Essay/ Beauty & Aesthetics The puzzle of beauty Rather than a golden ratio or a moral judgment, beauty is more like a radical jolt that awakens us to the world Shahidha Bari
Essay/ Beauty & Aesthetics The copy is the original In China and Japan, temples may be rebuilt and ancient warriors cast again. There is nothing sacred about the ‘original’ Byung-Chul Han
EXCLUSIVE Video/ Beauty & Aesthetics Finding chaos and precision in all things – a philosophy of watchmaking 9 minutes
Essay/ Beauty & Aesthetics Against popular culture For Adorno, popular culture is not just bad art – it enslaves us to repetition and robs us of our aesthetic freedom Owen Hulatt
Video/ History of Ideas Simone de Beauvoir on why women must reject the ‘feminine’ to become free and equal 2 minutes
Video/ Biology One of the most wondrous markers of the end of the day is a murmuration of starlings 2 minutes
Video/ Film & Television To see how editing shapes our experience of cinema, count the shots in ‘There Will Be Blood’ 7 minutes
Essay/ Computing & Artificial Intelligence Art by algorithm From book critiques to music choices, computation is changing aesthetics. Does increasingly average perfection lie ahead? Ed Finn
Essay/ Beauty & Aesthetics The sea was never blue The Greek colour experience was made of movement and shimmer. Can we ever glimpse what they saw when gazing out to sea? Maria Michela Sassi
Idea/ Beauty & Aesthetics The revolutionary figure of the beautiful, self-improved soul Justine Kolata
Video/ Nature & Environment Preventing the all-consuming sound pollution of modern life starts with listening to nature 10 minutes
Essay/ Beauty & Aesthetics Against flow In the myth of flow, the performer soars when the music starts. But it's grit and self-analysis until the very last bar Barbara Gail Montero
Video/ Beauty & Aesthetics Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which is the fairest rectangle of them all? 2 minutes
Video/ Mathematics A brilliant ‘geometric ballet’ of sound, shape and symmetry on the theme of 180° 5 minutes
Video/ Stories & Literature How E E Cummings’s most famous love poem reaches towards transcendence of self 9 minutes
Video/ Architecture & Landscape Light, geometry and symbolism: how Jean Nouvel’s architecture reimagines culture 15 minutes
Video/ Dance & Theatre Stephen Fry loathes dancing. To understand better, see it performed – in dance 2 minutes
Video/ History of Ideas Why Socrates believed that sexual desire is the first step towards righteousness 2 minutes
Essay/ Beauty & Aesthetics It is and it isn’t Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ is not just a radical kind of art. It’s a philosophical dialetheia: a contradiction that is true Damon Young & Graham Priest
Video/ Art The flickering ray of hope in the stark loneliness of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks 8 minutes
Essay/ Design & Fashion What do clothes say? Clothes can be forms of thought as articulate as a poem or equation. Why then does philosophy like to dress them down? Shahidha Bari