We think creativity is a uniquely mysterious force. But with Google's Magenta producing musical symphonies, some fear AI threatens to make the imagination redundant. Is human creativity no more than mechanics? Will AI transform and enrich the human experience? Can robots be creative? Or is there something strange about creative thought that separates humans and machines?

In the current political climate of populism and xenophobia, it is tempting to simply close the door and withdraw from public affairs. Indeed, there is a pervading sense that there is no alternative to our polarised politics, neoliberal capitalism and corruption. Pleas for solidarity among nation-states seem to be easily overshadowed by resentment towards foreigners and nostalgia for lost national glory. And yet, it is precisely such retreat into the private realm that Hannah Arendt warned against during the 20th century.

Three academics are launching a new journal in which arguments can be made anonymously. But is separating ideas from their authors the best way forward? Jeff McMahan is a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University. He’s a snowy-haired American, originally from South Carolina, and he works in a large, dark oak-panelled, and not very warm study in Corpus Christi college. It’s a room with an illustrious past.

by Thomas R. Wells Suppose a company wants to fill a job. They would advertise it together with the requirements for any successful candidate. HR would screen out all the applicants not good enough to do the job and everyone e Perhaps you…

What is boredom? What does it mean to have nothing to do? For many of us, the feeling of boredom is associated with being young, newspapers and magazines carry stories about the importance of boredom to stimulate creativity – the rise of the smart phone is, apparently, a threat to us all (although I am sure they said that about television as well…). But what happens when boredom turns into stagnation? When life stretches out behind, and ahead, with few opportunities to progress, gain experiences or make choices? What happens when you have served decades in prison?

Are insects ‘philosophical zombies’ with no inner life? Close attention to their behaviours and moods suggests otherwise. By Lars Chittka, Catherine Wilson.

Bullshit. By David Egan.

Why am I here? How can I live a good life? What does it mean to have a mind and be a person? Since the days of antiquity, philosophers have puzzled over fundamental questions like these that sit at the very heart of our lived experience and interactions with the world. Solving these problems is not merely about increasing our knowledge of the world, to fill up academic textbooks and sit on library shelves, but to impart wisdom to aid us as we navigate through life's uncertainties and its profoundest mysteries.

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.

“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.

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?

The fallacy fallacy is a logical fallacy which occurs when someone assumes that if an argument contains a logical fallacy, then its conclusion must necessarily be wrong. For example, consider a situation where someone claims that a certain medical treatment is preferable to an alternative simply because it’s perceived as more “natural”, and someone else points out that this reasoning is fallacious, since what matters is whether the new treatment is better in practice, and not whether it’s more natural.

"I’ve had experience, I know the world. Amuse yourself, ask every passenger to tell you his story, and if you find one, just one, who hasn’t often cursed his life, who hasn’t often told himself he’s the unluckiest of men, throw me headfirst into the sea.’’ – Voltaire.

Long before the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and the Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a Japanese video game developer predicted society's issues of truth and reality. Over a decade before my posts on post-truth aphorisms and our struggles in constructing narratives, Hideo Kojima would create a game in which the archenemy was none other than the American government itself in 2001.

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.

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.

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

Steven Nadler on Spinoza.

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.

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.

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...

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?

Death is perhaps one of the most terrifying concepts a human being can grapple with... By Mustapha Itani.

A philosopher's thoughts on how an individual can overcome the feeling of helplessness in the face of global climate change. People cannot engage in something they cannot see or feel. We need concrete reasons to care and act. In this way, climate change presents a threefold intangible challenge:

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.

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

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 …

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

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.