While on holiday in Vienna in 1833, the English poet Arthur Henry Hallam died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged […]

There’s a type of person who will tell you that life is a war, or at least, that we should […]

“The truly scary part of AI… is not the thought that we can be replaced by unfree rule-following machines. It’s […]

Despite his short life, the nineteenth century American author Henry David Thoreau has become an enduring symbol of not one, […]

According to medieval Jewish texts, the Roman emperor Hadrian once asked Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania about the doctrine of bodily […]

Here’s a fun little thought-experiment, derived from the work of Ernest Gellner. Try jotting down a list of all the […]

After reading moral philosophy for a while, you may come to suspect that being a moral philosopher must be utterly […]

Accepting the natural world is breakable took us centuries. Accepting we ourselves could break it took even longer. Thomas Jefferson, […]

In March 2018, a man named Mike Hughes climbed into a homemade, steam-powered rocket, and launched himself 700 metres above […]

Any new entertainment technology worth its salt is greeted as a portent of impending doom. In the 18th and 19th […]

There’s a certain disappointment – maybe there’s a word for it in German – that comes from realising a quote […]

If philosophy is good at one thing, it’s pointing out things that seem so obvious we don’t even notice them […]

“Life,” the American journalist and author Elbert Hubbard once quipped, “is just one damned thing after another.” Like many of […]

It probably says something telling about human beings that the oldest surviving piece of literature is about our longing to […]

The ancient Greeks invented a whole bunch of important stuff: democracy, tragedy, philosophy (if you ignore India and China, which […]