philosomajig

Nietzsche’s personal-training business, Marx’s podcast, and more.

2,500 years ago, Anaxagoras correctly determined that the rocky moon reflects light from the sun, allowing him to explain lunar phases and eclipses

Nietzsche was overlooked for most of his career. By the time his genius was discovered, his health had rapidly deteriorated.

One of the world’s most influential living thinkers offers his view on the most pressing issues of our time, including nationalism, immigration, the internet and Europe

Each semester, I teach courses on the philosophy of science to undergraduates at the University of New Hampshire. Most of the students take my courses to satisfy general education requirements, and most of them have never taken a philosophy class ...

In November 1633, the French philosopher René Descartes, now living in the Netherlands, was searching in the bookstores of Amsterdam and Leiden for a copy of Galileo’s recently published Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems. Descartes’s friend Marin Mersenne, a Minim friar in Paris who was the centre of a wide European intellectual network, had explained to him Galileo’s view that all bodies fall at the same rate, regardless of their material or weight (and assuming their fall is not affected by the friction of any medium). Descartes replied to Mersenne that this cannot be right. “According to my philosophy there will not be the same relation between two spheres of lead, one weighing one pound and the other a hundred pounds, as there is between two spheres of wood, one weighing one pound and the other a hundred pounds . . . he [Galileo]…

Who exactly was David Hume? He was a Scottish historian and philosopher (best known today for his radical empiricism), who prided himself on his reputation as a man of the utmost moral character.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of 'The Outsider', we pay tribute to the radical writer and his influential thoughts on the meaning of life – or rather, the positive lack of it

We’ve done it. You probably have, too. No matter what we believe about morality or politics, we’ve all used moral talk to project an impressive and morally respectable image of ourselves. Suppose, for instance, that one of us, in an effort to impr...

Neil Sinhababu is quite possibly the world’s coolest philosopher. His first paper, Possible Girls, uses modal realism to argue that everybody has a soulm...

It’s tempting to think of the mind as a layer that sits on top of more primitive cognitive structures. We experience ourselves as conscious beings, after all, in a way that feels different to the rhythm of our heartbeat or the rumblings of our sto...

What if the Italian civil servant whose name became shorthand for devious politics was trying to warn us about the despots, not advise them?