essay
Oceans and water
An oceanic tempo
An appreciation of the immensity embedded in the ocean’s cycles offers a way to reimagine our relationship with time
James Bradley
essay
Comparative philosophy
A cure for individualism
It runs deeply through the Western outlook, hailed and condemned in equal measures. For a corrective, look to Confucius
Tim Connolly
essay
Art
Out of the fog
It’s a ‘failed painting’ that obscures the profound power of German Romanticism. Why do we love the ‘Wanderer’ so much?
Gianluca Didino
video
History
Hags, seductresses, feminist icons – how gender dynamics manifest in witches
13 minutes
essay
History of science
Legacy of the angels
When medieval scholars sought to understand the nature of angels, they unwittingly laid the foundations of modern physics
Rebekah Wallace
essay
History of ideas
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
video
Art
Background music was the radical invention of a trailblazing composer
17 minutes
essay
Thinkers and theories
The winter of civilisation
Byung-Chul Han’s relentless critiques of digital capitalism reveal how this suffocating system creates hollowed-out lives
Josh Cohen
video
Metaphysics
What do past, present and future mean to a philosopher of time?
55 minutes
essay
Thinkers and theories
So many unmarried men
For Mary Midgley, the Western philosophical tradition is shaped by the fact that its greatest practitioners were bachelors
Ellie Robson
video
Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
15 minutes
essay
History of science
The birth of naturalism
The modern era is often seen as the triumph of science over supernaturalism. But what really happened is far more interesting
Peter Harrison
essay
Knowledge
The penumbral plunge
Diving into the ring of darkness beyond things easily answerable, asking ‘Why?’ questions is what make humans awesome
Eric Schwitzgebel
video
Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes
essay
Thinkers and theories
Who can claim Aristotle?
The endless battle over his legacy testifies to his great authority – and the power of his thought to make the world better
Edith Hall
essay
History of ideas
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
essay
Thinkers and theories
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
essay
History of ideas
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
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
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
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
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