A.N Whitehead and Process Theology:

July 4, 2011
Who knows about Alfred North Whitehead, these days, when the academic world seems to have moved from the days of the truly Renaissance man to the more mundane recognition of the philosophical specialist? Yet, Whitehead deserves to be better known and, more...

Ethics and Applied Ethics

May 15, 2011
The expression ‘applied ethics’ sounds like a contradiction in terms as if ethics consisted exclusively of the theoretical study or passive contemplation of pure ideas, such as patience or justice. Ethics means nothing if its principles are not directly and...

Philosophers and their ‘conceptual personae’

May 7, 2011
In their co-written book What is Philosophy? (1991) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari dedicate a chapter to ‘conceptual personae’ as living embodiments or illustrations of philosophers’ key ideas. Both authors draw similarities between the fictitious characters of...

From political rights to the right to basic human needs

April 21, 2011
One significant new development in the debate on rights, going back as far back as the natural rights tradition of Grotius and Pufendorf down to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice , is the new approach and definition of what formerly-called ‘natural rights’ actually...

Wittgenstein’s beetle in a box and philosophical activity

March 31, 2011
Wittgenstein’ s analogy of the beetle in a box in his Philosophical Investigations (1.293), points out our difficulties at sharing out most private experiences with others. For one thing, what do we actually mean by ‘pain’ or ‘disappointment’ or ‘regret’? My ‘own’...