Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek (August 19, 1921 - October 24, 1991). (more...)

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) was a British philosopher, primarily concerned with the nature of the mind and the role of philosophy in the world. (more...)

Hermann Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’ is probably his greatest novel, his deepest, most intriguing, most hackerish in spirit. It combines a theory of history and education with lessons in Zen, meditations on the enduring power of institutions, friendship, duty and excellence. (more...)

Happiness researchers are faced with the question how to reliably measure happiness in surveys. A paper by Kahneman discusses Direct Utility Measurements, the Experience Sampling Method and the Day Reconstruction Method as three approaches that allow us to measure how particular activities contribute to changes of happiness throughout a person’s day. (more...)

Happiness researchers are often required to determine the level of happiness of a population in order to evaluate policies that might affect it. One way to determine population happiness is through surveys. In this post, we discuss some points that one must keep in mind when designing a happiness survey. (more...)

Can we be mistaken about our own happiness? Proponents of subjective happiness measures would say no: one is as happy as one feels. Proponents of objective happiness would try to measure happiness “objectively” and could thus show that one is mistaken about one’s own happiness. (more...)

A core feature of Kant’s ethics is his insistence on the value of one’s motivation for the morality of an action. As opposed to utilitarianism, Kant does not look at the consequences when judging actions, but only at what he calls the “good will.” (more...)

Surveillance, instead of forcing citizens to behave more ethically, in reality undermines the essence of morality. According to Immanuel Kant as well as the Bible, the free human choice is the basis for all moral behaviour. (more...)

Aristotle distinguishes four causes which determine the nature and purpose of every thing: the “material”, the “formal”, the “efficient” and the “final” or “teleological” causes. (more...)

The mission of Daily Philosophy and who we are (more...)