Sam Dresser
Senior Editor, Aeon+Psyche
Sam has been with Aeon since its launch in 2012. He’s most interested in how to do philosophy and in the continental/analytic divide. History and politics are also amusing to him. He considers Evelyn Waugh to be a very funny writer and enjoys pubs more than he should.
Written by Sam Dresser
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Thinkers and theories
Peak ellipsis
Does philosophy reside in the unsayable or should it care only for precision? Carnap, Heidegger and the great divergence
Sam Dresser
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Anthropology
The meaning of Margaret Mead
Mead argued that non-Western cultures offered alternative (often better) ways to be human. Why was she so vilified for it?
Sam Dresser
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Thinkers and theories
Freud versus Jung: a bitter feud over the meaning of sex
Sam Dresser
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History of ideas
How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free
Sam Dresser
Edited by Sam Dresser
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Metaphysics
The truth about fiction
What distinguishes fiction from nonfiction? The answer to this perennial question relies on how we understand reality itself
Hannah H Kim
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Stories and literature
Elegance and hustle
How French modernists from Proust to Mallarmé were alarmed and inspired by the voracious dynamism of the newspaper world
Max McGuinness
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Cognition and intelligence
The power of prayer
Praying is a cognitive practice full of problem-solving resources. You can learn from it even if you don’t want to do it
Eleanor Schille-Hudson
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Dance and theatre
Why the old man dances
Religious ritual to appease the gods or free expression of human agency? For the ancient Romans, dance could be both
Karin Schlapbach
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Future of technology
A linkless internet
In creating anonymous summaries, AI flattens out all the fascinating architecture of thought that makes the internet hum
Collin Jennings
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Food and drink
The flavour of mechanisation
Olive oil was revered and cherished by the ancients. But its distinctive peppery taste is really a modern invention
Massimo Mazzotti
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Beauty and aesthetics
Is beauty natural?
Charles Darwin was as fascinated by extravagant ornament in nature as Jane Austen was in culture. Did their explanations agree?
Abigail Tulenko
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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
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Food and drink
The fermented crescent
Ancient Mesopotamians had a profound love of beer: a beverage they found celebratory, intoxicating and strangely erotic
Tate Paulette
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History of science
Forwards, not back
Medicine aims to return bodies to the state they were in before illness. But there’s a better way of thinking about health
Kate MacCord & Jane Maienschein
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Subcultures
An undulating thrill
Once lauded as a wonder of the age, cocaine soon became the object of profound anxieties. What happened?
Douglas Small
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Nature and landscape
Laughing shores
Sailors, exiles, merchants and philosophers: how the ancient Greeks played with language to express a seaborne imagination
Giordano Lipari