My name is Zach Barnett. Can machines think? Until what happened today, I thought that no human-made machine could ever think as a human does. I now know that I was wrong.

Sometimes, when I go to dinner parties organized by my partner, people ask me what I do, and I say that I'm a philosopher. But when I fumble at their questions about ‘my philosophy’, my partner will describe what I do by saying, ‘He uses big words to explain little words.’ Although this is meant tongue in cheek, it's basically right. My philosophical research is mainly in metaethics and the philosophy of language with a focus on the semantics of moral words. This means, for better or worse, that I use big words to explain little words.

Stephen Hawking recently caused controversy by suggesting that philosophy had become obsolete in the face of the advance of modern science. Hawking's The Grand Design is only the latest in a long series of premature notifications of the obsolescence of philosophy. A wide range of writers, including but not limited to scientists and philosophers, have suggested that philosophy, in part or in whole, has been superseded by the sciences in a way that, all things considered, justifies its abandonment. Some forty years ago, E.O. Wilson suggested that the province of ethics should be turned over to biology, forty years before that the logical positivists had drawn up plans for the formation of a ‘scientific philosophy’, and before that, in the nineteenth century, Comte had identified philosophy as the mere precursor to a modern, ‘positive’ stage of human culture. The list of examples could be extended, a fact which prompts the point that, if philosophy is dying, then it is putting up quite a fight.

It is no longer socially-acceptable to exhibit prejudice against ethnic minority people on grounds of their ethnicity, women on grounds of their gender, or working-class people on grounds of their class. The last bastions of discrimination are being overcome: such as prejudice against gay and lesbian people, and against disabled people. …Or, is there one more, crucial bastion of discrimination still strongly in place?

Many people claim that you can't prove or disprove God's existence. But why would anybody think you could? What's such a proof or disproof supposed to look like?

Many societies are now characterized by much more informality than they were before. One manifestation of this is that whereas children would previously address adults more deferentially (as Mr or Mrs Bloggs, for example), they are now much more likely to call (some) adults by their first names. The same is true of younger adults addressing considerably older adults. Is this greater familiarity acceptable or should it be avoided?

It is wonderful when you discover something which is really pleasing to hear about in an educational setting, let alone being able to investigate it for yourself – the something which you instinctively feel has something vital about it, which inspires you or ignites some cognitive flame. Blake, Shakespeare and Orwell have all done that for me, and now I can add two more to that list: Friedrich Nietzsche and Blaise Pascal.

Tim the terrorist: We have Tim the terrorist in custody, and we know that he knows where the bomb is that his group have secretly planted somewhere in central London, and we know that if we torture him hard enough he will reliably tell us where it is in time for us to defuse it, and we know that there is no other way of getting him to tell us, and we know that if we don't defuse it the bomb will kill thousands of innocent people. So: what to do?

Your mother was wise to teach you that just because everybody's doing it, that doesn't make it right. She would have been wise to add that just because everybody thinks it, that doesn't make it right, either. On the other hand, she would not have been wise to add (and probably did not) that when everybody agrees, that is no evidence whatsoever. When nearly everybody believes something, that's a reason in its favor.

Many theologians accept that it is not plausible to dismiss what is called the ‘higher criticism’ altogether, but try to limit its efficacy. This article discusses a number of their ways of doing so.

In his well-known piece ‘Autonomy and Benevolent Lies’ (in Thomas Hill, Autonomy and Self-Respect [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991]) Thomas Hill argues that out of respect for people's autonomy, we ought not to tell benevolent lies. He argues that we are obligated to tell the truth, especially when asked directly for it, even if we know it will cause a person more pain. This is because truth-telling is tied to respecting autonomy, which involves giving people a realistic picture of their situation, however rosy or bleak, and letting them decide what to do with the information given. Telling people benevolent lies, because one thinks they will be happier believing something else, is an instance of paternalism, which Hill wants to resist. In this paper I will raise a case that seems at first glance to be an objection to Hill's theory i.e. a case in which the right information to give someone is not what he has requested. In offering an explanation for how Hill can respond, I will suggest that a revision to his view would allow him to justify certain benevolent lies, while still avoiding his worry that benevolent lies are necessarily paternalistic.