Philosophy & Law

It hardly needs to be said that all is not well with our world. We are disempowered, isolated and (quite rationally) anxious about the future. The animal world offers both an escape and the promise of...

The voice, the face and the gaze, all crucial to our ‘being with others’, are ‘disrupted and distorted’ by chatbots, artificial intelligence, eye tracking, iris scanning, facial coding and all...

Weber insists that everything remain in its rightful place. Politicians should stick to politics, and scientists to science. Religion should vacate public life, except as an inner psychological ‘vocation’...

Macaulay seems to have belonged to what revisionist historians now refer to as the Christian Enlightenment, a movement that stood apart from the more familiar Enlightenment of sceptical or deistic philosophes....

Only the Greek junta in 1969 and Russia last year have left the European Convention on Human Rights – Russia went shortly before it was to be expelled for invading Ukraine. No democratic country has...

J.L. Austin was fascinated by many details of language for their own sake, and in 1947 brought together a group of philosophy dons, mostly younger than himself, to pursue these investigations collectively....

There are good reasons why some progressives tolerated racial affirmative action without feeling much enthusiasm for it, or are even quietly pleased that it has ended, hopeful that something better, more...

St Francis wrote poetry, tamed a wolf, received the stigmata on a mountainside, and if you love a kitsch Nativity figurine, you have St Francis to thank. He was a poor scribe and a worse artist, but great...

Both sides of Edward Coke’s reputation have endured. Not long ago the benchers of the Inner Temple refused to name a new building after him because of his brutal prosecution of Walter Raleigh. Yet Coke’s...

The unionist fondness for Union Jacks does not preclude violent resistance to the British state when its policy conflicts with the interests of Protestant Ulster. Under the auspices of the Ulster Covenant...

The question that motivates Matthew McNaught’s Immanuel is simple, but hard to answer. What prompted these white, Middle England Christians to leave their homes and families to join a church, the central...

Most of us would find it horrible to be told that we aren’t worth engaging with, that our views are socially unacceptable or merely a function of demography. But that it is painful to be on the receiving...

Research into intellectual auxiliaries has thrived in recent years. Translators, interpreters, secretaries and amanuenses are no longer considered intermediaries, but contributors in their own right. Martin...

‘Thirty years had passed since I last interviewed Sharon Henderson. In 1992 I was sent to her flat on the Wear Garth estate in Sunderland after her seven-year-old daughter, Nikki, was murdered. The following...

Epictetus presents a version of Stoicism that often aligns with traditional Roman social norms, even if his expression of those ideals is often wonderfully vigorous. ‘I’ll cut off your head,’ a tyrant...

Many white Southerners adopted their own equation of the era of the civil rights movement with Reconstruction, warning that federal civil rights legislation violated local freedom. Despite the courage...

Derek Parfit’s approach isn’t designed to get us to appreciate the mysterious, awe-inspiring significance of procreation and death in human life; it is simply the springboard for a new puzzle in moral...

A general rule about rules is that one rule breeds another rule developed to catch an exception to the first rule, and so (potentially) ad infinitum, until there are so many darn rules that nobody can...