
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

essayThinkers 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

essayAnthropology
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

ideaThinkers and theories
Freud versus Jung: a bitter feud over the meaning of sex
Sam Dresser

ideaHistory of ideas
How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free
Sam Dresser
Edited by Sam Dresser

essayFuture of technology
Techno-pipe dreams
Thirty years ago, nanotech was about to change everything. Let’s not get tricked again by Silicon Valley’s magical thinking
Philip Ball

essayBiography and memoir
The story of Malcolm X
Alex Haley co-wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X but Haley left out some profound elements of Malcolm’s political thought
Alex White

essayHuman rights and justice
Knowledge and justice
Any legal system that fails to compensate people for epistemic harm is unjust. Their damage must be named and remedied
Mitch Woolery

essayDeath
Freedom over death
Death is a certainty. But choosing how and when we depart is a modest opportunity for freedom – and dignity
Michael Cholbi

essayDesign and fashion
Walk in these
Shoes are deeply personal, literally moulded to our lives. But they create our social lives as much as express them
Matthew McCormack

essayComparative philosophy
What is Ethiopian philosophy?
Riven by two competing schools of thought, the future of philosophical enquiry in Ethiopia stands at a crossroads
Fasil Merawi

essayPhilosophy of science
Why philosophy of physics?
Some physicists reject philosophy as a distraction from ‘real’ science but it is in fact both useful and beautiful
James Read

essayComparative 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

essayHuman rights and justice
Levelling the world
Gerrard Winstanley led a small band of radicals whose vision of justice encompassed the globe and continues to inspire
Rowan Wilson

essayNeuroscience
The entangled brain
The brain is much less like a machine than it is like the murmurations of a flock of starlings or an orchestral symphony
Luiz Pessoa

essayCities
Cars beneath the ground
The explosion of automobiles shaped cities and lives. But an enduring problem remains: where to put them when they’re parked
Alfie Robinson

essayHuman rights and justice
Struggling to wake
After a murderous kidnapping in Nigeria, I launched a campaign to put a stop to the abductions. Why did no one listen?
Ayisha Osori