The Platform of the U.S. Republican Party in 2012 contains a promise to overturn the landmark Supreme Court decision, Roe. v. Wade, that laws prohibiting abortion are incompatible with the constitutional right to privacy of pregnant women. The Republican vice presidential nominee, Congressman Paul Ryan, opposes that decision as a matter of conviction. Congressman Ryan says that human life begins at conception, though he adds that abortion should be legal if a woman's pregnancy results from rape or incest, or if the life of the mother is at stake. Despite his reputation among Republicans as an astute thinker, Congressman Ryan's reasoning about abortion is faulty.

Does life have meaning? Less grandly, does your life have meaning? Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and author of the classic Man's Search for Meaning (1959), thought that the quest for meaning is the strongest drive humans possess. Without a clear sense of meaning, he said, we drift, lose vitality, and frequently fall into apathy, neurosis, and despair. Yet for many people today, sources of meaning are hard to find.

Some religious believers have defended themselves from philosophical criticism by arguing that religion, properly understood, makes no ontological claims: they are referred to here, for short, as ‘NOC-believers’. In order to make sense of the position of NOC-believers, the article discusses the different senses in which children and adults might plausibly claim to believe in Santa Claus. An adult might believe in Santa, in the sense of choosing to engage in a particular social practice; likewise, the NOC-believer chooses to take part in the social practices of prayer and worship. The comparison is used as a basis for illustrating some of the difficulties with the NOC-believer's position.

The conception of knowledge that human beings have – what knowledge is, how we get it, and how we can be sure it is knowledge – is something that has always been changing. It changes historically, and it changes in the personal life of each one of us. It is changing even as I write, and will continue to change.

William Lane Craig is a prolific Christian apologist who has written many articles and popular books on the mainly philosophical arguments for God's existence, and is famed for his debating, and his engaging with the public. His work with philosophical arguments is significant, as there is no confirmed empirical evidence for the existence of God, nor can there be any good historical evidence; sound historical methodology necessarily being dismissive of supernatural claims. Craig has formulated a number of arguments that he presents in a clear and accessible cumulative case.

Some people think that numbers and other mathematical entities exist. They believe in a platonic heaven of ideal mathematical objects, as some (other) people like to put it. This may seem a very strange thing to believe in: after all, we cannot see numbers, nor touch them, nor smell them. So why should one believe that they exist? Because, as Putnam and Quine used to say, numbers are indispensable to science: it seems almost impossible to state our best scientific theories without mentioning numbers or other mathematical objects.

In the closing chapters of Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke makes what seems to be an astounding error. What it is and why he appears to do it provides the meat of the tenth Conversation between John Locke and Terence Moore.

This article develops a conception of free will as a type of skill based upon the knowledgeable exercise of cognitive abilities. Critiques of some traditional accounts of free will are advanced; and a view is proposed in which acts of free will are those purposively controlled (caused) by acquired information and the learned ‘know-how’ of deliberation. What makes an act of will free is not that one theoretically could have done otherwise under the specific circumstances, but that one does in fact do otherwise than act in an uninformed, unreflective and thoughtless manner. Implications for moral responsibility are examined.

There are good reasons to think that mothers love their children, and love them for who they are. There are also good reasons to think that contingent events can decisively influence who one becomes. This entails, I argue, that your mother does not love you for who you are.

Philosophy's role is typically a reflective one. Yet this stance is in peril of being corrupted. Because it is being driven to specialized inquiries, the subdisciplines of which it is comprised may develop into separate fields, whose presence will then need to be justified in the same way the sciences are. This is impossible, however, given their diverging objectives. If this course of action persist, philosophy's end in the sense of its ending is imminent, on account of its no longer having an end in the sense of its objective.