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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Jeremy Taylor, whose writings on conscience shaped English moral thought, died on 13 August 1667. His defence of toleration was written in the years of the civil war.
Newsroom · 13 August 2026
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Immanuel Kant looks for the measure of moral rightness not in consequences but in the principle of the act. The three formulations of the categorical imperative, and why they are still argued about.
The IBM PC went on sale on 12 August 1981. The passage of computing power from institutions to individuals also altered arguments running from the philosophy of mind to the theory of knowledge.
Alessandro Achillini, the Bologna master whose contemporaries called him a second Aristotle, died on 12 August 1512. In the Renaissance, philosophy and medicine still met in the same chair.
The University of Dundee proposes to withdraw philosophy as a standalone undergraduate degree from 2027; Hertfordshire is closing its programme outright. Students and academics have launched a petition.
Friedrich Ebert signed the Weimar Constitution into force on 11 August 1919. Germany's first parliamentary democracy began there — and so did the deepest argument in twentieth-century legal philosophy.
A study in Philosophers' Imprint argues that consciousness is 'substrate flexible': it could arise in silicon- or sulphur-based structures that carry enough complexity.
Eric Schwitzgebel, Jeremy Pober
The French philosopher who defined 'the postmodern condition' and announced the end of grand narratives was born on 10 August 1924.
