Is hedonism a viable philosophy?

July 22, 2015
Onfray’s neo-hedonism derives from his admiration for the so-called ‘libertine’ thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries who, rejecting the perfectible nature of mankind extolled by Christianity, regarded our mortal existence as an essentially physical...

The New Hedonism of Michel Onfray

Michel Onfray has set himself the seemingly unsurmountable challenge of toppling over what he regards as the false idols of the philosophical Parthenon. Influenced by Nietzsche but especially by late ancient materialist thinkers such as Democritus and Epicurus, he...

Philosophers on Work

July 1, 2015
Philosophers are not known for their practical skills and thinkers like Plato and Aristotle had little to say about their toiling contemporaries, be they free artisans or slave labourers. Over the centuries, many philosophers have tried to exert some influence on the...

Aristotle and modern politics

In the wake of the most surprising election results of the last fifty years, it is a particularly appropriate time to apply a philosophical perspective to this most momentous event in British political history. Philosophy students, by now familiar with Aristotle’s...

Living in a religionless world

May 27, 2015
How do your IB Philosophy students react to Bonhoeffer’s suggestion that Christianity was already, back some seventy odd years ago, a religion having lost its initial spirit and very substance? After all, is religion nothing more than a cultural phenomenon like any...