Philosophy

A philosophy of secrets

Jacques Derrida was fascinated by the figure of the Marrano Jew, whose identity could barely be told even to themselves

Peter Salmon

Do we have good reasons to believe in beliefs? A radical philosophy of mind says no

5 minutes

The post-linguistic turn

Analytic and continental philosophers were once united in their obsession with language. But now new questions have arisen

Crispin Sartwell

Is simulation theory a way to shirk responsibility for the world we’ve created?

13 minutes

Why Aristotle believed that philosophy was humanity’s highest purpose

9 minutes

Meaning beyond definition

In science our concepts have neat, hard edges. In poetry our concepts stretch and expand. Both are necessary for knowledge

James Camien McGuiggan

The sage and his foibles

Scholars cannot agree whether the letters of Plato are fake or genuine. Is this just a symptom of misplaced reverence?

James Romm

The scar of identity

Alexandre Kojève was an immense influence on many French thinkers. What was so compelling about his lectures on Hegel?

Samantha Rose Hill

Jeremy Bentham was consumed by creating a perfect prison. Here’s the result

4 minutes

Masham and me

Were it not for her friendship with John Locke, the radical feminist gems of philosopher Damaris Masham might be unknown

Regan Penaluna

The ethics of human extinction

Why would it be so bad if our species came to an end? It is a question that reveals our latent values and hidden fears

Émile P Torres

Known unknowables

The ancient Sceptics used doubt as a way of investigating the world. Later thinkers undermined even that possibility

Mahdi Ranaee

Forgotten existentialist

Sartre gets much of the credit for existentialism. Karl Jaspers not only preceded him, but offered a way out of despair

Deborah Casewell

The first Romantics

How a close group of brilliant friends, in a tiny German university town, laid the foundations of modern consciousness

Andrea Wulf

The herd in the head

It is enormously empowering – even intoxicating – to lose yourself to a crowd. That is why we need contrarians

Costica Bradatan

We are interwoven beings

A dragon needs the clouds and the wind in order to fly. What happens when we too relinquish individualistic reasoning?

Mercedes Valmisa

Bernard Williams on Descartes’s audacious endeavour to prove knowledge is possible

43 minutes

The generous philosopher

Bruno Latour showed us how to think with the things of the world, respecting their right to exist and act on their own terms

Stephen Muecke

Medieval but not Christian

It’s shocking that histories of medieval philosophy celebrate only Christian thinkers, ignoring Islamic and Jewish thought

Yitzhak Y Melamed

Democracy or apocalypse

Eric Voegelin and Hans Kelsen fled the Nazis. In the US, they clashed over the nature of modernity and government

David Dyzenhaus

Peter Singer charts the path from Hegelian philosophy to Marxist revolution

43 minutes