Two tenets are of significant concern to today’s philosophers of science: one continues to be that age-old idea of Scientific Realism, the other is a more contemporary assertion of the Metaphysical Unity to science. Although the motivations for or against them are very different, there seems to be a payoff with the degree to which anyone has so-far been able to accept one given their acceptance of the other. Or at least, that is what a survey of recent debate would seem to suggest. Why is this? I’ll hazard a guess after laying out what exactly the tenets claim and how philosophers have tried to orient themselves between them.

Around elections it is common to hear loud calls for citizens of democracies to make themselves heard and vote when important elections take place. This is so prevalent in liberal societies that it oftentimes seems as if the call is to just vote, regardless of how one does so. Is just voting what really matters?

Travel writer Colin Thubron once wrote, “over there, as likely as not, everything will be depressingly the same”. Is the world homogenising, everywhere morphing into everywhere else? The worldwide lockdown seems like a good time to armchair travel and reflect on places other than our own. Using the philosophy of maps, I argue we should be optimistic: our world is not everywhere the same.

Gabrielle Suchon lived a uniquely solitary life. She joined no salons, although her position as minor nobility would not have barred her; there is no evidence of correspondence with other intellectuals of the time, a practice engaged in as a means of disseminating and developing ideas, and, remaining single, she did not have access to the intellectually stimulating social life a husband might have provided, as did other women of her class in the seventeenth century. Despite this apparent isolation from the cultural community, she had access to libraries and her two 600-page treatises were masterpieces of philosophical erudition, reflecting not only an extensive appreciation of ancient philosophy but also the ability to produce a finely-detailed analysis of the social norms of her time.

Socrates argued that the unexamined life is not worth living. What this means is we are so ignorant that we are guilty of criminal negligence how to lead our lives, unless we do our due diligence by philosophising.

As the illustrious Roman scholars Varro and Cicero reflect on the ethical turn in Greek philosophy, they rightly focus on Socrates, observing that he was the first to draw philosophy down from the heavens, placing her in the cities of men, so that she might inquire about life and morality. In the generation that follows Socrates, however, Diogenes of Sinope will unleash philosophy’s ethical potential with vitality and humour. Whereas Socrates identifies as a gadfly, Diogenes is a dog, and with him, ethics gains its bite.

John Stuart Mill famously maintained that “animal pleasures” – like enjoying good smells and tastes – are lower quality than the pleasures tied to higher cognition, like the pleasure of enjoying an opera or understanding a mathematical proof. This downgrading is particularly common in the ethical literature about eating animals. Peter Singer, James Rachels, Gary Francione, Alastair Norcross and dozens of other ethicists make quick work of defending vegetarianism by presuming that “gustatory pleasure” is trivial. But is it?