Alfred North Whitehead is often (mis-) quoted as saying that all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. I was asked the other day...

Doing some research on iconic speeches in times of crisis, I am struck by the common thread: all of them - Lincoln's Second Inaugural,...

A lot of people are being tested for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. (Not enough in my neck of the planet, thanks to our...

Today's quote of the day from The Browser - which I recommend to everyone - struck a cord for me. It's a commonplace in our culture to...

My old friend Aristotle is well known for the claim that moderation is a virtue - indeed, that we can locate virtue at the point of...

Two pictures tell a thousand words. In his recent public appearance, Robert Mueller thought he’d been clear, or as clear as the peculiar...

Absurd and repulsive though he is, the vandal Boris Johnson (Pants-on-Fire, Con), who has perhaps done his country more harm than any...

What if you had to move – not to another city or country but to either the future or the past? I ran across this Rawlesian thought...

The excellent and hugely underrated philosopher Mary Midgley has died at the age of 99, shortly after completing yet another book. (She...

After so many headlines about the men who  want to turn the world into kindling and warm their hands over the flames (in just this...

Excellent Op-Ed in the New York Times from a couple of weeks ago by (my once-upon-a-time teacher) Kwame Anthony Appiah, applying his...

Like many other philosophers, I’ve always had a soft spot for him: a 12-cylinder genius, and yet a wonderfully plain writer with the...

Philosophers are still reading Aristotle, and still arguing about whether there is free will: ergo, philosophy is useless. It has always...

Catching up with my favorite podcast, Philosophy Bites, I was fascinated to learn that the eerie connections between one of my favorite...

Quite a bit of The Babel Trilogy is about consciousness: what is it, and where does it come from, and how is it possible­—that’s what...

The most frightening book I’ve read in the past ten years is not a novel by Stephen King, but a childhood memoir by the German historian...

Graham’s Number, folksily abbreviated to “g64,” was long famous as the largest number ever used in a serious mathematical proof. I quote...

Yes! One of the characters in Ghosts in the Machine mentions this, and it’s true! Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit is...

In my first philosophy class, the professor began by saying something I've been repeating ever since: “Philosophy asks just two...

Today, June 16th 2016, is the 200th anniversary of the stormy night in Geneva when Byron told his houseguests they should all try their...