Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging.

Accepting that the world is full of uncertainty and ambiguity does not and should not stop people from being pretty sure about a lot of things.

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.

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

Instead of showing strangers kindness and giving them the benefit of the doubt, we increasingly show them only fear, and that is bad for us and them.

It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.

When you try to cool down hot emotions, what tends to happen is that you end up either repressing them or losing them altogether. Neither is desirable. Without emotion, much social interaction loses its meaning, or changes for the worse.