Porn holds a mirror up to society. Most mainstream porn – the free stuff – is misogynistic and demonstrates a casual loathing of women. The personalized market algorithm that advertises you a new kettle the moment you half-mention to a friend you might …
Just as the new James Bond has hit the screen, the chatter about who is going to replace Daniel Craig has already begun. Some are adamant that it should absolutely not be another white, straight, macho man - the times have moved on from all that. But would …
The beauty in the universe that physicists seek and see is an illusory consequence of our human mathematics. The world is asymmetric and imperfect: it's time for an aesthetic revolution in physics, writes Marcelo Gleiser. What is beauty? The poet John …
Postmodernism meant the end of a uniting grand narrative and the beginning of an era of often melancholic irony. For decades now we have been wondering what follows this? For the very idea of a vision of the future appears outlawed by the postmodern …
The idea of sexual transgression as sin is in the founding article of Christianity, Eve eating the forbidden fruit. It’s also embedded within our contemporary secular culture –shame is often accompanied in acknowledging our sexual kinks. And yet, nothing …
While human enhancement has little mainstream scientific support, gene-editing to eliminate diseases from human populations is a vision many share. Now, following breakthrough technologies and the shocking case of He Jiankui editing the germ-line of two …
We don’t get to choose our genes. But parents are now able to select their children’s genes in ways never possible before. The first baby born as a result of being singled out from a number of possible embryos with different probabilities of developing …
The question of what an ideally just society looks like has been one of the perennial philosophical questions. In recent decades, it has essentially dominated the field of analytic political philosophy. Charles W. Mills, a distinguished philosopher who …
One person likes Britney, another likes Beethoven. One person can discern the notes and texture of a Merlot, another just enjoys a glass of red. But is taste purely subjective? For Hume, good taste was discerned by a good critic, who met certain criteria …
China is increasingly trying to lure foreign universities, politicians and businesspeople with investment opportunities that are hard to resist. These can seem like legitimate transactions between parties that stand to mutually benefit. Not so, argues Finn …
The analytic – continental divide in philosophy is alive and kicking in the academy. Beyond the exchange of accusations and insults there is little genuine communication between the two traditions. But understanding the root of their divergence – different …
Just like the ancient Greek maxim “know thyself”, new cognitive neuroscience suggest that cultivating self-awareness is key to wisdom. Stephen M Fleming outlines new experiments that image the brain as we make decisions and considers how we can know what …
A legacy of Enlightenment thought was to see the human as separate from nature. Human history was neatly distinguished from natural history. The age of Anthropocene has now put all that into question. This human exceptionalism is seen by some as …
Our current attempts to tame the tech giants are destined to fail. Instead of trying to recover the old analog world, we should be asking ourselves what sort of digital world we want to live in. Only once we have that vision for the future will we know …
Liberalism isn’t often associated with the left. And yet, liberalism historically shaped many of the left’s political projects. In interpreting freedom not only as non-intervention by the government, but as what made people autonomous individuals, able to …
Aesthetic experience is not like other things. From Kant to Schopenhauer philosophers have long since recognised that art, beauty and the sublime does not aid, in any obvious way, the evolutionary will to life. Aesthetic experience instead, is a happy- …
Cosmology has made extraordinary progress in recent decades. Yet it now faces some fundamental physical problems and mathematical issues. In addition to these scientific challenges, much of modern cosmology relies on philosophical assumptions that are …
We usually think of extremism in terms of the political ideas one might hold and the willingness to resort to violence for their realization. But simply believing in an ideology on the extreme end of the spectrum, or resorting to violence are not enough to …
A new interpretation of quantum mechanics sees agents as playing an active role in the creation of reality. Blake Stacey outlines the case for QBism and its radical potential. The pandemic shut down our university when I was in the middle of giving a …
20 years ago, the world was shocked by images of two planes flying into the Twin Towers in New York. America was injured, but its response would go on to inflict worse wounds on the country’s image and influence, culminating with the humiliating retreat …
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