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The 2022 Nobel laureate for literature, Annie Ernaux, first entered the Rouen Municipal Library as shy, teenage philosophy student. In time, she came to

A.J. Ayer suggested to Steven Pyke during a photoshoot that other notable philosophers ought to be captured on film. The ensuing project culminated in

“The greatest thing in the world,” Montaigne writes, “is to know how to belong to oneself.”  And for taking possession of oneself, solitude is

The advent of Chat GTP creates new problems in the classroom. What will educators to about it? Irina Dumitrescu explores the question.

Now that all the celebrations are over and we’ve cleaned up after the party, everyone at firstphilosophy.ca is counting down the days until PI

Catherine Hundleby, a friend of firstphilosophy.ca and one of our earliest contributors, has died. Catherine was a fine philosopher and better person. Her TEDx

Six unlikely friends, romance, snappy, funny dialogue, and… loads of philosophy. The Good Place has an unusual combination of elements for network television, but

Long before the advent of modern computers, even before electricity was harnessed to power the kind of circuitry that makes large-scale computational processing possible,

The range of respectable lives for Seventeenth Century women in Europe was sharply restricted. As a young woman Gabrielle Suchon had two options available

What provokes us to laugh? Aristotle dropped some hints about laughter and comedy in what remains of his Poetics, but the account of Comic

One way to combat mis-information and dis-information is to reinforce good information with patiently explained evidence. But according to Ilana Redstone, the deeper problem

Detectable traces of philosophical influence are evident in the maneuvers of both Vladimir Putin and NATO. Santiago Zabala and Claudio Gallo help make sense

Economists often venerate Adam Smith’s monumental Wealth of Nations (1776) as the Newtonian origin of their discipline. Smith’s memorable image of an invisible hand

Unlike Archimedes — who made one of his defining discoveries in a single flash, a Eureka moment — Darwin’s hypothesis about natural selection emerged

“BS!”, like “bull!”, “crap!”, “humbug!”, “buncome!” and similar expressions, can seriously damn a rival’s claim or their personal authority. It can also serve as

Remarkably, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch graduated from Oxford within a few years of each other in the 1930s. Each

Theodor Lessing–controversialist, satirist, and spur to Nazi flanks–fled Germany in early 1933 to Marienbad, Czechoslovakia. He foresaw danger on the horizon in his native

Since ancient times, readers have recognized that the dogs, foxes, lions, ants, grasshoppers, and other creatures in Aesop’s fables represent features or types of

To combat the corrosive affects of contemporary cynicism implicit in the ineffectual carping that has so many people feeling defeated these days, Arthur C.

Edith Hall and Ansgar Allen are interviewed by Tom Sutcliffe on BBC’s “Start of the Week”. Edith Hall talks about the value of reading

In 1996, Richard Rorty delivered a series of lectures at the University of Girona in Catalonia, Spain. By then, Rorty had long turned away

It’s a tantalizing idea that dates back to the parable of the cave in Plato’s Republic VII: a special perspective unclouded by the illusions

On the occasion of World Philosophy Day 2020, UNESCO is offering a range of content for the Late Night with Philosophers event on 20