Ancient India is famous as a home for the ethical concept of ahimsa, meaning ‘non-violence’. Among other things, this moral principle demanded avoiding cruelty towards animals and led to the widespread adoption of vegetarianism. In this article, it is argued that the reasoning which led the ancient Indians to avoid violence towards animals might actually provide a more powerful rationale for vegetarianism than the utilitarian rationale that is more prevalent among animal rights activists nowadays.

Are human beings irredeemably irrational? If so, why? In this article, I suggest that we need a broader appreciation of thought and reasoning to understand why people get things wrong. Although we can never escape cognitive bias, learning to recognize and understand it can help us push back against its dangers – and in particular to do so collectively and collaboratively.

In this article I challenge the standard view that clarity and coherence in moral philosophy and ethics are always good and obscurity necessarily bad. The appraisal of clarity, I argue, entails a risk of reducing and misrepresenting the complex and multifaceted nature of good, productive and true thinking and communication. Uncertainty and obscurity do not necessarily lead to vagueness, imprecision or meaning-obstruction. There are productive forms of uncertainty and there are unproductive forms. Indeed, to be precise, lucid and truthful sometimes requires respecting and linguistically and conceptually reproducing the incoherence, obscurity and uncertainty of reality.

When, in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York more than two decades ago, the late Queen Elizabeth II expressed her sentiments with the words: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love’, she was making a reference to British psychiatrist Dr Colin Murray Parkes's book Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life. In the book, Dr Parkes states an obvious, albeit often ignored, fact that the pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love. Following the death of the Queen in September 2022, Joe Biden, the current president of the US, used the same quote as an opportunity to express his own personal sadness about her passing. It was also an opportunity to participate in public grief about the loss of a popular leader, and of innocent lives. It is not uncommon for leaders, religious ones including, to speak of love, especially during such poignant moments. But it is somewhat less common for public figures to bring to our attention the close connection between grief and love. Even when they do, grief is commonly seen in a negative light. Philosophers provide another example of what is, I shall argue, a mischaracterization of grief.

Let's escape our caves and, quite literally, spend more time philosophizing in the great outdoors.

An exploration of the risks and benefits of AI, particular regarding privacy.

Mary Midgley challenges the dominant conceptions of human nature, ethics, community and ecology taught at A-Level. This article considers some of the key themes of her thinking.

Here is a brief introduction to Ayer's radical criticism of religious belief. According to Ayer, a sentence like ‘God exists’ doesn't assert something false; rather, it fails to assert anything at all.

Now that the opportunity to build back from COVID in an intelligent and thoughtful way has largely passed us by, how do we cope with the existential threat of ecological collapse? We posit that economic concerns have been granted undeserved weight in conversations around climate policy, while the role of philosophy has thus far been an untapped resource of potentially liberating knowledge that can inspire action and a deliberative, collective reconsideration of what parts of society should be valued.

Some people have engaged in acts of civil disobedience to protest against the climate policies of their governments and corporations. This article argues that these disobedient actions are justified at present since governments fail to do all they reasonably can to respond to this pressing issue.

A philosophical argument for more TikTok dancing.

Jacques Derrida is one of the most controversial philosophers of the twentieth century, who is hailed by his followers as a genius, derided by his detractors as a charlatan. His work continues to be a source of often inordinate praise and blame. How does Derrida provoke such violent reactions? What is ‘deconstruction’, his most famous technique? And is there something in his work that can be useful to even the most hostile of his critics?

I'd rather not be an idiot and neither would you. One useful tool in avoid idiocy and figuring out what's true is to be aware of logical fallacies. Some errors in thinking are so common that they have been named in infamy. This article is an anti-idiocy vaccine to immunize you to common fallacies such as poisoning the well, begging the question, false dichotomy, and others, in order to give you a better shot at avoiding fallacy and finding out what's true.