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Who’s to say what makes a woman ‘womanly’? In her book The Second Sex (1949), the French existentialist writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir argued that femininity isn’t innate, but instead foisted upon females from birth. According to de Beauvoir, by pressuring women to conform to male stereotypes of beauty, patriarchal societies have subjugated women, robbing them of their autonomy and objectifying them in ways that belittle their abilities and their intellect. De Beauvoir’s existentialism, however, offered a way out: women are free, she wrote, to reject male views on how they should look and behave, and doing so allows them to become more equal.
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Philosophy of mind
‘Am I not at least something?’ A surreal dive into Descartes’s Meditations
3 minutes
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Art
Background music was the radical invention of a trailblazing composer
17 minutes
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Ethics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
5 minutes
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Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes
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Sex and sexuality
From secret crushes to self-acceptance – a joyful chronicle of ‘old lesbian’ stories
29 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