By Eunsong Kim

Consciousness is a bit like poop. It's a mysterious internal process, and if you talk about it at parties you'll stop getting invited to parties.

There’s nothing like a worldwide pandemic and its incessant media coverage to get you ruminating on the fragility of life. And those thoughts of death triggered by the coronavirus amplify the best and worst in people.

Brian Leiter examines Friedrich Nietzsche's views on what makes life worth living.

When every day many of us wake up to read about fresh horrors on our fresh horrors device, we might find ourselves contemplating the question as to whether, as Albert Camus supposedly put it, one should kill oneself or have a cup of coffee. If there is any philosopher who is famous for contemplating suicide, it’s Camus who, in a more serious tone, proposed that, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”

Imagining ourselves as no longer existing is, for most of us, terrifying. Buddhism may offer some reassurance. A central tenet of the religion is that all is impermanent and the self is actually an illusion. If there is no self, then why fear the end of the self? To find out if the logic of the Buddhist perspective eliminates existential fear, Shaun Nichols at the University of Arizona and his colleagues surveyed hundreds of monastic Tibetan Buddhists (monks-in-training) in exile in India, as well as lay Tibetans, Tibetan Buddhists from Bhutan, Indian Hindus and American Christians and atheists.

Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. To examine Camus’ central ideas and views surely one must get back to one of his best works, The Myth of Sisyphus.

We’re still feeling the aftershocks of the existentialist earthquake. Roger Scruton reviews Sarah Bakewell’s ‘At the Existentialist Café.’

Shahidha Bari on lately reclaiming the existential legacy.