We're back! Actually, we've never been away, so what I really mean is that my fellow zombies and I are, I hope, about to announce to the world that we're here! It's true I haven't yet asked anyone else to agree to expose themselves as I am now doing, but I'm hoping that my own public outing will encourage, or perhaps even shame others to come forward and join me.

It is impolite to discuss matters of religion or politics in mixed company. So goes the popular adage which all of us were supposed to have learned as children from our mothers. Let's call it Mom's Maxim. We tend to accept Mom's Maxim. But is it philosophically sound? In this short essay, we raise some objections to Mom's Maxim and make a case for an alternative which we call Mill's Principle.

Hell is other people. This miserable-sounding soundbite, the moment of revelation in Jean-Paul Sartre's shortest play, must be the most quoted line of twentieth-century philosophy. Not even Jacques Derrida's claim that ‘there is nothing beyond the text’, fondly cherished in some regions of academia, has anything like the cultural reach of what is often taken to be the quintessential Sartrean slogan. And the analytic tradition hardly abounds in snappy lines: meaning just ain't in the head, to be is to be the value of a variable, and that's about it. You'll not sell many of those t-shirts. Part of the appeal of Sartre's slogan lies, of course, in the fact that we all regularly annoy each other. We think we can see better ways of doing what only other people have the power to do. Your schemes can clash with mine in ways that prevent me from achieving my goals and living my dreams. People can look down on me. Other people can and do thwart, defeat, constrain, disappoint, irritate, and distort us. When we dwell on all this at the expense of the love, inspiration, fun, co-operation, respect, and decency that characterise much of our social interaction, then we find Sartre's slogan neatly encapsulates our mood. Its wit helps us put the melancholia in perspective as we express it. We get it off our chest.

If emotions such as sympathy are to play the role Oatley envisages for them, they cannot be condescending; they must be based on some real understanding. This is an essay about the difficulty of understanding, and, consequently, the difficulty of sympathy. So, it is a challenge to any philosopher who seeks to understand morality by assigning a strong role to the emotions.

A man fires a gun several times at the side of a barn and then draws a circle around a cluster of most of the bullet holes. Drawing a target retrospectively like this doesn't prove the shooting skills of the gunman – no one would consider him a sharpshooter if they knew what he'd done. When the equivalent of this happens in other circumstances we call it the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. As with many fallacies, it may not appear fallacious at first inspection.

Philosophers have been known to sometimes conjure up world-views which seem dazzlingly at odds with our everyday take on the world. Among the more, if not most drastic ‘-isms’ to be found in the history of philosophy, then, is the standpoint of solipsism, derived from the Latin words ‘solus’ (alone) and ‘ipse’ (self). What is that supposed to mean? It adopts a position that only acknowledges the existence of one's very own mind and opposes that there is anything beyond the realm of my mind that could be known. What a drastic contradiction to the way we normally view the world, indeed. Allow me to emphasize some implications that would arise were one really to take the solipsist view for granted. The aim is to briefly adumbrate how a solipsist view would cut us off from the social world and from the existential dimension of our own death.

For the first two years of my daughter's life, I was scheduled to teach an Introductory Logic course. While I had taught Critical Thinking courses in the past, having to steep myself in categorical and propositional logic left a lasting impression on my own thinking. More importantly, though, these courses influenced my speech-habits during the early years of my child's development. By no means do I intend to assert that my child somehow gained some cognitive benefit from my communication with her during these early stages of her life. Rather, it seems that she acquired the particular virtue of tolerating her father's habit of voicing strangely worded utterances. As she has passed the three and half year mark, her own communication skills and means of expression are well on their way towards developing into her own distinct styles. This I know because we talk a lot. Often times these dialogues are about day care, her friends, or princesses and lots of pink stuff. But sometimes a gem of an argument develops.

In his article ‘A New Euthyphro’ (Think, Summer 2010), pp. 65–83, Glenn Peoples constructs a new version of the famous Euthyphro dialogue, in which Euthyphro, rather than Socrates, prevails.

Pet adoption from an animal rescue shelter would seem to be one of those indisputable things in life that only increases a person's positive karma. Kant spoke of morality residing in a good will and pure intention; saving a dog from being euthanized by providing it with a loving, secure home seems the living embodiment of that. Or so it would seem.

Postmodernists claim that there is no truth. However, the statement ‘there isno truth’ is self-contradictory. This essay shows the following: One cannotstate the idea ‘there is no truth’ universally without creating aparadox. In contrast, the statement ‘there is truth’ does not producesuch a paradox. Therefore, it is more logical that truth exists.

Most people take it for granted that it's morally permissible to have children. They may raise questions about the number of children it's responsible to have or whether it's permissible to reproduce when there's a strong risk of serious disability. But in general, having children is considered a good thing to do, something that's morally permissible in most cases (perhaps even obligatory).