You've Got It All Wrong

  What’s in a name? In his 1892 paper, “Sense and Reference,” the German philosopher Gottlob Frege gave an unconventional answer to this question. Up until that point, most philoso...

Inductive reasoning is the process whereby we take a lot of specific observations and use them to form more general conclusions. For example, because we’ve seen millions of black r...

The Ship of Theseus is one of longest-standing paradoxes in philosophy. It asks us to consider how something can change over time, but still remain the same thing. If we take a shi...

The problem of free will has long haunted philosophers who also want to believe that the laws of physics govern everything in the universe. According to determinism, once set in mo...

In his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that the history of science is not the history of a steady march towards the truth that we usually ima...

Time is a fundamental part of how we experience the world. But when we try to describe what time actually is, things get murky pretty fast. The philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart laid ou...

In traditional moral philosophy there are three kinds of actions: Good actions you’re required to do, bad actions you’re not allowed to do, and permittable actions that are neither...

The traditional definition of “knowledge,” first put forward by Plato, is a “justified, true belief.” That definition stuck for a few thousand years until Edmund Gettier wrote a fa...

Are humans just a mere collection of atoms, arranged just so, or is the “self” something that transcends the physical world? This question goes all the way back to Plato and Aristo...

Is doing the most good for the most people always the right thing to do? The moral theory known as “consequentialism” holds that our decisions should be guided by their outcomes. U...