Life and death: they’re opposites. But each one can be defined by the other. That means death shapes life. But how? When things go well, death shapes life from the background of our awareness. This fact has profound consequences for every facet of life: politics and governance, interpersonal relationships, and all forms of human consciousness.

We live at a time when experts are increasingly viewed with distrust. Conservative Member of Parliament Michael Gove famously said that ‘The people of this country have had enough of experts.’ In this interview, philosopher Linda Zagzebski explores some key questions concerning experts, including: What is an expert? How does an expert differ from an authority? And: What can we do to foster a healthier relationship between experts and non-experts?

Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument is one of the most famous arguments in philosophy. It is a surprisingly tricky argument to understand. Some philosophers think it’s a good argument. Others disagree. In fact they even disagree about what the argument actually is. This short essay gives three different interpretations of the argument and explains why I believe none succeed.

This article defends the compatibility of evolutionary theory and religious belief against the objection that God could not have intentionally brought humans into existence given that the evolutionary process by which humans came into existence crucially involves random genetic mutation. The thought behind the objection is that a process cannot be both random and intended by God to unfold as it does.

Why would an omnipotent and benevolent God create a world with so much evil? Some theologians suggest that God permits evil for the sake of moral goodness. Because an act cannot be good unless it is freely performed, God could not create a world with moral goodness without giving us the freedom to perform both good and evil acts. But is this a wise trade-off for God to make? Or is evil too steep a price to pay for moral significance?

Philosophical writing always already entails poetics and rhetoric, even if the convention has been to try to reduce these dimensions in the effort to enhance the logic and clarity of an argument. Humans rely on aesthetics and narrative, to make themselves understood and to persuade and influence. A heightened awareness and more extensive use of these dimensions in philosophical and scientific writing could help facilitate deeper and more experiential ways for readers to engage with theoretical ideas, including the reductive theory of personal identity, as represented by Derek Parfit (which may have little psychological traction when presented in conventional scientific and philosophical discourses, which strive to be purely rational), and help release their emancipatory and consolatory potential.

Kerala, a state in southern India, represents a success story for women in terms of both education and social justice. What lessons can we learn from Kerala? It seems the distinctive local culture may have played an important role. This chapter explores the lessons of Kerala from a philosophical perspective, drawing on philosophers Sen, Nussbaum, Chen, and others.

This essay is the winning entry of the 2023–4 Royal Institute of Philosophy THINK Essay Prize Competition, for which there were 330 entries. Claudia Wong is 16-year-old student at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

A purely logical proof is offered of a statement that may be surprising to readers of this article in Think, namely the statement that this article has not been published in Think.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy has been hugely influential but can be difficult to understand. He has a radical approach to philosophy. Most philosophers think that questions such as ‘How can I know there is an external world?’ or ‘How is my private inner world of thought and experience related to my body?’ raise genuine puzzles requiring solutions. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, takes such questions to result from linguistic confusion and a scientistic approach to philosophy. Such questions require, not answers, but conceptual elucidation. This article introduces Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.

Many philosophers prize finding deep, important philosophical truths such as the nature of right and wrong, the ability to make free choices, and so on. Perhaps, then, it would be better for such philosophers to outsource the search for such truths to entities that are better equipped to the task: artificial philosophers. This suggestion may appear absurd, initially, until we realize that throughout human history outsourcing tasks has been the norm for thousands of years. To the extent such philosophers care about discovering deep philosophical truths, they have a reason to aid in the creation of artificial philosophers who will eventually, in many respects, do philosophy better than even the best human philosopher who ever lived or who will live.

Is travel to the past possible or does it harbour some hidden contradiction? It seems that if time travel is possible, a man could travel back in time and kill his grandfather before his father was conceived. Yet this is impossible. This conundrum has become known as the Grandfather Paradox. Some philosophers have attempted to defuse the paradox, and yet others have argued that the standard resolution of the paradox is open to a charge of incoherence. I argue that this charge is ungrounded.

The placebo effect is a genuine psychobiological phenomenon in which the expectation of improvement can lead to actual changes, including alterations in perception, behaviour and physiological responses. This article explores this phenomenon by dispelling common misconceptions and highlighting its significance for critical thinking.

What are epiphanies, and might they be of use in doing philosophy? This essay explores how a great deal of philosophy – and in particular ethics – adopts methods that make no room for epiphanies and the insights they can provide.

This article presents a short account of the practice of vice-charging within the domain of vice epistemology. It briefly examines two pervasive epistemic vices – closed-mindedness and insouciance – and then explores some of the issues surrounding when and how to go about charging others with an epistemic vice.

Could you be a brain in a vat, with all your experiences of people, plants, pebbles, planets and more being generated solely by computer inputs? It might seem difficult to know that you aren’t, since everything in the world would still appear just as it is. In his 1981 book, Reason, Truth, and History, Hilary Putnam argues that if you were in such a predicament, your statement ‘I am a brain in a vat’’, would be false since, as an envatted brain, your word ‘vat’ would refer to the vats you encounter in your experienced reality, and in your experienced reality, you are not in one of those but are instead a full-bodied human being with head, torso, arms, and legs living in the wide open world. The following extended thought experiment is intended to illustrate that, contrary to Putnam’s view, you, as an envatted brain, could truthfully believe that you are a brain in a vat.

Democracies may be defined as civic arrangements wherein all citizens have equal political standing. The problem is that no real-world democracy has successfully achieved this arrangement. Are they really democracies, then? For that matter, are there any democracies at all? Aikin and Talisse propose that ‘democracy’ is an aspirational concept, one that holds those who strive to achieve particular ends to exceedingly high standards. This makes democracies intelligible as democracies in their collective aspirations, but it also makes their failures instructive parts of what they are as democracies.

In this short piece, I invite readers to think about whether expertise is something as real as trees and mountains, or whether it is our own creation as a society. I discuss the challenges that a purely social view of expertise raises: inconsistent relativism, contradictions, frauds, epistemic and social anarchy. As a way out of these difficulties, I suggest that we must opt for an objective take on expertise. Of course, possessing expertise is relative in the sense that it is a consistent relational property between various levels of expertise. However, this relation is ‘objective’. It is an ‘objective relational property’. Taking this realist view on expertise can shed light on some difficulties, such as the expertise status of Newton in comparison to contemporary physicists and the English proficiency of native English speakers compared to monolingual non-English speakers.

An exploration of the ethical issues surrounding assisted dying, in the form of a dialogue.

Has science really shown that there are more than two sexes? Is it really time to redefine sex? A well-known article claims just that. In this short essay, I respond and show that there is nothing particularly surprising about these scientific data on sex, and that people with a traditional, binary definition of sex should not be moved by the data to change their view.