The British philosopher Galen Strawson doesn't think much of free will. His argument is fairly straightforward. It goes something like this: I do what I do because of the way I am. If I want to eat ...

Saving God and Surviving Death: Mark Johnston has gone for the double, and I’m tempted to think he has succeeded, on his own terms, many of which seem about as good as terms get in this strange part ...

Consciousness is all the rage just now. It boasts new journals of its very own, from which learned articles overflow. Neuropsychologists snap its picture (in colour) with fMRI machines, and probe with ...

A number of people have expressed puzzlement about the title of my poem ‘After Flaubert’ (LRB, 8 March). I shouldn’t have omitted the epigraph, a deeply characteristic comment from Flaubert’s letters ...

In his review of Jonathan Glover’s and Alan Donagan’s books, David Pears claims that ‘if … the philosophical analysis of human agency has altered our view of our place in the world as human agents, it ...

I’m not sure why Jonathan Parry’s reference to Lord Northcliffe’s appointment as ‘director of propaganda in Enemy Countries’ led me to look up ‘propaganda’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it ...

According to Peter Green’s Homer, quoted by Colin Burrow, Achilles’ spear ‘stuck in the ground, after breaking through both layers of [Aeneas’] sheltering shield’ (LRB, 18 June). I take it that the ...