues that choice is an illusion. “Recently I was trying to explain to an intelligent woman the problem of trying to understand how it is we perceive anything at all, and I was not ...

Thomas M. Powers on how a computer might process Kant’s moral imperative. Philosophers have worried about how to compare humans and machines ever since Alan Turing proposed his famous ‘intelligence ...

Wendell Wallach tells us what the basic problems are. If a train continues on its current course, it will kill a workcrew of five down the track. However, a signalman is standing by a switch that can ...