Current & Timely

The 2022 Nobel laureate for literature, Annie Ernaux, first entered the Rouen Municipal Library as shy, teenage philosophy student. In time, she came to inhabit the space as an emerging scholar and writer. She recalls the formative influence of those days and that space in this brief essay.

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 a book. Over a decade later, Pike returned to the subject for a second series. Now he’s working on a third series. He talks to Alex King about philosopher portraiture and

“The greatest thing in the world,” Montaigne writes, “is to know how to belong to oneself.”  And for taking possession of oneself, solitude is indispensable. Not everyone must retreat to a tower as Montaigne did, but to sustain solitude in communal form monks adopt a discipline of silence, and the poet Rilke cherished his marriage

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 Day 452. 364 days to go! To learn a bit more about pi in the meantime, check out the following sites. Visit Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy to learn about Pythagoras

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 talk “Live to Argue Another Day” touches on a key theme of her work, that good argumentation can be conducted civilly and for everyone’s mutual benefit.

Six unlikely friends, romance, snappy, funny dialogue, and… loads of philosophy. The Good Place has an unusual combination of elements for network television, but the situation comedy makes an excellent entry point for theoretical ethics. The show’s guiding concern is the nature of good and evil — on both a human and cosmic scale. Its

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, Leibniz conceived of a computational machine. He got the germ of this idea from the 14th Century Majorcan mystic and logician, Raymond Llull. Leibniz had great hopes for mechanizing and automating

The range of respectable lives for Seventeenth Century women in Europe was sharply restricted. As a young woman Gabrielle Suchon had two options available to her: marry or join the convent. She entered the convent, but at the age of 41 she left the Priory of Saint Hughes in Semur-en-Brionnais to study philosophy and write

What provokes us to laugh? Aristotle dropped some hints about laughter and comedy in what remains of his Poetics, but the account of Comic Drama from Book II has been lost. Others have taken up the cause since, so there is a lengthy history of speculation about why human beings laugh and what we find

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 is that people are unduly certain. Indeed, certainty is a trap that encourages people to defend a contentious claim as if it were a fortress. As a result, contending sides barely

Detectable traces of philosophical influence are evident in the maneuvers of both Vladimir Putin and NATO. Santiago Zabala and Claudio Gallo help make sense of geopolitical visions guiding the war. The first link below takes you to their column on NATO’s Philosophers, the second to their column on Putin’s Philosophers.

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 generating socio-economic order from the chaos of innumerable self-interested marketplace transactions is seductive, especially to mathematically inclined contemporary economists. In mathematical models, self-interest admits of axiomatic expression: no one works, hires,

Unlike Archimedes — who made one of his defining discoveries in a single flash, a Eureka moment — Darwin’s hypothesis about natural selection emerged slowly, over the course of decades. Empirical research conducted on a lengthy expedition aboard the HMS Beagle (1831-1836) percolated for many years before emerging as a fully articulated theory in The

“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 a jest or dismissive riposte. In any case, the nature of BS is notoriously difficult to pin-point. Several philosophers–who have been accused of spreading more than their share of it–have theorized

Remarkably, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch graduated from Oxford within a few years of each other in the 1930s. Each one worked against the central currents of analytic philosophy prevailing among English philosophers in the middle of the 20th Century, and all of them left an indelible impression on the field.

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 Germany when Hindenburg was elected chancellor and in the devastation of the natural world across Europe, and he railed against the corrosive affects upon clear thought from urban noise pollution. Rainer

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 human nature. Still, particular species were chosen by Aesop with evident care (hence, an industrious ant is paired with a heedless grasshopper), so Aesop was working with some ideas about animal

To combat the corrosive affects of contemporary cynicism implicit in the ineffectual carping that has so many people feeling defeated these days, Arthur C. Brooks recommends … ancient cynicism. As it turns out, ancient cynicism – exemplified by Diogenes of Sinope who resided in a barrel, disdained conventional values, and lived by his wits –

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 ancient classics in translation. Not only were low-priced translations of Greek and Roman authors historically popular among working class autodidacts, they offered (and still offer) opportunities to explore potentially subversive ideas.

In 1996, Richard Rorty delivered a series of lectures at the University of Girona in Catalonia, Spain. By then, Rorty had long turned away from the problems of traditional philosophy. As the title of these lectures makes plain, Rorty elaborates how to counter authoritarian politics without resorting to grand abstractions or indubitable first principles. Here

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 to which virtually everyone else is subject. In The Matrix that special perspective is induced by a red pill, which one may or may not want to take. Geoff Shullenberger examines

On the occasion of World Philosophy Day 2020, UNESCO is offering a range of content for the Late Night with Philosophers event on 20 November. Philosophers from around the world and philosophy students will be discussing the ongoing pandemic.