Have you ever wondered what could possibly be meant by the epigrams ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world‘, or ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’. These are just two of a large number of utterances (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein) from celebrated Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein). His contribution to the subject […]

Many readers love Roger Scruton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Scruton) for his traditionalist conservatism whether that be in aesthetics , politics, The Church of England,  or public affairs (e.g. issues like fox hunting). Making love to Roger might be a whole lot trickier. He has allowed the fecundity of his mind to generate a tome on the philosophical aspects

We normally take it for granted that other people will live on after we ourselves have died. Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a ‘collective afterlife’ in which humanity survives long after we are gone. Samuel Scheffler (http://as.nyu.edu/faculty/samuel-scheffler.html) maintains

Our subjective experience of time is that the future advances towards us into the present moment and then recedes into the past. It is a kind of ‘flow’, ‘the river of time’. Many people are troubled by questions about the relation between past, present and future. Is time travel possible? If so could you kill your own

This is the best short introduction to Humanism I’ve read. Part of the ‘Thinking in Action’ series from Routledge, it is systematic, clear and cool headed. People often ask me ‘What is Humanism?’ The best boiled down answer I’ve got is ‘An ethical life without superstition’ Richard Norman (Professor of Philosophy at Kent, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Norman) covers

Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Protagoras (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protagoras) declares in the dialogue of the same name by Plato that ‘Man is the Measure of all Things’. If there is an objective reality ‘out there’ how can we know it except through our human point of view? David E. Cooper, (Professor of Philosophy at Durham, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Cooper) takes up this challenge.

Donald E. Brown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_E._Brown) offered this thesis in 1991. His own summary of human universals is that they “comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception.” We are all tiresomely familiar with the banal falsity that ‘everything is relative’. In the field of anthropology at least, Brown