video
Bioethics
Is it ethical to have a second child so that your first might live?
10 minutes
essay
Anthropology
Your body is an archive
If human knowledge can disappear so easily, why have so many cultural practices survived without written records?
Helena Miton
essay
Biology
Seeing plants anew
The stunningly complex behaviour of plants has led to a new way of thinking about our world: plant philosophy
Stella Sandford
video
Meaning and the good life
‘Everydayness is the enemy’ – excerpts from the existentialist novel ‘The Moviegoer’
2 minutes
essay
Knowledge
Frameworks
Knowledge is often a matter of discovery. But when the nature of an enquiry itself is at question, it is an act of creation
Céline Henne
essay
History of ideas
All that we are
The philosophy of personalism inspired Martin Luther King’s dream of a better world. We still need its hopeful ideas today
Bennett Gilbert
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
essay
Music
A novel kind of music
So-called ‘classical’ music was as revolutionary as the modern novel in its storytelling, harmony and depth
Joel Sandelson
essay
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Decolonising psychology
At times complicit in racism and oppression, psychology has also been a fertile ground for radical and liberatory thought
Rami Gabriel
essay
Meaning and the good life
Beyond authenticity
In her final unfinished work, Hannah Arendt mounted an incisive critique of the idea that we are in search of our true selves
Samantha Rose Hill
essay
Politics and government
Governing for the planet
Nation-states are no longer fit for purpose to create a habitable future for humans and nature. Which political system is?
Jonathan S Blake & Nils Gilman
video
Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
essay
History of ideas
Baffled by human diversity
Confused 17th-century Europeans argued that human groups were separately created, a precursor to racist thought today
Jacob Zellmer
essay
Meaning and the good life
Philosophy was once alive
I was searching for meaning and purpose so I became an academic philosopher. Reader, you might guess what happened next
Pranay Sanklecha
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
video
Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
essay
Global history
The route to progress
Anticolonial modernity was founded upon the fight for liberation from communists, capitalists and imperialists alike
Frank Gerits
essay
Thinkers and theories
Paper trails
Husserl’s well-tended archive has given him a rich afterlife, while Nietzsche’s was distorted by his axe-grinding sister
Peter Salmon
essay
Philosophy of mind
The problem of erring animals
Three medieval thinkers struggled to explain how animals could make mistakes – and uncovered the nature of nonhuman minds
Sam Alma
essay
Ethics
Moral progress is annoying
You might feel you can trust your gut to tell right from wrong, but the friction of social change shows that you can’t
Daniel Kelly & Evan Westra
essay
The future
The disruption nexus
Moments of crisis, such as our own, are great opportunities for historic change, but only under highly specific conditions
Roman Krznaric
essay
History of ideas
Chaos and cause
Can a butterfly’s wings trigger a distant hurricane? The answer depends on the perspective you take: physics or human agency
Erik Van Aken
essay
Philosophy of mind
Do plants have minds?
In the 1840s, the iconoclastic scientist Gustav Fechner made an inspired case for taking seriously the interior lives of plants
Rachael Petersen
essay
Beauty and aesthetics
All aquiver
The Decadent movement taught that you should live your life with the greatest intensity – a dangerous and thrilling challenge
Kate Hext