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How do you decide whether you ought to do something? Chances are you’ve employed statements about how things are or have been as the basis for making a judgment call. The 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume forcefully argued against this approach. According to ‘Hume’s law’, also known as the ‘is/ought problem’, determining what you ought to do based on what is represents a logical mistake because there’s a gap that reason cannot bridge between the facts of the world and the values you might espouse.
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History of science
Meet the Quaker pacifist who shattered British science’s highest glass ceilings
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History
Hags, seductresses, feminist icons – how gender dynamics manifest in witches
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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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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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Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
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Political philosophy
The radical activist couple who fought for social change in the courtroom
21 minutes