Could machines think? Yes, in a sense, they do already. Impressively. But could machines experience and feel? Only God knows. And perhaps that’s the point. The prayer I prayed is the prayer Claude ...

David Deutsch is a distinguished quantum physicist and a member of the Centre for Quantum Computation at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University. He has received the Paul Dirac Prize and Medal ...

Have you ever wondered whether everyone talks about you behind your back? Whether they are all keeping something from you? John McGuire discusses the Cartesian nightmare that is The Truman Show. Every ...

Emrys Westacott asks a probing question. Imagine that right after briefing Adam about which fruit was allowed and which forbidden, God had installed a closed-circuit television camera in the garden of ...

The following answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. Sorry if your answer doesn’t appear: we received enough to fill twelve pages… Why are we here? Do we serve a ...

Alexander Hooke finds hell & existentialist hope in prison. Hope helps keep us alive and anticipating the next sunrise with joy rather than gloom. It enlivens projects and maintains focus. Hope is ...

Imadaldin Al-Jubouri on the medieval Islamic philosopher who pioneered the scientific understanding of history. Some consider the Italian philosopher Vico (1668-1744) to have been the founder of ...

Stephen Leach considers what Bertrand Russell thought about common sense & reality – and how the one does not necessarily show you the other. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) believed that reality is ...

Raymond Tallis takes us from A to Zzzzz. The column you’re reading is at least in part the result of an accident – a happy one, I hasten to add. A few weeks ago, I was sitting on a panel with the ...

Hegel’s philosophy of history is most lucidly set out in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, given at the University of Berlin in 1822, 1828 and 1830. In his introduction to those ...

Christopher Norris presents a case for the defence. Stephen Hawking recently fluttered the academic dovecotes by writing in his new book The Grand Design – and repeating to an eager company of ...

Gisle Tangenes describes the life and ideas of a cheerfully pessimistic, mountain-climbing Norwegian existentialist. “This world,” mused Horace Walpole, “is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to ...