In 2000, when the distinguished American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine died at the age of 94, The Times of London published a respectful obituary. A few days later, one of the paper's own column...

This week we meet one of the all-time philosophical heavyweights: Socrates.

Franz Kafka—author of The Trial, in which a man is unjustly accused and tried, and Metamorphosis, in which a man becomes a giant insect—is perhaps the modernist author most often discussed by philosop...

Last week, we heard Plato's dialogue, 'The Euthyphro', in which Plato's great teacher, Socrates, explores (with the slightly befuddled fellow Athenian who gives the dialogue its title) the question of...

A few weeks ago, ABC TV ran a series - part documentary, part drama - about what volcanoes (and in particular the supervolcano under Yellowstone Park in the US) might do to us at some point in the fut...

This week, The Philosopher's Zone goes back to basics and asks what sort of thing philosophy really is. If you were going to produce a caricature of a philosopher, you might have somebody saying somet...

In 2000, when the distinguished American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine died at the age of 94, The Times of London published a respectful obituary. A few days later, one of the paper's own column...

In Easter week we examine a seasonal topic: contrition and apology. After Judas had betrayed Jesus, could he have known enough about the extent of guilt to be capable of adequate contrition? Do you need to feel contrite for your apology to have meaning? Do you, indeed, need to feel anything at all? And what about apologising for something that happened in the distant past, for which the community of which you are now a member was responsible, but in which you took no part?

This week, The Philosopher's Zone goes back to basics and asks what sort of thing philosophy really is. If you were going to produce a caricature of a philosopher, you might have somebody saying somet...

We have seen a huge public humanitarian response after the Asian tsunami, but was it too much? Should we be less emotional and more calculating in our compassion, carefully apportioning aid according ...

On this Philosopher’s Zone we’re looking at agents. Not secret agents but rather public agents: an agent is just somebody who does something for a purpose and an agent is distinguished from a patient....

You can be a biologist without reading Darwin and you can be a physicist without knowing anything about the works of Newton, but philosophers are still reading Plato, Descartes and Kant: people who di...