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

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 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

So many unmarried men

For Mary Midgley, the Western philosophical tradition is shaped by the fact that its greatest practitioners were bachelors

Ellie Robson

The penumbral plunge

Diving into the ring of darkness beyond things easily answerable, asking ‘Why?’ questions is what make humans awesome

Eric Schwitzgebel

In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us

9 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baffled by human diversity

Confused 17th-century Europeans argued that human groups were separately created, a precursor to racist thought today

Jacob Zellmer