Being Human
Reasons of love
Here’s a fun little thought-experiment, derived from the work of Ernest Gellner. Try jotting down a list of all the things you love about…
Articles
Essays, interviews and ideas from New Philosopher.
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Illusions
Our surveillance society
In the perfect prison, I am bathed in light. I don’t languish in the dark – I am put to work. There are no…
Being Human
Running with the pack
Zan Boag: It has been some nine years since you’ve published Running with the Pack, and 14 years since The Philosopher and the Wolf.…
Ideas to change your life
Word to the wise
The 21st century has created a whole range of new types of professional that we have never had before – or if not quite…
Philosophy and you
The lost art of travel
We’re in perpetual motion; we can go anywhere, at any time, and the momentum builds. Before long, we’re planning another trip abroad, or we’re…
News
NFN: The bystander effect
“If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” –Anonymous …
Death
On the shortness of life
It is a general complaint among mankind, Paulinus, that Nature is niggardly: our allotted span is brief, and the term granted us flies by…
Being Human
Would you upload yourself?
By Russell Blackford If our minds are essentially what happens when our brains perform certain kinds of complex computations, then very powerful computers should…
Ideas to change your life
Just a game?
Any new entertainment technology worth its salt is greeted as a portent of impending doom. In the 18th and 19th centuries, moralists fretted that…
Ideas to change your life
New Philosopher ‘Magazine of the Decade’
London, December 2019: We're thrilled to announce that New Philosopher has been named 'Magazine of the Decade' by the UK's leading independent subscription service…
Being Human
Remember the dead
In the late 19th century, Boston photographer William H. Mumler posed his subjects by a window in his studio – grieving fathers, distraught lovers,…
Death
Learning not to die
It probably says something telling about human beings that the oldest surviving piece of literature is about our longing to overcome death. The Sumerian…