Roger Caldwell looks at the most pessimistic of philosophers. If Leibniz, that great German figure of the Enlightenment, proclaimed that we live in the best of all possible worlds, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) held that we live in one of the worst – one permeated through and through by suffering and death. He became an atheist …
Peter Rickman says you’re not the only one. A competitor on a BBC quiz show thought that Immanuel Kant was a football player. As a layman he can be forgiven; even if philosophy were more widely taught in schools, it would probably not include Kant for kids. It is harder to forgive those who teach …
Anja Steinbauer introduces the life and ideas of Immanuel Kant, the merry sage of Königsberg, who died 200 years ago. “Have the courage to use your own reason!”, (in Latin sapere aude!) is the battle cry of the Enlightenment. It was articulated by Immanuel Kant in his famous article ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1784). Obstacles that …
Pinhas Ben-Zvi thinks Kant was inconsistent in his revolutionary ideas about the nature of space and time. In the first and second editions of his Critique of Pure Reason (A&B) Immanuel Kant asks: “What, then, are space and time? Are they real existences? Are they only determinations or relations of things, yet such as would …
Thomas Morrison asks just what Kant learned from his Critique of Pure Reason. Can we know how things really are regardless of how they appear to us? Throughout history, many philosophers – known as skeptics – have argued that we can not. Part of what Immanuel Kant is attempting in his Critique of Pure Reason …
Samantha Neave explores how to be a good person, with the help of Immanuel Kant and the Tooth Fairy. Last night I dreamt I promised my niece a ride on a skipping giraffe. Sadly, when it came to the crunch, my car broke down half way round the safari due to some gorillas landing on …
Randall Curren finds that talking about humor is no laughing matter. Especially on national television. When our president asked me some weeks ago if I would be willing to prepare a philosophy commencement address on the subject of humor for national broadcast I was puzzled. I sized this up as, at best, a clumsy attempt …
An introduction by Tim Madigan. “It is worth noting that Wittgenstein once said that a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes (without being facetious).”Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir The above passage is rather ambiguous – does it mean that Wittgenstein said such a thing in a …
John Marmysz looks on the funny side of absolute nothingness. God is dead. Nothing matters. All is meaningless. Nothing is true. These are the sorts of laments often associated with nihilism, a philosophical perspective premised on the belief that the world is incurably imperfect, flawed, defective. According to the nihilist, the way that the world …
Mordechai Gordon takes ideas about not taking ourselves too seriously seriously. To date, philosophers have concentrated much more on trying to account for what makes us laugh at others than on why we laugh at ourselves. Indeed, attempts to explain the phenomenon of laughing at others have been around for a long time, at least …