A philosophical inquiry into whether, and, if so, why, marriage is good.

Tim Mawson argues that moral values hold objectively.

Nick Bostrom presents an argument that our species will shortly disappear.

Following on from Nick Bostrom's discussion of the Doomsday argument, Alasdair Richmond considers how anthropic reasoning can lead from Doomsday to some odd conclusions about computation and our place in reality.

D.J. Sheppard reflects on Carey's controversial What Good are the Arts?

Dan Strimpel makes a plea for calm in ethical debate.

Philosophical debate over the infamous Danish cartoons of Muhammad continues.

Mark Lovas asks to what extent are we all morally blind — and morally wanton?

There are other sound reasons to destroy the Social Security system. It is based upon principles that are deeply offensive to the moral values of the political leadership … Social Security is based on the idea that it is a community responsibility to ensure that the disabled widow on the other side of town has food to eat, or that the child across the street should be able to go to a decent school. Such evil ideas have to be driven from the mind. … According to right thinking, it isn't my fault if the widow married the wrong person or if the child's parents made bad investment decisions, so why should I contribute a few cents to a public fund to take care of them?

Peter Cave's new book, Can a Robot Be Human? 33 Perplexing Philosophy Puzzles, covers a wide range of perplexities and paradoxes. Here, Peter raises some timely puzzles.

Gianluca Di Muzio develops a novel objection to theism.

In this article, Sandis defends four of the most notorious doctrines which Plato attributes to Socrates. The first is the ‘theory’ of forms, the second is the doctrine of recollection, the third Socrates'contention that philosophers ought to be the guardian-kings of the ideal state, and the fourth his rejection of rhetoric. Sandis does not claim that his interpretation (which owes a lot to Wittgenstein) is correct, but only that it renders the doctrines both relevant and plausible.

James Warren responds to Sandis's preceding article.

John Shand also critically discusses Sandis' preceding paper.

Tim Crane responds to the several recent attacks on religion made by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al.

Can you know something that isn't true?

Settling definitions is often seen as a central tool for clarifying concepts, and answering ‘What is X?’ questions. Examples might be ‘What is knowledge?’, ‘What is a work of art?’ or ‘What is a dog?’. A common way of answering such questions is by formulating necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing to be of a certain sort. It is this form of real definition that is of concern here.

Brian Ribeiro offers a sketch of a new theory of humour, pitched at roughly the same level of detail, and intended to have roughly the same level of inclusiveness, as the other available philosophical ‘theories’ of humour.

A dialogue on the puzzle of mental causation.

This challenging paper presents an ingenious argument a for functionalist theory of mind.