Welcome to the 4th Philosophy Now Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity. I’m delighted to say that we’re giving this year’s award to Professor Noam Chomsky. Stupidity comes in many ...

Our last issue contained two articles on the philosophy of science: an analysis of the works of Khun and a review of Feyerabend’s Against Method. Mike Fuller continues their debate about science, ...

Dr E. R. Klein says we should reconsider the value of space exploration and start getting ready to leave the nest. Everyone is familiar with the giant stone heads of Easter Island, a tiny and remote ...

Richard Rorty is perhaps the best-known living philosopher in the Pragmatic tradition, and one of the most talked-about thinkers of the present day. He is a philosophy professor at Stanford University ...

Helena Moradi looks at changing philosophical attitudes to technology. The Greek word τέχνη, ‘techne’, which is usually translated as ‘art’, ‘craftsmanship’, ‘knowledge’, or ‘skill’, is generally used ...

In earlier eras, the human desire to explain natural phenomena linked what was observed with preconceived notions of the world taken from mythology, religion, and philosophy. Modern science developed ...

Duane Cady tells us why pacifism isn’t sitting back and letting the masters of war have their way. Pacifism rarely gets taken seriously due to a widespread cultural bias: ‘everybody knows’ that ...

The following answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. Sorry if your answer doesn’t appear: we received enough to fill twelve pages… Why are we here? Do we serve a ...

Laura Weed takes us on a tour of the mind/brain controversy. In the twentieth century philosophy of mind became one of the central areas of philosophy in the English-speaking world, and so it remains.

Katie Javanaud asks whether there is a contradiction at the heart of Buddhism. Two of the most fundamental doctrines of Buddhism are firstly that the self is illusory, and secondly that we can achieve ...

Raymond Tallis on maths’ unreasonable effectiveness. The belief that mathematics is the surest path to the truth about the universe because the latter is at bottom mathematical has been very ...

Chris Wright ponders Plato’s masterplan. One of the purposes of Plato’s Republic is to put forth a conception of the ‘just state’. Plato describes how such a state would be organized, who would govern ...