Julian Baggini

“It’s not good enough to say there’s some mechanism such that you start out with amoebas and you end up with us. Everybody agrees with that. The question is in this case in the mechanical details. What you need is an account, as it were step by step, about what the constraints are, what the environmental variables are, and Darwin doesn’t give you that.”

This book collects together, for the first time in one volume, all of the major writings on religion by Britain's great 18th-century philosopher, David Hume.

I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.

“Socrates spent many of his prime years fighting the most vicious, pitiless wars. I think that has a huge impact. I wonder if his central interest in the good is because actually he saw a lot that was very bad all around him.”

If you’re thinking ethically you ought to try to take the point of view from which you consider whether you could prescribe the action if you were in the position of all of those affected by it. I think that if you consider the situation of poverty and affluence, if you were really to put yourself in the position of the poor person and the affluent person, and ask yourself whether you could support the view that the affluent person doesn’t give anything to the poor, you couldn’t.

An entertaining and thought-provoking look at the food on our plates, and what it can teach us about being human, from the author of The Pig That Want's to be Eaten.

It was only after the liberation in 1945 that we started to reflect and revive again our traditional philosophy. But for a long time it was neglected. Many of our universities did not teach oriental philosophy or Korean philosophy at all. We learned Heiddegger, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant.