Raymond Tallis on the true mystery of memory. Regular readers of this column will know that despite my background in neuroscience, I am not persuaded that brain activity is a sufficient explanation of ...

Willow Verkerk considers what Nietzsche has to teach us about love. What could Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) have to teach us about love? More than we might suppose. Speculations about his sexuality ...

Angels, humans, the leaves on a tree; is each one unique or just an example of its kind? Peter Pesic explains why Leibniz thought even leaves are individuals. In the long debate on these issues, ...

Martin Tyrrell on a champion of common sense. “I think Sartre is a bag of wind and I am going to give him a good [metaphorical] boot.” Although Orwell made few direct references to philosophy, much of ...

Roger Caldwell finds philosophy & poetry to be mutually alien. For over two decades I have written a good deal of poetry and poetry criticism. I have also in that period written on philosophy, and ...

Magdalena Scholle looks for Apollonian and Dionysian traits in Salvador Dalí’s art. “Even in the matter of moustaches I was going to surpass Nietzsche! Mine would not be depressing, catastrophic, ...

Susan Lucas on how words gain meaning from their context. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is perhaps one of the most startlingly original pieces of philosophy ever written. It has been ...

The following readers’ answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. What’s the problem? Isn’t it enough that things are as they are? No, because we are sometimes deceived. We ...

Samuel Kaldas compares two views on the nature of animals and their implications for our moral responsibility towards them. “No one understands animals who does not see that every one of them, even ...

David Rönnegard laments having to leave the party early.

Nobody ever put food on the table by worrying about the notion of authenticity… or did they? Gordon Giles on authentic culinary performance. Here we have a recipe for Spaghetti alla Carbonara – a ...

Kai Hammermeister on the beauty business. Aesthetics is the philosophical investigation of art and the theory of beauty and opposite phenomena, like the ugly, the comical, the ironic, the grotesque ...