Philosophy

The cochlear question

As the hearing parent of a deaf baby, I’m confronted with an agonising decision: should I give her an implant to help her hear?

Abi Stephenson

The nature of natural laws

Physicists and philosophers today have formulated three opposing models that explain how laws work. Which is the best?

Mario Hubert

The radical activist couple who fought for social change in the courtroom

21 minutes

Is beauty natural?

Charles Darwin was as fascinated by extravagant ornament in nature as Jane Austen was in culture. Did their explanations agree?

Abigail Tulenko

Elusive but everywhere

A new theory argues that unseen ‘fields’ guide all goal-directed things in the Universe, from falling rocks to voyaging turtles

Daniel W McShea & Gunnar O Babcock

The forces of chance

Social scientists cling to simple models of reality – with disastrous results. Instead they must embrace chaos theory

Brian Klaas

Settling accounts

Before he was famous, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was Louise Dupin’s scribe. It’s her ideas on inequality that fill his writings

Rebecca Wilkin

Rage against the machine

For all the promise and dangers of AI, computers plainly can’t think. To think is to resist – something no machine does

Alva Noë

Life makes mistakes

Hens try to hatch golf balls, whales get beached. Getting things wrong seems to play a fundamental role in life on Earth

David S Oderberg

Wander through the English countryside with two teens trying to make sense of the world

10 minutes

Against humility

Intellectual humility has recently been hailed as the key to thinking well. The story of Barbara McClintock proves otherwise

Rachel Fraser

My leap across the chasm

After years of debate and contemplation, I’ve come to think a heretical form of Christianity might be true. Here’s why

Philip Goff

Main character syndrome

Why romanticising your own life is philosophically dubious, setting up toxic narratives and an inability to truly love

Anna Gotlib

The value of our values

When Nietzsche used the tools of philology to explore the nature of morality, he became a ‘philosopher of the future’

Alexander Prescott-Couch

Philosophy of the people

How two amateur schools pulled a generation of thinkers from the workers and teachers of the 19th-century American Midwest

Joseph M Keegin

Make it awkward!

Rather than being a cringey personal failing, awkwardness is a collective rupture – and a chance to rewrite the social script

Alexandra Plakias