philopapers

Francis Akpata explains how Schiller saw art as a path to utopia. The Athenian soldier and statesman Themistocles (523-458 BC) once said, “I cannot fiddle but I can build a great state out of a little city.” How do we build, better than a great state, a beautiful society? When one hears the term ‘beautiful

Tim Weldon detects links between Sherlock Holmes and Blaise Pascal in the operation of intuition. How did the most famous fictional detective in history triumph over evil in over fifty celebrated cases? To what – or to whom – might we attribute his success? Holmes’ creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle self-admittedly modelled Holmes’ manner and

Patrick Cannon uses a popular setting to explain Kant’s metaphysics. It’s Friday night and you’re at the bar. It’s packed. You snake through the sea of bodies. “Ah! There’s a free spot!” exclaims your friend, pointing to some stools across the counter. You part your way through a boisterous group of young women, sit down,

Mikhail Epstein sees a bright future for metaphysics in the hi-tech age. “Numerous universes might have been botched and bungled throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labor lost, many fruitless trials made, and a slow but continual improvement carried out during infinite ages in the art of world-making.” David Hume, Dialogues

Angus Taylor argues that to be consistent, we must either exclude some humans from the moral community, or else include at least some animals. Let me begin with a story. My mother’s family were minor nobility from Transylvania, near the border with Hungary. When Romania was invaded by Soviet forces during the Second World War

Charlotte Laws cautiously chows down with the Defender of Animals. I recently had the opportunity to eat, drink and make moral calculations with philosopher Peter Singer, who is sometimes called ‘the Father of the Animal Rights movement’. You might think that hanging out with a renowned and accomplished philosopher would cause a pain in the