Finding an adequate definition of ‘life’ has proven to be a tricky affair. In this article, I discuss the idea that nothing is really alive: we only say so. I shall argue that ‘being alive’ is not a genuine property of things, and that it only reflects the way we think and talk about things. An eliminativist strategy will then allow us to free ourselves from the burden of having to find a definition of life, and will allow us to focus on the genuinely interesting properties of living (and non-living) entities.

I consider the metaphysics of farts. I contrast the essential-bum-origin view with a phenomenological view, and I argue in favour of the latter.

I argue that there is an important emotion for which we do not have a name.

Hugh Mellor examines both the fine-tuning argument and the suggestion that this is but one of many universes within a great ‘multiverse’.

Mark Piper introduces the best-known and perhaps most powerful of all the arguments against the existence of God.

In Harrison and Tanner's (2011) ‘Better Not to Have Children’, it's argued that having children is immoral as well as detrimental to one's well-being. In this article, I argue against those claims and defend the position that, for most people, having children is morally permissible and greatly enhances their well-being.

In society, power and responsibility are often linked, supporting the idea that with great power comes great responsibility. I assert that this link between power and responsibility is a form of the Act–Omission Distinction, a principle in ethics that there is a morally relevant distinction between doing something and omitting to do something, e.g. a difference between killing someone and letting someone be killed. As such, using trolleys, elected spider-men, and real-life cases such as R v Stone & Dobinson, I contest this casual relationship between power and responsibility and argue the relationship to be correlative as both power and responsibility are often simultaneously caused by consent.

Around 1998, internet postings began appearing under the alias ‘Timetravel_0’. This alias was later replaced by ‘John Titor’, and it's as such I'll designate the posts' author(s). Remarkably, Titor claimed to have time-travelled from 2036 on a mission to retrieve an IBM 5100 in 1975. Titor refrained from public appearances and any evidence for his story remains web-bound but before closing shop c. March 24th 2001, he described various future events, e.g.:

In the second of our two articles focusing on the war in Iraq, Richard Ryder looks at a range of possible justifications, and finds them all wanting.

This article responds to Tibor Machan's criticisms of government provision for needy citizens. It argues that although charity may be morally worthy, private charity is inadequate to the task of providing our fellow citizens with the security they deserve; the tremendous social good of secure access to a life of dignity can only be produced by a public social safety net. Moreover, individual rights to property do not stand in the way of providing a public social safety net. Since there are social inputs in wealth creation, reasonable levels of taxation do not violate people's rights to their wealth.

Hempel's famous Raven Paradox derives from Nicod's criteria for confirmation and the Equivalence Condition, the unintuitive conclusion that things like white roses, green T-shirts and ice cubes confirm the raven hypothesis ‘All ravens are black.’ By a small rearrangement of the Equivalence Condition, I show that we can also derive the conclusion, which sounds even more intuitively intolerable, that observation of black ravens fails to confirm the raven hypothesis. We are left with the contradictory result that black ravens both confirm and do not confirm the raven hypothesis.

This piece considers the role of memory in personal identity, but specifically how we can choose and manipulate individual memories in order to take control of self-identity. The ideas of Locke and Ricoeur are briefly included, along with some questions about the implications of memory on identity in the age of social media.

Matthew Flannagan explains why Christians can consistently both oppose abortion and support the death penalty.

Most academics in philosophy departments accept that the discipline needs to change for the better. In this piece, Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting offer several proposals for how to make philosophy a more inclusive place for everyone.

As an evaluative view in the philosophy of life, nihilism maintains that no lives are, all things considered, worth living. Prominent defenders of the view hold that, even so, it can be all-things-considered better for us to continue living than for us to cease living, thus endorsing a ‘soft’ nihilism that appears more palatable than its ‘hard’ counterpart. In support of an intuitive assumption about what nihilism implies, I argue that soft nihilism is incoherent.

Several lines of argument are presented to support the notion that hooved animal rescue is justified, however expensive and controversial. The work of Singer and McNamee is discussed. The article concludes that various breeds have distinct arguments in their favour when it comes to rescue.