Philosophy

The forces of chance

Social scientists cling to simple models of reality – with disastrous results. Instead they must embrace chaos theory

Brian Klaas

Settling accounts

Before he was famous, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was Louise Dupin’s scribe. It’s her ideas on inequality that fill his writings

Rebecca Wilkin

Rage against the machine

For all the promise and dangers of AI, computers plainly can’t think. To think is to resist – something no machine does

Alva Noë

Life makes mistakes

Hens try to hatch golf balls, whales get beached. Getting things wrong seems to play a fundamental role in life on Earth

David S Oderberg

Wander through the English countryside with two teens trying to make sense of the world

10 minutes

Against humility

Intellectual humility has recently been hailed as the key to thinking well. The story of Barbara McClintock proves otherwise

Rachel Fraser

My leap across the chasm

After years of debate and contemplation, I’ve come to think a heretical form of Christianity might be true. Here’s why

Philip Goff

Main character syndrome

Why romanticising your own life is philosophically dubious, setting up toxic narratives and an inability to truly love

Anna Gotlib

The value of our values

When Nietzsche used the tools of philology to explore the nature of morality, he became a ‘philosopher of the future’

Alexander Prescott-Couch

Philosophy of the people

How two amateur schools pulled a generation of thinkers from the workers and teachers of the 19th-century American Midwest

Joseph M Keegin

Make it awkward!

Rather than being a cringey personal failing, awkwardness is a collective rupture – and a chance to rewrite the social script

Alexandra Plakias

Desperate remedies

In order to make headway on knotty metaphysical problems, philosophers should look to the methods used by scientists

Nina Emery

Citizens and spinning wheels

For Indians to be truly free, Gandhi argued they must take up traditional crafts. Was it a quixotic hope or inspired solution?

Benjamin Studebaker

A Japanese religious community makes an unlikely home in the mountains of Colorado

9 minutes

C L R James and America

The brilliant Trinidadian thinker is remembered as an admirer of the US but he also warned of its dark political future

Harvey Neptune

Rawls the redeemer

For John Rawls, liberalism was more than a political project: it is the best way to fashion a life that is worthy of happiness

Alexandre Lefebvre

Is it ethical to have a second child so that your first might live?

10 minutes