Life and death: they’re opposites. But each one can be defined by the other. That means death shapes life. But how? When things go well, death shapes life from the background of our awareness. This fact has profound consequences for every facet of life: politics and governance, interpersonal relationships, and all forms of human consciousness.

This article defends the compatibility of evolutionary theory and religious belief against the objection that God could not have intentionally brought humans into existence given that the evolutionary process by which humans came into existence crucially involves random genetic mutation. The thought behind the objection is that a process cannot be both random and intended by God to unfold as it does.

Philosophical writing always already entails poetics and rhetoric, even if the convention has been to try to reduce these dimensions in the effort to enhance the logic and clarity of an argument. Humans rely on aesthetics and narrative, to make themselves understood and to persuade and influence. A heightened awareness and more extensive use of these dimensions in philosophical and scientific writing could help facilitate deeper and more experiential ways for readers to engage with theoretical ideas, including the reductive theory of personal identity, as represented by Derek Parfit (which may have little psychological traction when presented in conventional scientific and philosophical discourses, which strive to be purely rational), and help release their emancipatory and consolatory potential.

Kerala, a state in southern India, represents a success story for women in terms of both education and social justice. What lessons can we learn from Kerala? It seems the distinctive local culture may have played an important role. This chapter explores the lessons of Kerala from a philosophical perspective, drawing on philosophers Sen, Nussbaum, Chen, and others.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy has been hugely influential but can be difficult to understand. He has a radical approach to philosophy. Most philosophers think that questions such as ‘How can I know there is an external world?’ or ‘How is my private inner world of thought and experience related to my body?’ raise genuine puzzles requiring solutions. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, takes such questions to result from linguistic confusion and a scientistic approach to philosophy. Such questions require, not answers, but conceptual elucidation. This article introduces Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.

Is travel to the past possible or does it harbour some hidden contradiction? It seems that if time travel is possible, a man could travel back in time and kill his grandfather before his father was conceived. Yet this is impossible. This conundrum has become known as the Grandfather Paradox. Some philosophers have attempted to defuse the paradox, and yet others have argued that the standard resolution of the paradox is open to a charge of incoherence. I argue that this charge is ungrounded.

The placebo effect is a genuine psychobiological phenomenon in which the expectation of improvement can lead to actual changes, including alterations in perception, behaviour and physiological responses. This article explores this phenomenon by dispelling common misconceptions and highlighting its significance for critical thinking.

This article presents a short account of the practice of vice-charging within the domain of vice epistemology. It briefly examines two pervasive epistemic vices – closed-mindedness and insouciance – and then explores some of the issues surrounding when and how to go about charging others with an epistemic vice.

In this short piece, I invite readers to think about whether expertise is something as real as trees and mountains, or whether it is our own creation as a society. I discuss the challenges that a purely social view of expertise raises: inconsistent relativism, contradictions, frauds, epistemic and social anarchy. As a way out of these difficulties, I suggest that we must opt for an objective take on expertise. Of course, possessing expertise is relative in the sense that it is a consistent relational property between various levels of expertise. However, this relation is ‘objective’. It is an ‘objective relational property’. Taking this realist view on expertise can shed light on some difficulties, such as the expertise status of Newton in comparison to contemporary physicists and the English proficiency of native English speakers compared to monolingual non-English speakers.

An exploration of the ethical issues surrounding assisted dying, in the form of a dialogue.

One set of policies that have been suggested to address climate change are carbon prices. Pricing carbon makes it more expensive to make polluting or unsustainable choices and less expensive to make cleaner or sustainable choices. This article explains why, if well designed, carbon prices can provide systematic signals to the market and make societies fairer. The article also defends carbon prices from several objections.