“Avatar” was bumped off screens in China by a state-sponsored biopic on Confucius. We look at his teachings — and the rise of Confucianism in China today.

Bonuses, the American financial system, and what’s just. We’ll talk about justice with political philosopher Michael Sandel.

Nobel Prize-winning philosopher and economist Amartya Sen on a new theory of social justice.

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips explains how kindness went out of fashion, and why we need it more than ever.

Filmmaker Astra Taylor got some of today’s top philosophers out of their ivory towers and onto the streets — and asked for their bottom line on life.

Heavens and Hells and more – a top neuroscientist offers forty ways to imagine the afterlife.

Descartes said “I think, therefore I am.” Bestseller Russell Shorto reminds us it’s more complicated than that, in his new tale of faith, reason, and “Descartes’ Bones.”

Philosopher Susan Neiman gets back to basics in her new book “Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists.”

Forty years after Robert Pirsig began the journey that became “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” we retrace his tracks and his philosophy of life.

Man walks into a restaurant and asks: “How do you prepare your chickens?” And the cook responds: “Nothing special really. We just tell them they’re gonna die.” Bada boom. The human condition in a two-line joke about chickens.
Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein see philosophy today all over the world of humor. A world where Woody [...]

Twenty years ago, Chicago’s Allan Bloom made a bestselling splash with his book “The Closing of the American Mind,” arguing that American universities had walked away from the Western classics and dumbed down American higher education.
Now, former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman arrives to say that door is nearly shut. In his new book, [...]