If a benevolent and all-powerful God exists, how can there be so much suffering? Could God have created a better world? Or is evil the price we pay for freedom of the will?

What is the best way to respond to monuments in our communities if they represent people who stood for harmful ideas and/or societal structures? I start with the assumption that it would be best for everyone if all of the harmful monuments were removed from our public squares. The more interesting question is: Why would it be best? I will examine critically two different explanations as to why it would be best: one, Plato's, which rests on the harmful non-intellectual influences of images and the other, Socrates’, which rests on the harmful intellectual influences of those images. In the end, I shall argue that Socrates got it right and Plato wrong due to the former's ability to explain human behaviour and the latter's surprising lack of that same ability, despite how widely it is believed. If the argument is correct, it will have deep and widespread implications for how we educate our children and ourselves about every important aspect of the human condition.

‘You are overthinking that!’ The article argues against the popular idea that too much of the activity of thinking is bad for individuals. Wrong thinking, I argue, is what is bad or unhealthy, irrespective of the length of time it is done for. Wrong thinking can lead to worrying, stress, and impedes practical action. But if thinking is done right, then you can't have too much of it.

Among the people who have been hailed for being particularly authentic are notorious liars. But this seems like a contradiction. Can you be authentic if you lie about what you value, believe, or feel? This brief article explores this question and the unique stances on honesty that different notions of authenticity take.

OpenAI is a research organization founded by, among others, Elon Musk, and supported by Microsoft. In November 2022, it released ChatGPT, an incredibly sophisticated chatbot, that is, a computer system with which humans can converse. The capability of this chatbot is astonishing: as well as conversing with human interlocutors, it can answer questions about history, explain almost anything you might think to ask it, and write poetry. This level of achievement has provoked interest in questions about whether a chatbot might have something similar to human intelligence and even whether one could be conscious. Given that the function of a chatbot is to process linguistic input and produce linguistic output, we consider that the most interesting question in this direction is whether a sophisticated chatbot might have inner speech. That is: might it talk to itself, internally? We explored this via a conversation with ‘Playground’, a chatbot which is very similar to ChatGPT but more flexible in certain respects. We put to it questions which, plausibly, can only be answered if one first produces some inner speech. Here, we present our findings and discuss their philosophical significance.

This short article aims to strengthen Hume's case against the rationality of believing in religious miracles by incorporating certain lessons borrowed from the growing literature on the history and psychology of magic tricks.

Griefbots are chatbots designed to assist individuals in coping with the loss of a loved one by offering a digital replica of the departed. Navigating grief is a deeply transformative and vulnerable journey intricately tied to one's well-being. Do griefbots aid in the grieving process, or do they complicate it? To address these questions, this article blends insights from philosophy and neuroscience to explore the nature of grief as a means to clarify the ethical dimensions surrounding the use of griefbots.

What is the role of intimacy in sex? The two culturally dominant views on this matter both share the implicit assumption that sex is genuinely intimate only when connected to romance, and hence that sex and intimacy stand in a contingent relationship: it is possible to have good sex without it. Liberals embrace this possibility and affirm the value of casual sex, while conservatives attempt to safeguard intimacy by insisting on romantic exclusivity. I reject their shared assumption and argue for a necessary connection between intimacy and sex, in that sexual activity as such aims at a specific form of intimacy, irrespective of whether it takes place in casual encounters or romantic relationships, and the difference between good and bad sex consists in whether this end is attained. To defend this view, I develop a general account of intimacy and apply it to isolate its specifically sexual form.

Yuval Harari believes that humans make myths, and that these can be powerful engines for social change. One of these myths, claims Harari, is the existence of ‘liberal rights’. This article challenges that claim and defends the idea of grounding rights in human nature.

What's the best way to raise good citizens – individuals who will do the right thing even in the most challenging of circumstances? I argue that philosophy has an important role to play.