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To the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the ethics of honesty were clear-cut: telling the truth, no matter the consequences, was a ‘categorical imperative’ – a moral duty. Taking chilling (and chilly) inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining (1980), this brief animated snippet details Kant’s inflexible perspective on truth-telling, and its contrast with utilitarianism, which emphasises good outcomes over actions that are always right or wrong.
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Virtues and vices
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Art
Background music was the radical invention of a trailblazing composer
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Metaphysics
What do past, present and future mean to a philosopher of time?
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Spirituality
Through rituals of prayer, a monk cultivates a quietly radical concept of freedom
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Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
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Ethics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
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Animals and humans
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control?
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Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
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Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
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