The late Robert Nozick once expressed puzzlement that works of philosophy are written "as if their authors believe them to be the absolutely final word on their subject". If sociologists are more modest than philosophers, there is none more so than Zygmunt Bauman, and his words are so far from final that, by the time you have finished his latest book, the next is already going to press. Bauman's hope [...]

At the outbreak of the Second World War, David Niven abandoned his newly acquired Hollywood stardom to return home and volunteer for the war effort. "Young man," said Winston Churchill to him one evening, "you did a very fine thing to give up a most promising career to fight for your country . . . Mark you, had you not done so it would have been despicable." According to Churchill, [...]

Colin McGinn was once introduced to the actress Jennifer Aniston at a party. Although Aniston was impressed to meet a professional philosopher, the encounter ended in embarrassment when she proved never to have heard of Kant, Descartes or Bertrand Russell. McGinn subsequently agonised over the "interpersonal discomfort" caused to the poor multimillionaire movie star.

Aniston is not the only person who has been made uncomfortable by the author of this [...]

A trip to the Imperial War Museum offers a good picture of the disparity between German and Allied arms during the Second World War. In the centre of the main hall, the hulks of the various fragile, flammable "Tommy-cooker" tanks in which the British went into battle are towered over by a V2 missile. After the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944, the American Shermans that replaced them proved just [...]

Suicide attackers are supposed to come from minorities that lack the conventional trappings of military power, such as the al-Qaeda hijacker or the Palestinian bomber, or else those who have recently lost such power and seek a last resort, such as the Japanese kamikaze. In truth, the chief exponents of suicide in battle have always been the largest and best-equipped armies. The strategy, in the form of attacks by waves [...]

Although religion has suffered one beating after another at the hands of science, mysticism survives into the current age with its respectability more or less intact. Despite the debunking of theism and the impostures of the New Age, mysticism lives on because it declines to participate in intellectual contests that it cannot win. Mysticism is expected to be silent, rather than articulate, whereas mainstream religion, with its doctrine, dogma and [...]

No one of common sense today believes in the liberal myth of the noble savage, but a belief in its conservative counterpart - the savage savage - has become a cornerstone of realism. There can be no reasoning, we are told, with those firing rocket-propelled grenades from rooftops in Mogadishu, or assault rifles from barricades in Grozny. They are the "brutes" - unworthy and incapable of the order they have [...]

Where have all the philosophers gone? Asked to name a living philosopher, most educated people in Britain might come up with Jacques Derrida. Ask them for something they know about contemporary philosophy, and they might venture the opinion that Derrida is "the one who talks nonsense". The early 20th century witnessed a bumper crop of great figures such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Less resounding [...]

Graham Greene wrote that we are wrong to think of children as simpler creatures than adults, because it is the latter whose characters grow ever less complex with age. It is small wonder, then, that children are reassured by simplicity in the outside world when there is so little of it in their own. They want stories whose titles offer literal descriptions of their contents, such as The Lord of [...]

Robert Nozick, who recently died aged 63, was one of the great philosophers of our day. In his 1974 classic, Anarchy, State and Utopia, he defended the justice of free enterprise and the sanctity of private property. The state, he argued, had no right to regulate "capitalist acts between consenting adults". And the attempt to redistribute wealth was no better than theft. To take, by force of law, Peter's earnings [...]