There is no self, no 'I', only a flickering illusion. So claim many neuroscientists and philosophers. Yet for the rest of us, the denial of the self feels like a bitter pill to swallow. Is the self a fantasy? Or is it essential to our being and consciousness?

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Emil Cioran isn’t much read in England. Born in Romania, but winning a scholarship to the University of Berlin in 1933.

The German philosopher has been adopted by the alt-right, but he hated antisemitism. He has been misappropriated and misread, argues his biographer. Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin are the great triumvirate of 19th-century thinkers whose ideas still have huge impact today. Nietzsche was philosophy’s supreme iconoclast; his sayings include “God is dead” and “There are no facts, only interpretations”. Highly relevant, yet his association with concepts such as the Übermensch, master morality, slave morality and, possibly most dangerous, the will to power, have also contributed to him being widely misinterpreted.

Governments and corporations will soon know you better than you know yourself. Belief in the idea of freedom has become dangerous

“Fascism” is a word that gets tossed around pretty loosely these days, usually as an epithet to discredit someone else’s politics. One consequence is that no one really knows what the term means anymore. Liberals see fascism as the culmination of conservative thinking: an authoritarian, nationalist, and racist system of government organized around corporate power. For conservatives, fascism is totalitarianism masquerading as the nanny state.

Consider two familiar moments at a family reunion. Our host, Uncle Bill, is taking pride in his barbequing skills. But his niece Becky says that she now refuses to eat meat. A groan goes round the table; the family mostly think of this as an annoying picky preference. But if it were viewed as a moral position rather than personal preference – as they might if instead Becky were avoiding meat on religious grounds – it would usually receive a very different reaction.

John Kaag’s fascinating new book about the German thinker seeks to tether philosophy back to the mess of daily experience.

First of all, I will distinguish between doing philosophy and teaching philosophy. If I ask you a question like ‘Should you do or be good?’ or ‘Are you in control of your life?’ I am inviting you to think about a philosophical question. If you do so, in a suitably philosophical spirit, then you are doing philosophy, whether you know it or not. If I explain to you what philosophers have said about these questions over the years or even explain and attempt to transfer to you the methods philosophers have used to answer such questions...

What might make life hard to recognize as life? By Caleb A. Scharf.

Plato’stheory of justice quite different from and contrary to the justice as we understand it in constitutional-legal terms, can be precisely summed in following two quotes from the Republic: “Justice is having and doing what is one’s own”and “A just man is a man just in the right place doing his best and giving full equivalent of what he receives”.

Let’s start with the title of your latest book. Why is the mind not the brain? The shortest argument goes something like this: there’s what philosophers call a mereological fallacy. Mereology is the discipline which studies the relation between wholes and parts. So imagine someone tells you that David Beckham didn’t score a goal, it was his foot. That would be an odd thing to say because Beckham couldn’t shoot for the goal without his foot, but it was the whole beast, so to speak, which shot the goal.

One piece of advice could solve all of your love problems. And it doesn’t come from Dr. Phil, Shakespeare, or your mother. Instead, it comes from the world’s unlikeliest love guru, Frederich Nietzsche, who not only explained the world of romance, but did so in fantastically unpronounceable German. You may be wondering how Nietzsche offered …

In every Star Wars film destiny is a central theme, and The Last Jedi is no exception. The main characters – including Kylo Ren, Rey, and Luke Skywalker – are explicitly portrayed as possessing a fixed destiny in that their futures are preordained by a mysterious energy field that governs the entire universe: the Force. This same energy is also presented as determining the outcome of the struggle between the warring sides in which the main characters play their part: the Resistance and the First Order.

We really are going to have to start a conversation about ethics, aren’t we? By John Michael Greer.

Physicists study matter, motion, and energy. Chemists study substances and their forms of combination, interaction and decomposition. Biologists study living things. And so forth. But what is it that philosophers study? One answer common throughout the ages is that as physicists study physics, philosophers study meta-physics. Philosophers, or at any rate the deepest of philosophers, we are told, are meta-physicists. Physicists study the contingencies of the world – things that happen to be so. Meta-physicists study the essential, necessary features of all possible worlds.

With jobs being automated and knowledge being devalued, humans need to rediscover flexible thinking.

In China and Japan, temples may be rebuilt and ancient warriors cast again. There is nothing sacred about the ‘original.’ By Byung-Chul Han.

Donald S. Lopez, Jr. looks at Voltaire's early reflections on Buddhism and how, in his desire to separate the Buddha's teachings from the trappings of religion, the French Enlightenment thinker prefigured an approach now familiar in the West.

Thomas Nagel reviews “As If: Idealization and Ideals” by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Hello, I'm Brian Brushwood, creator of The Modern Rogue and co-host of the videos. I've logged over 2,000 performances of an award-winning stage magic show nationwide, hosted TV Specials and had my own National Geographic series, released four Billboard chart-topping comedy albums, and taught a quarter-billion people a few cool magic tricks. Oh, and I'm Teller's bastard son.

For centuries, people who were born blind have been the intellectual curios of philosophers studying consciousness. This is particularly true for those exploring the way our consciousness is effected by our bodies, especially our eyes, which Leonardo da Vinci described as the “window of the soul”.

With her latest book, Natural Causes, Barbara Ehrenreich notes that there’s an age at which death no longer requires much explanation.

History tells us he invented modern philosophy. That history is wrong. By Christia Mercer. (Sept. 25, 2017)

Philosophers love to use thought experiments, here are seven of the most useful for making you reflect on everything around you. By Scotty Hendricks.

The alt-right is obsessed with the 19th-century German philosopher. They don’t understand him. By Sean Illing.

By Roger Schank. (Jan. 10, 2017)

Steven Nadler on Spinoza.

"That means for example that if all the climate scientists in the world were wiped out by a freak meteor at a conference, climate science would quickly reappear and say basically the same things again, as more or less happened when the Catholic Church tried to suppress heliocentricism." By Thomas R. Wells.

Rather than a golden ratio or a moral judgment, beauty is more like a radical jolt that awakens us to the world, By Shahidha Bari.

Aztec moral philosophy has profound differences from the Greek tradition, not least its acceptance that nobody is perfect. By Sebastian Purcell.

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

Diogenes Laertius compiled the sole extant work from antiquity that gives anything like a comprehensive picture of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. He may have been a flaming mediocrity. He may have been credulous and intellectually shallow. He may have produced a scissors-and-paste job cribbed from other ancient sources. But those other sources are lost, which makes what Diogenes Laertius left behind, to quote the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “truly priceless.” By Jim Holt.

Philosophy has always played an essential role in the development of science, physics in particular, and is likely to continue to do so. By Carlo Rovelli.

Can animals reflect on, and reject, their conditions of existence? The philosopher Owen Flanagan has pointed out that when Hamlet poses the question that has become the single most powerful query of all English literature, “he is, of course, contemplating suicide.

Critical thinking is essential for us to successfully adapt to both new information and situations so what is it and how can we do it better?