Philosophy

Why Orwell urged his readers to celebrate the spring, cynics be damned

11 minutes

The truth about love

In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates shared a theory of love from the teachings of a ‘non-Athenian woman’. Who was she really?

Armand D’Angour

The last letter

Condemned to death by firing squad, French resistance fighters put pen to paper. Their dying words can teach us how to live

Daniel R Brunstetter

Welcome to the Chaoscene

The climate crisis is here. In order to thrive in these dangerous and precarious times, we must build resilient communities

Rupert Read

By the light of brahman

Ideas from classical Indian philosophy help illuminate the enigmas of selfhood, consciousness and the nature of reality

Anand Vaidya & Manjula Menon

Leading 1950s thinkers on the search for happiness in trying times

29 minutes

Why the cat wags her tail

Here’s a puzzle: how could evolution favour such a costly, frivolous and fun activity as animal play?

Mathilde Tahar-Malaussena

Why Bennie tried to disappear, and what happened when he was found decades later

16 minutes

Suffused with causality

Humans have a superpower that makes us uniquely capable of controlling the world: our ability to understand cause and effect

Mariel Goddu

Ghosts among the philosophers

Cambridge, home of analytic philosophy, was also a hotbed of psychical research. How did this spooky subject take root?

Matyáš Moravec

The necessity of Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum’s philosophy is dynamic and challenging, but also elegant and lucidly written: she is the thinker of our time

Brandon Robshaw

The winter of civilisation

Byung-Chul Han’s relentless critiques of digital capitalism reveal how this suffocating system creates hollowed-out lives

Josh Cohen

What do past, present and future mean to a philosopher of time?

55 minutes

A right to exist?

Since states are founded on violence and expulsion, their existence is always bound up in thorny questions about justice

Andrew F March