May 2024

Finn Janning says empathy and compassion are necessary for our thriving and even our survival. “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I can’t be sure.” These are the opening lines from Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger (1942). If these words seem gruesome, it is because the reader has an expectation that a ‘normal’ person simply

Dan Taylor shows that even great philosophers can have their hearts broken. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) isn’t often read for his counsel on love. We do not know the extent to which he knew love, and his words on physical love tend to be distrusting and unsentimental. In a passage on jealousy, he gives this example

Stephen Leach looks with Murdoch at the three graces of love, art, and morality. The English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) believed that although we may never fully know reality itself, love may help us glimpse something of it, since love alerts us to reality as it exists independently of our egos. How it

Julia Nefsky on the curiously strong connections between logic and humour. What would you say if I asked you to describe humour? What type of ‘thing’ is it? Perhaps you’d say that humour is a form of entertainment and creativity. Humour is colourful and free, unbounded by rules and norms. Humour is lively. It has

Ryan Andrews reminds us what free speech is for. Tom: (tuts over his newspaper) Of course, religious extremists and state censors are not the only enemies of free speech. There are also moral-majority conservatives, left-wing egalitarians, and many more overly-sensitive souls of every stripe. The variables are different, but they all follow the same formula:

Seán Moran is watching the watchers. We are being watched. As we go about our daily business, closed-circuit televison cameras observe and record our every move. There are over six million CCTV cameras keeping an eye on the public in the UK alone, and public surveillance is at a similar level in all developed countries.

Philip Badger tries to convince us to be optimistic about human equality. One shared ambition of philosophy and social science has been to understand the origins of conflict in human society. The evidence from social psychology is mixed, with some studies suggesting that conflict can be reduced by the establishment of shared goals (Muzafer Sherif,

Shawn Harte on a fleeting dream. “Everything subject to origination is subject also to dissolution,” warns the Buddha, insightfully foreshadowing the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the ineluctable tendency of a system towards disorder) in a way whose simplicity would impress even a modern physicist. This law of anitya, or ‘impermanence’, proclaims that all contingent existence