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.
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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
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War and peace
Legacy of the Scythians
How the ancient warrior people of the steppes have found themselves on the cultural frontlines of Russia’s war against Ukraine
Peter Mumford
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Language and linguistics
Cathedrals of convention
Humans have a strong impulse to see things that are arbitrary or conventional as natural and essential – especially language
Reuben Cohn-Gordon
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Comparative philosophy
Folklore is philosophy
Both folktales and formal philosophy unsettle us into thinking anew about our cherished values and views of the world
Abigail Tulenko
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Political philosophy
Liberal socialism now
As the crisis of democracy deepens, we must return to liberalism’s revolutionary and egalitarian roots
Matthew McManus
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Thinkers and theories
On knowing who he was
Alan Watts, for all his faults, was a wildly imaginative and provocative thinker who reimagined religion in a secular age
Christopher Harding
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Logic and probability
What is incoherence?
We can all be inconsistent. Philosophy illuminates a bigger puzzle: how do we hold contradictory beliefs at the same time?
Alex Worsnip
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Language and linguistics
Our language, our world
Linguistic relativity holds that your worldview is structured by the language you speak. Is it true? History shines a light
James McElvenny
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Thinkers and theories
We’ll meet again
The intrepid logician Kurt Gödel believed in the afterlife. In four heartfelt letters to his mother he explained why
Alexander T Englert
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Philosophy of mind
What colour do you see?
New research is uncovering the hidden differences in how people experience the world. The consequences are unsettling
Gary Lupyan
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War and peace
The two Chomskys
The US military’s greatest enemy worked in an institution saturated with military funding. How did it shape his thought?
Chris Knight
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Ethics
Ethics has no foundation
Ethical values can be both objective and knowable – torture really is wrong – yet not need any foundation outside themselves
Andrew Sepielli
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Philosophy of mind
What is it like to be a crab?
Consciousness science should move past a focus on complex mammalian brains to study the behaviour of ‘simpler’ animals
Kristin Andrews