Gary Cox asks, ‘is happiness a cigar called Hamlet?’, and other searching questions. I spent my formative years being told by advertisers that ‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’. These celebrated cigar ads ran from 1966 until tobacco advertising was banned from UK television in 1991. Despite all I have read and written on the …
One can scarcely imagine a figure with a greater reputation for disapproval of philosophy than John Calvin. The French expatriate penned some of the most vitriolic diatribes against philosophy and its role in scholastic theology ever written. Thus, in one way, this reputation is rather well-earned, and an article upon Calvin in an encyclopedia of …
Lewis Vaughn asks what it’s all about. After tragedy and heartbreak – after the war is lost, after the pandemic takes someone you love, after climate change destroys your home, after your life seems to be rendered nonsensical by illness, personal failure, or injustice – deep questions may linger like a bruise: What is the …
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A Scottish philosopher of the latter half of the nineteenth century, Edward Caird was one of the key figures of the idealist movement that dominated British philosophy from 1870 until the mid 1920s. Best known for his studies of Kant and Hegel, he argued that “Kantian philosophy is only a first stage, though of course …
Brian King says that life’s meaning is a question of purpose; but what is the purpose of human existence? In the expression ‘the meaning of life’, people more often than not mean ‘purpose’ when they refer to ‘meaning’. The real question such people are asking is actually ‘What is the purpose of life?’. Things which …
Sir Francis Bacon (later Lord Verulam and the Viscount St. Albans) was an English lawyer, statesman, essayist, historian, intellectual reformer, philosopher, and champion of modern science. Early in his career he claimed “all knowledge as his province” and afterwards dedicated himself to a wholesale revaluation and re-structuring of traditional learning. To take the place of …
Nicholas Maxwell says we need a total rethink concerning the way we think. Are we philosophers responsible for global warming? It sounds absolutely crazy to suggest we are. How could our harmless, minute community of scholars, agonizing about abstruse intellectual problems, have any major role in bringing about global warming? But consider… Humanity has known …
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Addams Jane Addams was an activist and prolific writer in the American Pragmatist tradition who became a nationally recognized leader of Progressivism in the United States as well as an internationally renowned peace advocate. Addams is primarily acclaimed for founding the Chicago social settlement, Hull-House, which emerged as the flagship of the Settlement Movement. Hull-House …
Tim Madigan asks, why did the featherless biped cross the road? “When some one reproached him with his exile, his reply was, ‘Nay, it was through that, you miserable fellow, that I came to be a philosopher.’ Again, when some one reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, ‘And I …
Peter Abelard (1079-1142) was the preeminent philosopher of the twelfth century and perhaps the greatest logician of the middle ages. During his life he was equally famous as a poet and a composer, and might also have ranked as the preeminent theologian of his day had his ideas earned more converts and less condemnation. In …