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Sartre and the existential choice: ‘In fashioning myself, I fashion humanity’
What’s the essence of being human? According to the 20th-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, existence precedes essence. In other words, ‘I am what I do.’ This, thought Sartre, makes life an anguish-inducing experience as every one of our choices becomes a statement about what we think humanity should be. ‘Condemned to be free,’ each one of us must act as if the whole world is watching.
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Meaning and the good life
A Japanese religious community makes an unlikely home in the mountains of Colorado
9 minutes
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Bioethics
Is it ethical to have a second child so that your first might live?
10 minutes
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Meaning and the good life
‘Everydayness is the enemy’ – excerpts from the existentialist novel ‘The Moviegoer’
2 minutes
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
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Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
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Political philosophy
Beyond the veil – what rules would govern John Rawls’s ‘realistic Utopia’?
6 minutes
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Thinkers and theories
A rare female scholar of the Roman Empire, Hypatia lived and died as a secular voice
5 minutes