Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) wrote two major works in his life: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953). With Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein at once built on and contradicted his earlier work, arguing that the meaning of language wasn’t in its relationship to reality (as he’d argued in the Tractatus) but in its vast web of crisscrossing usages – a ‘language game’, as he called it, in which all people are engaged. Further, he said, any attempt to step outside this language game was doomed to fail as, in the human mind, thinking and language are inseparable. In this video from 1987, the celebrated UK broadcaster and philosophy populiser Bryan Magee (1930-2019) discusses Wittgenstein’s intricate ideas with the US philosopher John Searle (1932-). Highlighting how Wittgenstein twice upended the philosophy of language – once by disagreeing with his own earlier views – Searle points to the philosopher’s wide influence, and what he perceives as the strengths and limits of his life’s work.
video
Meaning and the good life
A Japanese religious community makes an unlikely home in the mountains of Colorado
9 minutes
video
Bioethics
Is it ethical to have a second child so that your first might live?
10 minutes
video
Meaning and the good life
‘Everydayness is the enemy’ – excerpts from the existentialist novel ‘The Moviegoer’
2 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
video
Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
video
Political philosophy
Beyond the veil – what rules would govern John Rawls’s ‘realistic Utopia’?
6 minutes
video
Thinkers and theories
A rare female scholar of the Roman Empire, Hypatia lived and died as a secular voice
5 minutes