My name is Zach Barnett. Can machines think? Until what happened today, I thought that no human-made machine could ever think as a human does. I now know that I was wrong.

We're back! Actually, we've never been away, so what I really mean is that my fellow zombies and I are, I hope, about to announce to the world that we're here! It's true I haven't yet asked anyone else to agree to expose themselves as I am now doing, but I'm hoping that my own public outing will encourage, or perhaps even shame others to come forward and join me.

A common answer to the title question is: being highly competent in a wide range of academic disciplines, as shown by having a large number of good exam results. Is this acceptable?

It is impolite to discuss matters of religion or politics in mixed company. So goes the popular adage which all of us were supposed to have learned as children from our mothers. Let's call it Mom's Maxim. We tend to accept Mom's Maxim. But is it philosophically sound? In this short essay, we raise some objections to Mom's Maxim and make a case for an alternative which we call Mill's Principle.

Sometimes, when I go to dinner parties organized by my partner, people ask me what I do, and I say that I'm a philosopher. But when I fumble at their questions about ‘my philosophy’, my partner will describe what I do by saying, ‘He uses big words to explain little words.’ Although this is meant tongue in cheek, it's basically right. My philosophical research is mainly in metaethics and the philosophy of language with a focus on the semantics of moral words. This means, for better or worse, that I use big words to explain little words.

Most advice for sharpening our thinking skills concerns how to avoid bad arguments. But argument is only one of the two basic forms of reasoning. The other is explanation, and it is equally susceptible to abuse. You may already be familiar with certain forms of explanatory malfeasance. One of the best known is circular explanation, in which the stated cause is just a different way of describing the effect. (Why did we lose the match? Because our opponents scored more goals.) Here I'd like to introduce you to a less appreciated error of explanation. To my knowledge it has no widely accepted name, but I call it ‘the convincing explanation’.

Hell is other people. This miserable-sounding soundbite, the moment of revelation in Jean-Paul Sartre's shortest play, must be the most quoted line of twentieth-century philosophy. Not even Jacques Derrida's claim that ‘there is nothing beyond the text’, fondly cherished in some regions of academia, has anything like the cultural reach of what is often taken to be the quintessential Sartrean slogan. And the analytic tradition hardly abounds in snappy lines: meaning just ain't in the head, to be is to be the value of a variable, and that's about it. You'll not sell many of those t-shirts. Part of the appeal of Sartre's slogan lies, of course, in the fact that we all regularly annoy each other. We think we can see better ways of doing what only other people have the power to do. Your schemes can clash with mine in ways that prevent me from achieving my goals and living my dreams. People can look down on me. Other people can and do thwart, defeat, constrain, disappoint, irritate, and distort us. When we dwell on all this at the expense of the love, inspiration, fun, co-operation, respect, and decency that characterise much of our social interaction, then we find Sartre's slogan neatly encapsulates our mood. Its wit helps us put the melancholia in perspective as we express it. We get it off our chest.

Stephen Hawking recently caused controversy by suggesting that philosophy had become obsolete in the face of the advance of modern science. Hawking's The Grand Design is only the latest in a long series of premature notifications of the obsolescence of philosophy. A wide range of writers, including but not limited to scientists and philosophers, have suggested that philosophy, in part or in whole, has been superseded by the sciences in a way that, all things considered, justifies its abandonment. Some forty years ago, E.O. Wilson suggested that the province of ethics should be turned over to biology, forty years before that the logical positivists had drawn up plans for the formation of a ‘scientific philosophy’, and before that, in the nineteenth century, Comte had identified philosophy as the mere precursor to a modern, ‘positive’ stage of human culture. The list of examples could be extended, a fact which prompts the point that, if philosophy is dying, then it is putting up quite a fight.

People prefer certainty. There's a psychological need to explain events or phenomena rather than accept one's ignorance, to say ‘I don't know’ when faced with insufficient evidence.

It is no longer socially-acceptable to exhibit prejudice against ethnic minority people on grounds of their ethnicity, women on grounds of their gender, or working-class people on grounds of their class. The last bastions of discrimination are being overcome: such as prejudice against gay and lesbian people, and against disabled people. …Or, is there one more, crucial bastion of discrimination still strongly in place?

If emotions such as sympathy are to play the role Oatley envisages for them, they cannot be condescending; they must be based on some real understanding. This is an essay about the difficulty of understanding, and, consequently, the difficulty of sympathy. So, it is a challenge to any philosopher who seeks to understand morality by assigning a strong role to the emotions.

Osama bin Laden means well. This is evident from his declarations, juridical decrees, lectures, epistles, and written reminders, which Bruce Lawrence has made available in Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden (2005; hereafter referred to by the page numbers in parentheses) a single volume. Duty, Osama claims, compels Muslims' support for jihad against the ‘Crusader–Jewish Alliance’ (7, 23). But many attack his goals and behavior as immoral. Initiatives he has supported or directed represent his strategy for fulfilling his duty and demonstrate its apparent immorality at the same time: notably, attacks on U.S. embassies, the 9/11 attacks, and more recently an alleged plot to detonate hydrogen peroxide bombs in public transportation venues. Moreover, his willingness to kill innocents generally is self-evidently wrong, as is his blanket hatred of Jews, Americans, and Christians (56, 87); although on one occasion he has declared that ‘many in the West are polite and good people’ (142).

In this essay, I want to provide an introduction to Aristotle's theory of the Greek Tragedy, which he outlines in his book, the Poetics. Many philosophers since Aristotle, including Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin, have analysed tragic art and developed their own theories of how it works and what it is for. What makes Aristotle's theory interesting is that it is as relevant to art today as it was in Ancient Greece because it explains the features of not just tragic art, but of the films and stories that we enjoy today. I will explain the features that Aristotle says make a good tragic play and give examples of them from popular culture. The examples I give will be from tragedy, but also from romance, crime and fantasy to demonstrate how he has outlined, not just the features of Greek Tragedy, but also the internal workings of the drama that we enjoy today. The contemporary relevance of Aristotle's theory is in the fact that the features he outlines are basic features of great stories, which I think is best illustrated by applying Aristotle's analysis to popular Hollywood movies.

A man fires a gun several times at the side of a barn and then draws a circle around a cluster of most of the bullet holes. Drawing a target retrospectively like this doesn't prove the shooting skills of the gunman – no one would consider him a sharpshooter if they knew what he'd done. When the equivalent of this happens in other circumstances we call it the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. As with many fallacies, it may not appear fallacious at first inspection.

Many people claim that you can't prove or disprove God's existence. But why would anybody think you could? What's such a proof or disproof supposed to look like?

Many societies are now characterized by much more informality than they were before. One manifestation of this is that whereas children would previously address adults more deferentially (as Mr or Mrs Bloggs, for example), they are now much more likely to call (some) adults by their first names. The same is true of younger adults addressing considerably older adults. Is this greater familiarity acceptable or should it be avoided?

Philosophers have been known to sometimes conjure up world-views which seem dazzlingly at odds with our everyday take on the world. Among the more, if not most drastic ‘-isms’ to be found in the history of philosophy, then, is the standpoint of solipsism, derived from the Latin words ‘solus’ (alone) and ‘ipse’ (self). What is that supposed to mean? It adopts a position that only acknowledges the existence of one's very own mind and opposes that there is anything beyond the realm of my mind that could be known. What a drastic contradiction to the way we normally view the world, indeed. Allow me to emphasize some implications that would arise were one really to take the solipsist view for granted. The aim is to briefly adumbrate how a solipsist view would cut us off from the social world and from the existential dimension of our own death.