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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Thinkers and theories
The prison abolitionist who dares to envision a world without ‘unfreedoms’
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Mathematics
Spiral into the ‘golden ratio’ – and separate the myths from the maths
4 minutes
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Knowledge
Why David Deutsch believes good explanations are the antidote to bad philosophy
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Philosophy of mind
‘Am I not at least something?’ A surreal dive into Descartes’s Meditations
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History of science
Meet the Quaker pacifist who shattered British science’s highest glass ceilings
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Meaning and the good life
Why Orwell urged his readers to celebrate the spring, cynics be damned
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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?
55 minutes