Atheists should point out that life without God can be meaningful, moral and happy.

Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe that the universe is governed by benign forces, at some point you have to explain why there is so much suffering, misfortune and misery in the world.

Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

If there is an art of living, it is not something that can be taught timelessly. We have lessons to learn from Aristotle et al, for sure, but not if we simply uproot them from their epoch and stamp them into 21st-century soil.

I don't think there is ever a direct connection between the philosophical community and the wider populus. I'm very aware of this because I've been working on a book on ideas in global philosophy and you always find some kind of relation between the dominant philosophies in a culture and the folk philosophy but it's not a straight-down dissemination. It's partly bottom-up. Thinkers are the products of the cultures they grew-up in. They aspire to thinking purely objectively and universally, but they are often reflecting ways of thought that are embedded in a culture.

To become a stoic is to endorse the truthfulness of its world view and accept its prescription for how you ought to live, not just to like how it makes you feel.

The capacity to make free choices is not something we either have entirely or not at all. Rather, choices become freer the more they are the result of our own capacity to reflect on and assess facts and arguments.