Julian Baggini
Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.Collection: Plato
Wellbeing is a notion that entails our values about the good life, and questions of values are not ultimately scientific questions.Collection: Good Life
People should not expect the state to protect them from fraudsters. If we do, we get into the habit of neglecting our own powers of intellectual discernment.Collection: People
Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I think, a pretty worthwhile practice and it is not something you can only do if you believe you are talking to an unseen creator.Collection: Prayer
Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren't that bad and are bound to get better anyway.Collection: Challenges
Rules matter, and to be rules they need to be universal in form: always do this, never do that. But it is foolish to rule out in advance the possibility that an occasion might arise when normal rules just don't apply. Rules are not there to be broken, but sometimes break them we must.Collection: Broken
Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality.Collection: Morality
Truth and Truthfulness is an ambitious work, and its journeys into history give it a breadth unusual in these days of increased academic specialization. . . . William's book combines real history and fictional constructs to tell a revealing story that makes us reconsider the meaning of familiar concepts.Collection: Real
Untested assumptions and lazy habits of thought can be shown up, once put in a spotlight of a different hue.Collection: Lazy
Cooking can be rewarding when it is a choice and no longer the onerous duty of the housewife, and when a dishwasher can lighten the load at the other end of the process.Collection: Choices
It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.Collection: Law
Constructive complaint requires only two things: that what you are complaining about should be different, and that it can be different. It sounds simple, but too often our protests fail this test.Collection: Simple
Big sporting events and spectacles might give the national morale a shot in the arm, but they are too transient and taste-specific to stand as robust symbols of nationhood.Collection: Giving
"That which does not kill me makes me stronger" is not a law of the universe. What it can be, if we so choose, is a resolution.Collection: Law
Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.Collection: Impact
The simplest and clearest motivation for taking animal welfare seriously is the recognition that pain is in and of itself a bad thing, and that to inflict significant amounts of it unnecessarily is wrong.Collection: Pain
The supposed revelations of God to humanity through Christ, or the word of God to Mohammed through the angel Gabriel, had the power they did because they indicated new truths, new directions for followers.Collection: Angel
This is the deal: we are happy to single out people as superior just as long as they don't accept the description themselves. We want heroes and idols but we also want egalitarianism and that requires proclamations of humility from our Gods.Collection: Hero
On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.Collection: Data
To become a stoic is to endorse the truthfulness of its world view and accept its prescription for how you ought to live, not just to like how it makes you feel.Collection: Views
Too often, complaint is not about principled objection on moral grounds, but opportunistic objection on grounds of self-interest. To rectify this, we need to work on mastering the art of complaint.Collection: Art
Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging.Collection: Weather
Waiting is so unusual that many of us can't stand in a queue for 30 seconds without getting out our phones to check for messages or to Google something.Collection: Phones
True virtue would never liken its rewards to points on a loyalty card, not because it is its own reward, but because it is not something we should practice to accrue future benefits.Collection: Loyalty
Yesterday's news feeds our fear that our neighbours are more likely than not to be bad eggs: benefit fraudsters, bogus asylum seekers, paedophiles or jihadist terrorists.Collection: Eggs
If we now find ourselves looking down on the cheap and convenient, it is only because we now have better things which are affordable.Collection: Affordable
Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger.Collection: Rip
Philosophy has to be enquiring; it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.Collection: Philosophy
The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives.Collection: Philosophical
Most people believe, more or less, that the value of a human life is the same, irrespective of where on the planet it happens to find itself. But, of course, not every life has the same value for us.Collection: Believe
Looking out over the port of Dover, with the endless steam of boats coming in and out, every British citizen is reminded that belonging here has never been about blood or genes. It's simply about being at home on this discrete island and being aware of the privileges and responsibilities that brings.Collection: Home
If we find it hard to believe that winning millions might not be so lucky after all, we just don't have a good enough imagination. If I fantasise about winning the lottery, it doesn't take long before all sorts of worrisome potential consequences occur to me.Collection: Believe
Whatever the truth is about the extent to which truth is respected in the future, it is going to depend partly on what we do. More important than making predictions is doing things which help bring about this respect.Collection: Important
I am only me for practical purposes.Collection: Purpose
Nature deals the cards without thought or care, and there is no point in blaming the dealer. All we can do is make the best of the hands we have been dealt.Collection: Hands
Seek first what is true and of value, and then whatever happiness follows will be of the appropriate quantity and, more importantly, quality.Collection: Quality
Once Steve Fuller said that there is this idea that your responsibility as an intellectual is just to speak the truth as you see it. But actually, you should be more appreciative of what needs to be said. I don't think that's ever an excuse to say something you don't believe is true - but sometimes the emphasis has to be different. Well, if I'm talking to an audience of hardline atheists, I'll be trying to unsettle them a bit more, whereas, if I'm speaking to an audience of believers, I'll be giving them more of the pros of atheism. It's about having a sensitivity to context.Collection: Atheist
True humility is expressed in deeds, not words. The humble are those who truly walk the same ground as everyone else - not necessarily with grovelling, hunched backs, but certainly not lording it over others, either.Collection: Humble
True respect means taking other people's beliefs seriously and assuming they are adult and intelligent enough to be able to cope with it if you tell them, clearly and civility, why you think they are totally, utterly and disastrously wrong.Collection: Mean
Being a good neighbour is about compassion, which is as warm-blooded as justice is cool-headed.Collection: Compassion
For most people their ideal life involves an intimate relationship with another person; one which often has a sexual basis. But there's no logic about it; why shouldn't people choose to live together with someone they just like? 'Of course' if we were too unquestioning about it, and we said 'well, that person has got to be someone of the opposite sex, and it's got to be for life, and divorce is terrible', then we're stuck. But if you don't recognize the importance that kind of bond has for human beings - you can't really understand what is needed to live a good life.Collection: Good Life
It's not leftovers that are wasteful, but those who either don't know what to do with them or can't be bothered.Collection: Leftovers
Any celebration meal to which guests are invited, be they family or friends, should be an occasion for generous hospitality.Collection: Meals
I just think that the skepticism about truth has almost completely flipped - from being something associated with generally left-leaning progressives to being something which is a tool of right-wing populists and demagogues. I think a lot of those people writing books ten years ago would now think those books are no longer needed, they've kind of been vindicated.Collection: Book
It is often said that having gone through any kind of suffering tends to makes you appreciate life more and live more in the present. I'm not sure how universal or long-lasting these effects really are.Collection: Long
I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere.Collection: Growing Up
I think that a lot of social movements, political movements, powerful ones - certainly they form, collectively, an idea of the truth which becomes hard to question. It becomes a dogma, and from the inside it starts to look like common sense.Collection: Powerful
The idea that the mind can extend even beyond the body is an intriguing one, and is bound to become more pressing as we increasingly develop technologies that augment our natural abilities.Collection: Technology
You should protest about the views of people you disagree with over major moral issues, and argue them down, but you should not try to silence them, however repugnant you find them. That is the bitter pill free speech requires us to swallow.Collection: Views