Philosophy
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Metaphysics
Reality is evil
Everything eats and is eaten. Everything destroys and is destroyed. It is our moral duty to strike back at the Universe
Drew M Dalton
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Nature and landscape
Scenes from Aboriginal Australian pottery chart the turn of the seasons
7 minutes
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Knowledge
Socrates would be pleased
With a class of college students and inmates, teaching philosophy in prison is a rowdy, honest and hopeful provocation
Jay Miller
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Ethics
Why love matters most
For Iris Murdoch, morality is not about duties and rules but stopping our ego fantasies and attending to others with love
Cathy Mason
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Sports and games
The secret
At the heart of surfing, whether you’re a kook or a famous charger, is the pursuit of moments so pure they clean you out
M M Owen
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Ethics
The incompleteness of ethics
Many hope that AI will discover ethical truths. But as Gödel shows, deciding what is right will always be our burden
Elad Uzan
video
Ethics
What’s an idea worth? How prominent thinkers have understood intellectual property
6 minutes
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Rituals and celebrations
A life in Zen
Growing up in countercultural California, ‘enlightenment’ had real glamour. But decades of practice have changed my mind
Anshi Zachary Smith
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Biography and memoir
The story of Malcolm X
Alex Haley co-wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X but Haley left out some profound elements of Malcolm’s political thought
Alex White
video
Thinkers and theories
The prison abolitionist who dares to envision a world without ‘unfreedoms’
16 minutes
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Anthropology
Spider divination
Life is complicated. In Cameroon, initiated diviners read the messages of spiders to untangle possible futures
David Zeitlyn
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The environment
Beyond food and people
Nietzsche shows us how to embrace our connection with nature – without denying its essential conflict, strife and suffering
Nicholas E Low
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Human rights and justice
Knowledge and justice
Any legal system that fails to compensate people for epistemic harm is unjust. Their damage must be named and remedied
Mitch Woolery
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Animals and humans
Humanlike?
Interpreting the emotional lives of animals requires a subtler and more nuanced understanding of anthropomorphism
Mike Dacey
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Consciousness and altered states
Kind of confusing
Is consciousness like jazz, something hard to pin down? Or is it more like the biology of dolphins, odd but natural?
Tim Bayne
video
Mathematics
Spiral into the ‘golden ratio’ – and separate the myths from the maths
4 minutes
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Illness and disease
The power of the ‘C’ word
Saying the word ‘cancer’ changes a person’s life and can lead to overtreatment and fear. Is the word too hot to use at all?
Benjamin Chin-Yee
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Biology
Memories without brains
Certain slime moulds can make decisions, solve mazes and remember things. What can we learn from the blob?
Matthew Sims
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Death
Freedom over death
Death is a certainty. But choosing how and when we depart is a modest opportunity for freedom – and dignity
Michael Cholbi
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Thinkers and theories
The French liar
René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, was furiously condemned by his contemporaries. Why did they fear him?
Sandrine Parageau
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Architecture
The replica and the original
Architectural copies of lost structures require reckoning with history and heritage. At what cost is the past rebuilt?
Elizabeth Kostina
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History of ideas
From scattered traces
How the ideas circulating among one noblewoman’s coterie in 16th-century Dubrovnik anticipated modern feminist thought
Luka Boršić
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Virtues and vices
Awkward silences
What is it about lulls in conversation that make them so very uncomfortable? It has to do with how we connect with each other
Rebecca Roache
video
Knowledge
Why David Deutsch believes good explanations are the antidote to bad philosophy
10 minutes