Niccolò Machiavelli wasn't famous in his lifetime, but is now. But did you know he had a formula for predicting who might be famous in the future? Read more...
Do we just see one thread of an infinite tapestry? Jorge Luis Borges wasn't the only one to imagine that every permutation might be realised in every respect. The idea of the multiverse has many followers. Read more...
Astrology is an obvious example of pseudo-science, even if it sometimes borrows from astronomy (I would say that, though, as I'm an Airies). But it wasn't always so worthy of dismissal and ridicule. Read more...
Althusser killed his wife, Sartre adopted his mistress as a daughter, Seneca was sent into exile for an affair. Why should we trust these characters? Read more...
Can we get beyond 'us and them' and embrace a healthy cosmopolitanism? Although they weren't exactly 'Obamas in togas', perhaps the experience of the Ancients can teach us something. Read more...
Saul Kripke, who read Descartes when very young, found Philosophy confusing: 'One philosopher says one thing, then another one comes along and says something entirely different'. Read more...
Brian Leiter makes a case for reducing the visibility of offensive cyber-cesspools, those websites, blogs, and chatrooms where demeaning and humiliating comments are posted. But would his solution work? Read more...
Stephen Stich and Wesley Buckwalter raise the possibility that women have different intuitions about a classic series of thought experiments in a quirky article for the Philosophers Magazine. Read more..
A.C. Grayling on James Miller's book about how philosophers have lived. A different set of philosophers' lives might have produced more optimistic conclusions. Read more...
Jacques Derrida had many followers, and numerous critics who objected to his wilfully obscure Derridadaisms. I don't think it is accurate to describe him as going from strength to strength as this review of a recent biography does. Read more...
There is a widespread belief that Friedrich Nietzsche's dementia stemmed from syphilis contracted from a prostitute in a Leipzig brothel. But that might be a smear put about by anti-Nazis, according to this 2003 article. Read more...
A. C. Grayling thinks you should read novels in the morning and avoid just waxing lyrical in the pub if you really want to become a philosopher. Read more...