Should philosophy express the national character of a people? Bertrand Russell’s ‘scientific’ philosophy was a bulwark against nationalism | Continue reading
For Simone de Beauvoir, authentic love is an ethical undertaking: it can be spoilt by devotion as much as by selfishness | Continue reading
Loving a pet is usually accompanied by a sombre and unavoidable truth: unless you’ve bought a puppy to accompany you through your final days or are providing excellent care to your tortoise, your dear animal companion will likely precede you in death. However, if you’re a dog own … | Continue reading
The Sun is both creator and destroyer of life. Where better to bow to its power than a subterranean tomb on winter solstice? | Continue reading
Some mushrooms will kill you,while some will show you godsand some will feed the hunger in our bellies. Identify.The UK-born writer Neil Gaiman wrote the poem ‘The Mushroom Hunters’ for an event held in Brooklyn in 2017 to celebrate ‘great scientists and scientific discoveries’. … | Continue reading
Some mushrooms will kill you,while some will show you godsand some will feed the hunger in our bellies. Identify.The UK-born writer Neil Gaiman wrote the poem ‘The Mushroom Hunters’ for an event held in Brooklyn in 2017 to celebrate ‘great scientists and scientific discoveries’. … | Continue reading
For Simone de Beauvoir, authentic love is an ethical undertaking: it can be spoilt by devotion as much as by selfishness | Continue reading
Voting is a duty of common pursuit. There is nothing more rational than acting individually to achieve collective benefits | Continue reading
Voting is a duty of common pursuit. There is nothing more rational than acting individually to achieve collective benefits | Continue reading
Many athletes are propelled by childhood trauma to succeed, but it’s a toxic myth that healing the wounds blunts the edge | Continue reading
The 3,500-kilometre, 23-day cycling competition known as the Tour de France has long been considered one of the most prestigious and gruelling athletic events in the world. But, as this excerpt from the celebrated French director Louis Malle’s documentary Vive La Tour (1962) demo … | Continue reading
Antisemitism flourished in response to the unsettling, abstract growth of finance capitalism in the early modern world | Continue reading
All the big questions about our world that can be answered at all can be answered by science | Continue reading
The Brazilian filmmaker Nara Normande grew up on the breezy, sandswept beaches of Guaxuma in northeast Brazil, in something of a hippie commune, co-established by her parents and their friends. As she recalls in her animated short Guaxuma, she enjoyed an idyllic childhood, with a … | Continue reading
Coitus reservatus is an ancient technique promising bliss and longevity. Does orgasm data back up these tantric ideas? | Continue reading
Science once communicated in a polyglot of tongues, but now English rules alone. How did this happen – and at what cost? | Continue reading
The term collage – the artistic technique of gluing different elements together – has its origins in the early modernist movement, especially in Cubist works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. But before such combining of disparate source materials became a mode of the artistic … | Continue reading
I was a teenager struggling to deal with my body and my feelings until William James taught me I had free will and choices | Continue reading
After she was widowed at age 32, Grażyna Sochacka founded the Panakeja Foundation – a social-assistance centre for homeless men on Sobieszewo Island in Gdańsk, Poland. Alongside her sister Wioletta Sienkiewicz, Sochacka has dedicated her life to caring for men living on the fring … | Continue reading
Pastness, presentness and futurity seem to be real features of the world, but are they? On McTaggart’s philosophy of time | Continue reading
Mead argued that non-Western cultures offered alternative (often better) ways to be human. Why was she so vilified for it? | Continue reading
Woolf loathed it but it spurred her on. Hemingway drew ideas of manliness from it. Self-help haunted the modernist imagination | Continue reading
Woolf loathed it but it spurred her on. Hemingway drew ideas of manliness from it. Self-help haunted the modernist imagination | Continue reading
King Midas looked to the gods for an easy way to get rich, but modern chemists use ingenuity to pan for gold in our waste | Continue reading
A generation ago, children in classrooms in the United States prepared for natural disasters such as fires and tornadoes. Today, active-shooter drills force them to confront the grim possibility that someone – perhaps a fellow student – might open fire in their school. In this St … | Continue reading
Mead argued that non-Western cultures offered alternative (often better) ways to be human. Why was she so vilified for it? | Continue reading
‘We're not so much abandoning the idea of the gods, we're just trying to pull them all the way into the Universe.’From the possibility of infinite universes to the prospect of panpsychism, puzzles have arisen in physics that can take science to some very counterintuitive places. … | Continue reading
Time does not heal everything. Like a severely inflamed wound, complicated grief needs special treatment to aid healing | Continue reading
Must radical political change generate uncontainable violence? The French Revolution is both a cautionary and inspiring tale | Continue reading
The West focuses only on slavery, but the history of Africa is so much more than a footnote to European imperialism | Continue reading
How China’s new state surveillance culture is changing the country’s centuries-old Confucian-inspired understanding of ‘face’ | Continue reading
If you’ve ever tripped up over the term ‘Bayesian’ while reading up on data or tech, fear not. Strip away the jargon and notation, and even the mathematics-averse can make sense of the simple yet revolutionary concept at the core of both machine learning and behavioural economics … | Continue reading
How China’s new state surveillance culture is changing the country’s centuries-old Confucian-inspired understanding of ‘face’ | Continue reading
On 16 April 2014, the ferry MV Sewol sunk off the coast of South Korea, killing 304 people – the vast majority of them high-school students on a field trip. Like many other tragedies, the event made headlines around the world before quickly fading from the international news cycl … | Continue reading
The West focuses only on slavery, but the history of Africa is so much more than a footnote to European imperialism | Continue reading
Wild, feral and fossil-fuelled, fire lights up the globe. Is it time to declare that humans have created a Pyrocene? | Continue reading
It is not enough to conserve species and ecosystems. We have an ethical duty to care for each individual animal on earth | Continue reading
Can history help tell us what happiness is? It certainly shows that it is not one simple, self-evident thing | Continue reading
Dadaism was an avant-garde artistic movement born amid the wreckage of the First World War in Europe and formed in reaction to the perceived meaninglessness of modern life – in particular, of capitalism and its violence. The Swedish artist Viking Eggeling’s stop-motion animation … | Continue reading
We can chose how we live – why not how we leave? A free society should allow dying to be more deliberate and imaginative | Continue reading
‘We laugh and for one heartbeat forget to be afraid…’The Battle of the Somme, fought by French and British forces against the German army in northern France in 1916, was one of the bloodiest in history. It lasted 140 days and resulted in more than 1.5 million casualties. The Scot … | Continue reading
A novel, by definition, tells a fictional story – but does that make its author a liar? On the space between stories and lies | Continue reading
The challenge of chess – learning how to hold complexity in mind and still make good decisions – is also the challenge of life | Continue reading
Ghostly hallucinations and other unusual experiences can be therapeutic – we should be careful not to overpathologise them | Continue reading
When you need robot assistance, a sheet of paper is a better model than the human body: the future of robotics is origami | Continue reading
In La Ensenada on Colombia's Pacific coast, local women embark on regular downriver journeys to harvest shellfish from a nearby mangrove forest. This short documentary by the Peruvian filmmaker Guille Isa and the Colombian filmmaker Angello Faccini follows a local mother as she t … | Continue reading
When you need robot assistance, a sheet of paper is a better model than the human body: the future of robotics is origami | Continue reading
Philosophy will thrive if we model debate on the playful exchanges of friends, not the adversarial arguments of a tribunal | Continue reading