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Philosophy

Essays and videos on philosophy, the history of ideas, ethics and life’s big questions
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Language and linguistics

Cathedrals of convention

Humans have a strong impulse to see things that are arbitrary or conventional as natural and essential – especially language

Reuben Cohn-Gordon

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Philosophy of language

Metaphors make the world

Woven into the fabric of language, metaphors shape how we understand reality. What happens when we try using new ones?

Benjamin Santos Genta

A black and white shot shows three men sitting on a sea wall and seen from a diminishing perspective such that they represent a scale of size
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Philosophy of language

The geometry of other people

Some friends are ‘close’. Others are ‘distant’. But our spatial descriptions of social life are more than just metaphors

David Borkenhagen

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Philosophy of language

Quantum poetics

How Borges and Heisenberg converged on the notion that language both enables and interferes with our grasp of reality

William Egginton

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Mood and emotion

The joy of sulk

Full of implicit rules and paradoxes, sulking is a marvellous example of intense communication without clear declaration

Rebecca Roache

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Metaphysics

Is the question ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?’ even worth asking?

9 minutes

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Philosophy of language

For Ludwig Wittgenstein, language is a game, but not a frivolous one

43 minutes

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Stories and literature

Nil by page

When a writer stares down a blank page, the whole of literature stares back. Why, then, leave the empty page as it is?

Andrew Gallix

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Thinkers and theories

Hegel today

Too dense, too abstract, too suspect, Hegel was outside the Anglophone canon for a century. Why is his star rising again?

Willem deVries

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Language and linguistics

Typos, tricks and misprints

Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology

Arika Okrent

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Language and linguistics

Ums, likes and y’knows get no respect – but they’re vital to conversation

6 minutes

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Philosophy of mind

The problem of now

The injunction to immerse yourself in the present might be psychologically potent, but is it metaphysically meaningful?

John Martin Fischer

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Philosophy of language

Thoughts into words

Here’s the paradox of articulation: are you excavating existing ideas, or do your thoughts come into being as you speak?

Eli Alshanetsky

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Language and linguistics

Hand to mouth

If language began with gestures around a campfire and secret signals on hunts, why did speech come to dominate communication?

Kensy Cooperrider

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Language and linguistics

Hypocognition is a censorship tool that mutes what we can feel

Kaidi Wu

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Philosophy of language

The ethics of speech acts

It’s one thing to say something. It’s quite another for a person to do (or not do) something because of what you’ve said

Guy Longworth

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Philosophy of language

Making up stuff

A novel, by definition, tells a fictional story – but does that make its author a liar? On the space between stories and lies

Emar Maier

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Language and linguistics

Why learning a new language is like an illicit love affair

Marianna Pogosyan

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Animals and humans

The pointing ape

How a chimpanzee named Clint trained a psychologist to question human exceptionalism and reconsider the intelligence of apes

David Leavens

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Philosophy of language

The way words mean

Words stand for things in the world, and they stand apart from it. Perhaps meaning is more sunken into words than we realise?

Alexander Stern

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Thinkers and theories

Can you step in the same river twice? Wittgenstein v Heraclitus

David Egan

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Language and linguistics

To all intensive purposes, you might have another think coming about how idioms work

4 minutes

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idea

Language and linguistics

At the end of the day, think outside the box about clichés

Nana Ariel

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Language and linguistics

Words as feelings

A special class of vivid, textural words defies linguistic theory: could ‘ideophones’ unlock the secrets of humans’ first utterances?

David Robson