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.

videoEthics
A deathbed scenario raises the question: how much power should a promise hold?
5 minutes

videoEthics
What’s an idea worth? How prominent thinkers have understood intellectual property
6 minutes

videoThinkers and theories
The prison abolitionist who dares to envision a world without ‘unfreedoms’
16 minutes

videoMathematics
Spiral into the ‘golden ratio’ – and separate the myths from the maths
4 minutes

videoKnowledge
Why David Deutsch believes good explanations are the antidote to bad philosophy
10 minutes

videoPhilosophy of mind
‘Am I not at least something?’ A surreal dive into Descartes’s Meditations
3 minutes

videoHistory of science
Meet the Quaker pacifist who shattered British science’s highest glass ceilings
14 minutes

videoMeaning and the good life
Why Orwell urged his readers to celebrate the spring, cynics be damned
11 minutes

videoHistory
Hags, seductresses, feminist icons – how gender dynamics manifest in witches
13 minutes