John Lachs

Drugs and alcohol involve personal habits that have significant social consequences. Some have said that we are a society of drinkers and pill takers; much...

For most of human history, killing animals presented few moral problems; they seemed made for our use. But the rapid growth and increasing dominance of human...

The beginning and ending of life are deeply controversial moral topics with enormous stakes. Most people agree that it is wrong to kill humansbut are...

Only a few hundred years ago there emerged the ideal of inalienable rights to life, liberty, property, free speech, freedom of conscience and religion, etc....

From Philo of Judea to Maimonides and beyond, Medieval Jewish philosophy created an outstanding, unbroken tradition. Jewish thinkers worked to square...

Most people think it's wrong to lie, but sometimes telling the truth seems more hurtful than lying. Secrecy protects the truth and maintains our privacy, but...

John Dewey was America's most influential philosopher. Dewey's views are known as "pragmatism," which emphasizes action and results. He believed that...

Friedrich Hegel developed a profound and influential synthesis of all prior knowledge. He aimed to make philosophy an all-comprehensive science that would...

Near the end of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche boldly announced that God is dead. There are no absolute truths, he said; the only reality is...

A Portuguese Jew living in Holland, Spinoza was excommunicated because of the unorthodox view he took of God. Spinoza wrote in the rationalist style of a...

Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher, is perhaps the best known advocate of existentialism. In this view, no external authority gives life meaning: mankind...

Immanuel Kant's "transcendental" philosophy transcends the question of what we know to ask how we know it. Before Kant, philosophers had debated for...

Few philosophers have so extensively influenced thought and language as Aristotle. His conception of the universe pervades Christian theology. Knowledge of...

Popular culture usually represents love in physical or sexual terms; our society has been ';liberated' in that premarital sex (and in some cases even...

Concern for others is the basis of human decency; without it, our communities are increasingly degraded by selfishness and corruption. Some think that crime...

China's two greatest philosophers, Confucius and Lao Tzu, were intensely interested in how we should live and how a good society is governed. The central...

Arthur Schopenhauer was the most articulate and influential pessimist in the history of human thought. He was convinced that the space and time of ordinary...

David Hume (1711-1776) represented the culmination of the British philosophy of sense-experience. Although he lived in the age of reason, Hume had profound...

India has perhaps the oldest living philosophical tradition in the world. Though both Buddhism and Jainism began in India, its primary influence is the Vedic...