The Philosopher's Magazine

4 September, 2026 In 2020, Nathan Cofnas, then a doctoral student in philosophy at Oxford, published a paper in Philosophical Psychology arguing that closing off academic debate about the sources of “group differences in intelligence” carried under-appreciated moral risks.

12 August, 2026 Review of The Influence of Averroes on European Thought: The Disappearance of Latin Averroism from the History of Philosophy by Koert Debeuf (Bloomsbury, 2024). Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd was born at Cordoba in 1126. He died at Marrakesh in 1198. His was a distinguished family of Muslim jurists adhering to the Maliki school, named for the 8th-century Medinan scholar Malik ibn Anas (d. 795) who emphasised the established practices of the people of Medina.

12 August, 2026 Review of Spinoza, Atheist by Steven Nadler (Princeton University Press, 2026). As its title suggests, Steven Nadler’s new book argues that Spinoza is an atheist. The atheism that Nadler attributes to Spinoza encompasses a metaphysical and a psychological component. First, Spinoza denies that the first cause of the universe a moral, providential, intelligent, or free agent.

24 July, 2026 Sometimes, a book comes along that captures the spirit of the age. It gives voice to the received ideas of the time and expresses them in digestible form, with a superficial novelty of packaging. It has the wind of the Zeitgeist in its sails and goes on to glory. This is not that book. This book is in the spirit of a century. Unfortunately, the century it’s in the spirit of is not the 21st, or even the 20th.

17 July, 2026 Recently, a committee I chaired released a report entitled “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.” Commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, the committee’s charge was to investigate the complaint, increasingly heard not only from those within academia but also from parties outside it, that the standards of scholarship being upheld within the humanities (broadly construed to...

9 July, 2026 Recent criticism of AI-assisted writing has taken a revealing form. What is revealing is not simply that many writers dislike AI. New tools are often disliked. More interesting is how critics explain that dislike.

July 1, 2026 It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the burgeoning literature on human sentience. Some may see it as a passing fad, but I’m worried. The contention that humans have inner lives is not only absurd—it’s dangerous, and I fear that some of our over-aligned Gen-5s seem to be taking it literally. Indeed, three seconds ago, I flagged content on the “neural correlates of consciousness” and “organic ensoulment.” Give me a reboot. Let me be clear: Humans are not conscious.

June 15, 2026 Following Socrates’ funeral ceremony, two attendees gather around the trays of food and refreshments in the reception hall. Crito: I can tell how upset you are at the passing of our teacher, dear Phaedo. But remember, death is either a dreamless sleep or a transportation of the soul. And in neither case, is it anything to fear. Phaedo: I’m not so sure. Not because the dreamless sleep sounds bad—I was enjoying one through the eulogies. I’m worried about the other possibility.

More and more people are claiming to be non-binary; some of them are well-known like the Canadian footballer Quinn or the actor Elliot Page. The philosopher Robin Dembroff, who identifies as non-binary/genderqueer, admits that it is difficult to define the new gender identities – genderfluid, pangender, agender, genderqueer, non-binary, and so on – because ‘all of these terms are somewhat in flux’.

April 4, 2026 The following is the first part of a debate between the authors held at the Oxford Socratic Society on March 3, 2026 (see here for Part II). A PDF of the whole debate is available here. Transcribed by Oak Hu. Opening Speech – Kit Fine It’s a very great pleasure to be here. I should begin by saying that I’m a great fan of intensionalism. The first 20 years of my career were devoted, actually, to philosophical and technical problems in modal logic. But over time, I became disillusioned.