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According to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the basis of morality is not happiness but reason.

According to the existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, love is not about forever committing to pre-given roles: the best romantic relationships consist in mutual projects of growth and change.

Honor thy father and mother, says the Bible; serve and revere your parents, says Confucius.

17th-century philosopher Descartes’ exultant declaration “I think, therefore I am” is his defining philosophical statement.

Loneliness is rising not just due to less community, suggests the philosopher Sanem Soyarslan, but also from our loss of authentic, nourishing solitude.

60 years ago, Hannah Arendt provided a haunting critique of modernity.

While philosophies like Buddhism and Stoicism operate under the assumption that suffering should be lessened or transcended, Nietzsche thinks suffering can have real value.

There is not one type of friendship, Aristotle argues, but three.

According to the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, we are all subject to the growing unchecked power of the modern corporation.

A quick introduction to the difficult logical puzzle of solipsism, and why it's harder to refute than you might expect...

The classical Japanese idiom mono no aware denotes an emotional connection to the world, as well as the ephemeral nature of everything in it.

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein suggests the meaning of a language is always rooted in a distinctive “form of life”.

The Stoics, Toni Morrison, C.S.

The gargantuan scope of the universe need not diminish us, argues the philosopher Robert Nozick.

Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus argues death is absolutely nothing to fear, “because as long as we exist, death is not here.

In Against Narrativity, the philosopher Galen Strawson challenges the popular idea that living well requires a coherent life story.

In Modern Moral Philosophy, Elizabeth Anscombe launches a blistering critique on the very concept of ‘morality’.

In this passage from his 1955 work The Sane Society, the philosopher Erich Fromm suggests our task is not to feel certain and secure, but to better tolerate uncertainty and insecurity.

In his famous 1974 paper ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’

The Witness: a beautiful, haunting, 4-paragraph short story from the great Jorge Luis Borges that asks: when people die, what dies with them?

Whether you’re into setting New Year’s resolutions, or you’re more of the opinion that formulating goals for the next twelve months is a waste of time, which philosophical perspective most resonates with you?

Iris Murdoch thought our inner lives are too often clogged by the “fat, relentless ego”.

Robert Nozick’s experience machine is commonly invoked to argue that there’s more to life than pleasure.

When we genuinely grasp ourselves as finite temporal beings, argues 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger, we can release ourselves from the illusions of the anonymous ‘They’, and discover what really matters to us.

After receiving a devastating diagnosis in her mid-thirties, the philosopher Havi Carel argues that, while society views ill people as objects of suffering, and medicine reduces them to sets of symptoms, those who are ill remain fully human and capable of…

If we want to stop ruminating on the past, writes Buddhist philosopher Thich Nhat Hanh, we first need to connect more deeply to the present.

“There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life,” observes French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, “and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning”...

For philosopher Michael Cholbi, grief is not an irrational emotion but a multistage, active process involving the deep reformation of our identities.

David Benatar’s ‘asymmetry argument’ suggests that, in virtually all cases, it’s wrong to create new life.

Amor fati is a Latin phrase meaning ‘love of fate’, an idea rooted in the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy of Stoicism.

Arne Næss’s famous distinction between ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ ecology is a call to reevaluate our place in nature: the world is not a resource to be exploited, it is the root of our humanity.

Meaning is a distinctive category of the good life, argues Susan Wolf: as well as happiness and morality, we also want our lives to contain meaning.

For Simone Weil, the “essential evil besetting humanity” is our destructive tendency to treat tools (like money, technology, and power) as end goals.

Every person lives in an ‘island universe’, writes 20th-century thinker Aldous Huxley, and building bridges into one another’s worlds is a challenge we should not underestimate.

Done badly, parenting has tremendous scope for harm.

While much Western philosophy places the individual at the center of existence, Ubuntu is a system of thought structured around the community.

With her famous ‘capabilities approach’, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that wealth and satisfaction are very limited measures of the good life; instead, she offers 10 essential capabilities by which to judge if someone can live a full, flourishing

Contemporary philosopher Ruth Chang suggests if we’re stuck in a hard life choice, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking there must be a ‘best’ path; often there are simply different paths, which will change us in different ways.

Thoughts, concepts, and ideas may occur at a level of abstraction ‘above’ the brain’s physical components, but that doesn’t render them mere epiphenomenon, argues cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter; rather, they have real causal power in the brain’s p…

Though we assume freedom of choice to be a good thing, psychologist Barry Schwartz suggests too much choice fills us with anxiety and regret, and could lead people to seek more direction and control from their political leaders.

When we feel lost, tense, or uncertain, we may have become disconnected from what Chinese philosophers call ‘Dao’, often translated as ‘the way’.

In his 1956 classic The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm suggests we should place less emphasis on finding an impossibly perfect partner, and more on honing our capacity for love and commitment…

2,300 years ago in Ho Kepos, the ancient Greek thinker Epicurus and his friends renounced the trappings of ‘ambition’ to spend their days enjoying one another’s company and discussing philosophy…

That we can only understand things in retrospect perhaps tells us something important about how to better approach life.

In The Symposium, one of his most celebrated dialogues, Plato suggests love is not seeking your other half; love is best characterized as a ladder to the beautiful and the good.

The age-old question of whether a falling tree makes a sound when there’s no one around to hear it exploits the tension between perception and reality.

Will international politics ever be based on justice?

Friends from whom we’ve grown apart constitute what Nietzsche calls a ‘Star friendship’.

What might make us truly secure?

Five short passages from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism on the roles played by propaganda, misinformation, and loneliness.