Ideas to change your life
How much time do I have left?
No one can really know how much time they have left to live, though some have a better idea than others – the terminally…
Articles
Essays, interviews and ideas from New Philosopher.
More articles
Ideas to change your life
The mystery of time
Carlo Rovelli, Professor of Physics at Aix-Marseille University and the author of The Order of Time, is interviewed by Zan Boag, editor of New…
Ideas to change your life
Power to the people?
By Mark Colyvan & Brian Hedden Most of us have great faith in democracy. Such is this faith that when democratic processes deliver poor…
Ideas to change your life
The ethics of political power
“From this we learn that a wise prince sees to it that never, in order to attack someone, does he become the ally of…
Society & Culture
How power corrupts
Zan Boag: Have you arrived at your own definition of power? Keith Dowding: No, I don’t really have one, actually, and I’m not sure…
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…
Society & Culture
Let the kids out
If you go to the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London, you will find that it has been transformed into a gigantic playground, on…
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…
Illusions
The art of Amistics
In his most recent novel, Seveneves, sci-fi author Neal Stephenson coins an intriguing term: “Amistics”. Amistics describes “the choices that different cultures made as…
Illusions
Dumb luck and entitlement
There’s a certain disappointment – maybe there’s a word for it in German – that comes from realising a quote you like is actually…
Environment
A new human era
Earth has lost half of its wild animals in the last forty years. What does it mean to be philosophical about this? The last…
Illusions
Are your best days ahead?
If philosophy is good at one thing, it’s pointing out things that seem so obvious we don’t even notice them and making them suddenly…