Philosophy

Why the cat wags her tail

Here’s a puzzle: how could evolution favour such a costly, frivolous and fun activity as animal play?

Mathilde Tahar-Malaussena

Why Bennie tried to disappear, and what happened when he was found decades later

16 minutes

Suffused with causality

Humans have a superpower that makes us uniquely capable of controlling the world: our ability to understand cause and effect

Mariel Goddu

Ghosts among the philosophers

Cambridge, home of analytic philosophy, was also a hotbed of psychical research. How did this spooky subject take root?

Matyáš Moravec

The necessity of Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum’s philosophy is dynamic and challenging, but also elegant and lucidly written: she is the thinker of our time

Brandon Robshaw

The winter of civilisation

Byung-Chul Han’s relentless critiques of digital capitalism reveal how this suffocating system creates hollowed-out lives

Josh Cohen

What do past, present and future mean to a philosopher of time?

55 minutes

A right to exist?

Since states are founded on violence and expulsion, their existence is always bound up in thorny questions about justice

Andrew F March

So many unmarried men

For Mary Midgley, the Western philosophical tradition is shaped by the fact that its greatest practitioners were bachelors

Ellie Robson

Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?

5 minutes