Money & Consumerism
Alternative hedonism
Imagine if we all wore the same clothes, lived in the same sort of house and drove the same sort of car. Social scientists…
Articles
Essays, interviews and ideas from New Philosopher.
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Life
Human engineering
You know the situation is getting desperate when three bioethicists propose genetically modifying humans to reduce our environmental impact. In a bizarre paper titled…
Death
Rat race to the afterlife
So you’ve spent your life accumulating money – you’ve worked hard, invested wisely; every waking moment has been devoted to moneymaking. Well, almost every…
Ideas to change your life
Are we the barbarians?
The ancient Greeks invented a whole bunch of important stuff: democracy, tragedy, philosophy (if you ignore India and China, which you shouldn’t), and more…
Ideas to change your life
The fourth revolution
We live in amazing times. Digital media and the Internet have transformed how we exchange ideas, how we learn, how we think about ourselves,…
Happiness
Metaphors of the mind
Rhys Bevan-Jones works and researches in the field of psychiatry in Cardiff. He is interested in the relationship between psychology/ psychiatry and the visual…
Being Human
Who are we behind closed doors?
In the midst of a nuclear war, an evacuation plane from England crash lands on a deserted, paradisiacal island in the remote Pacific. The…
Being Human
Are you just a story?
In the early 1980s, a new idea began to find its way from philosophy of history and into the raging debate over personal identity:…
Philosophy and you
Piketty: unequal selves
Thomas Piketty’s recent work Capital in the Twenty-First Century, provides disturbing evidence about the increasing inequality of income and wealth between and within nations.…
Philosophy and you
Getting high on search
A friend of mine recently sat in a waiting room in Singapore. The room was only large enough to hold a fence of chairs…
Being Human
The commercial self
It’s an ancient human law and it makes us do extraordinary things. Author Tom Wolfe calls it serial immortality; it’s that unnamed force that…
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…