The 1990's über conspiracy-theory television series The X-Files was a decade-defining and culture-reflecting mosh pit of UFOs, extraterrestrials, psychics, demons, monsters, mutants, shape-shifters, serial killers, paranormal phenomena, urban legends turned real, corporate cabals and government cover-ups, and leakages unveiled by a deep-throat-like ‘cigarette smoking man’ character played, ironically, by real-life skeptic William B. Davis. Gillian Anderson's skeptical FBI agent Dana Scully played off David Duchovny's believing character Fox Mulder, whose slogans became posterized pop-culture catch-phrases ‘I want to believe’ and ‘The truth is out there’.

Mathematics has been the most successful and is the most mature of the sciences. Its first great master work – Euclid's ‘Elements’ – which helped to establish the field and demonstrate the power of its methods, was written about 2400 years ago; and it served as a standard text in the mathematics curriculum well into the twentieth century. By contrast, the first comparable master work of physics – Newton's Principia – was written 300 odd years ago. And the juvenile science of biology only got its first master work – Darwin's ‘On the Origin of Species’ – a mere 150 years ago. The development of the subject has also been extraordinarily fertile, particularly in the last three centuries, and it is perhaps only in the last century that the other sciences have begun to approach mathematics in the steady accumulation of knowledge that it has been able to offer. There has, moreover, been almost universal agreement on its methods and how they are to be applied. What we require is proof; and, in practice, there is very little disagreement over whether or not we have it. The other sciences, by contrast, tend to get mired in controversy over the significance of this or that experimental finding or over whether one theory is to be preferred to another.

Some people hope to die in their sleep. Not me. I don't regret having been oblivious at my birth, but I don't want death to catch me napping.

According to some, questions about the meaning of life are inextricably bound up with questions about God and religion. Without God, it is suggested, humanity amounts to little more than a dirty smudge on a ball of rock lost in an incomprehensively vast universe that will eventually bare no trace of us having ever existed, and which will itself collapse into nothingness. So why bother getting out of bed in the morning? If there is a God, on the other hand, then we inhabit a universe made for us, by a God who loves us, and who has given us a divine purpose. That fills our lives meaning.

Philosophers typically distinguish between a priori and a posteriori beliefs, knowledge, justification, and propositions. A belief is a priori if it is derived from reason, and it is a posteriori if it is derived from sense experience. Similarly, we would say that we know a priori that ‘a closed, n-sided figure has n interior angles’ because our knowledge is derived from reason in that we understand the concept of a closed, n-sided figure and thus know the statement is true. On the other hand, we know a posteriori that ‘Americans drive on the right’ because in justifying this belief, we appeal to sense experience; perhaps we have seen for ourselves that Americans drive on the right or we've read about it in a book or seen it in a movie.

This is an introduction to some questions about the truth or falsehood of pairs of sentences. Truth is, of course, something philosophers have always been interested in. Finding out the truth can be difficult, but it's usually been thought that truth itself behaves in a very simple way. In particular, every statement is either true or false, and no statement can be both at once.

This paper articulates and defends two theses due to Richard Paul and Linda Elder. First, creative thought and critical thought cannot be separated. Second, the intellectual traits constitutive of critical thinking are interdependent. The twin theses combined with certain impact studies show that study abroad enhances both creativity and criticality. The primary value of such gains resides in their potential to realize not only the Socratic ideal of rationality but also the Diogenean ideal of cosmopolitanism. The former consists in the cultivation of fair-minded, creative, and critical individuals and societies, whereas the latter consists in the cultivation of citizens of the world and the single community to which they belong. Since study abroad can lead to intellectual growth in participants, this paper recommends certain policies and practices to help ensure the desired gain.

My impression is that the fire-breathing atheists about whom we hear so much – the celebrated quartet of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Dan Dennett – think of religious commitments in terms of mistaken or at least hopelessly improbable and therefore irrational ontology. Believers think that something exists, but the overwhelmingly probable truth is that it does not. I may be wrong that this is what they think, but whether they do so or not, I am sure others do. Yet this interpretation of the issue is itself mistaken, and indeed doubly so. It is mistaken, or perhaps it would be better to say unimaginative or off-key to think of religious frames of mind primarily in terms of belief. And it is similarly misdirected to think that the belief component primarily concerns the existence of anything. I read both these insights into Hume's celebrated works on the philosophy of religion, but their lesson seems never to have been properly absorbed. Even Wittgenstein, I think, although he came close and certainly flirted with more adequate views, failed to take their measure properly, although I will be unable to substantiate that opinion here.

Compassion (or ‘feeling with’) has attracted fervent admiration and vehement condemnation. Among the critics are some Stoics and early Christians, and early modern philosophers such as Kant and Spinoza. Characteristics that are regarded as ideal in humans tend to be regarded as divine perfections as well. Accordingly, traditional Christian and Jewish theology includes the belief that God is ‘impassible’, that is, both emotionless (in general) and incapable of suffering (in particular). Divine compassion is precluded on both grounds.

In his immensely popular L’Irréligion de L'Avenir (The Non-Religion of the Future) J.M. Guyau showed that the soul has been invoked to account (among other things) for the difference between the living and the dead and for dreams. The breath, he said, was the most tangible thing, other than the blood, with which life could be definitely associated. It could even be heard leaving the body at the last gasp. It seems to be immaterial and invisible, so that it is not surprising that in many languages words for soul or spirit are derived from words meaning the breath or the wind. As for dreams, Guyau pointed out that the dreamer experiences adventures, yet is assured by his companions that he did not leave the room or the tent at all during the night, and that this could be explained by supposing that there is a soul that can leave the body, roam the country, and then return to its normal corporeal abode. In dreams one not only goes on adventures, but also meets friends and talks with them, yet thereafter they know nothing of the meeting. Some semblance of them had therefore been separated from their bodies without their knowledge. Sometimes these simulacra belong to the dead and must therefore represent some portion of those persons that survived death.

This essay defends the idea of drawing a distinction between two modes of not being religious today: between what I will call atheist disbelief, on the one hand, and a-theist non-belief on the other. The former is the mode which is most often in the news. It is the position that pitches itself against religion. The latter is perhaps easily confused with agnosticism as that is popularly understood. Agnosticism in this sense is a position in which you declare yourself undecided or unsure: one is not sufficiently convinced that God does not exist to affirm a full-blooded atheism, but equally, spiritual conceptions, for example as determined by the Christian Churches, do not persuade you either. The situation as regards what I am calling a-theist non-belief is different again: it is not so much a ‘position’ at all as a non-religious ‘habitus’: the understanding of the world and the significance of your life that characterises the a-theist life is one in which religion and religious beliefs, for the most part, just do not figure or play a part. The a-theist does not have positional stance towards religious beliefs – namely a stance of disbelief – but rather, for the most part, simply has no thoughts about God. While not agnostic, the a-theist resembles the agnostic is this respect: conceptually speaking the a-theist is no closer to atheism than he or she is to religious faith. In my view, while the a-theist habitus is incredibly widespread today it is nevertheless typically overlooked in discussions of contemporary faith and atheism. Perhaps this is because it seems so comparatively unreflective and uncommitted. Nevertheless, I will champion it in this essay.

For many contemporary atheists a significant justification for their belief is the claim that there is no evidence for the existence of God. They compare the lack of evidence for God to the lack of evidence for such beings as leprechauns and goblins. And they point out that for belief in the non-existence of alleged entities such as these it is not necessary to prove the negative, which would not be possible, but it is sufficient to show that after due scrutiny there is a lack of affirmative evidence. We reasonably believe, they argue, that there are no such beings as leprechauns and goblins not because we have found proof that they do not exist but simply because we have found no evidence to suggest that they do exist. And similarly in the case of the existence of God.

Almost without exception, those in the West who think that homosexual behavior is morally wrong are Christians (the belief that all homosexual behavior is wrong is also common among the devotees of other Abrahamic religions, e.g. Islam, and perhaps among other cultural groups elsewhere in the world). But is it true that, assuming a traditional Christian worldview, there are strong reasons to think that all homosexual behavior is morally wrong? Traditionally, Christians have appealed to three independent sources to justify any given belief: church tradition, scripture, and reason. If a Christian is justified in believing that homosexual behavior is morally wrong, his reasons must appeal one of these three sources. As it turns out, however, this is a difficult trick to turn. None of these sources provides a clear reason to think that homosexual behavior is morally wrong, and at least one of them provides a clear reason for thinking that, in at least some cases, it is morally permissible.

Recently, I wandered into a substantial research library in downtown Sydney – the State Library of New South Wales. A moment prior, I had been evading cars, listening unwillingly to city noises. The next moment, I was inside the library: elegance, peace, stillness – books enveloping me. The library's reading room: an imposing collection, especially of non-fiction. So I sat; I pondered; and I raised my eyes to the surrounding walls of books. Calmness for a while; until suddenly I was troubled. A fundamental philosophical problem about the nature of that room had crept into my mind. Here is the story of my collision with that problem – and of how I tried to resolve it.

We often judge that death is bad for the person who dies – that my death, for instance, will be bad for me when it occurs. It is not easy, however, to explain, justify, or defend this judgment. As Epicurus argued more than 2000 years ago, death is ‘nothing to us’ because ‘when we exist death is not present, and when death is present we do not exist.’ (Letter to Menoeceus, 124–125)