Articles

Art has been part of our being for millions of years—possibly even before the beginning of our genus Homo—without being understood as what we now call art. From the beginning, it was simply another way of knowing, probably our first, of coping with what confronted us in our environment as a necessary way of surviving in it and sharing that knowledge with others. It sprang from an emotional reaction to what existed outside of us and how we translated that feeling to pass it on

Convince an enemy, convince him that he’s wrong Is to win a bloodless battle where victory is long A simple act of faith, in reason over...

Carved into the stone of the ancient temple of Apollo at Delphi was the injunction to ‘know thyself’. Without such knowledge we are tossed this way and that by forces we neither suspect nor understand. Knowing ourselves helps explain our predicament; and doing so is greatly aided by understanding an aspect of the way in which the brain constructs the world.   I believe we have adopted a limited vision of a very particular type, and precisely because it is limited we cannot se

Introduction My philosophy aims at an ordering of rank: not at an individualistic morality. The ideas of the herd should rule in the...

Professor Judith Butler is a world-renowned philosopher and theorist whose writing has made them a household name. Their work has shaped...

Professor Jan-Werner Müller is the Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He has published many books—including  Contesting Democracy  (Yale University Press 2011), What is Populism?  (University of Pennsylvania Press 2016), and Democracy Rules  (Penguin 2021)—and voluminously in academic journals and public fora including the Guardian , The New York Times , and Project Syndicate .   This interview was conducted o

‘It is authority and not truth that makes the law’[1] German philosopher Hannah Arendt says in her book On Violence : ‘The authority does...

Applause in the executive boardroom. Hands pound backs, mouths twist into smiles. A round man with a stain of indecipherable grease on his shirt collar rises to speak, gesturing inanely at an electronic display. His hands twitch with glee as he highlights data points and maps out forecasts. ‘Returns for this quarter are exceptional, a threefold uptick on last year. Our customer base has expanded markedly. Any number of substantial brand deals. And a few bookings of particular

Amitav Acharya is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and Distinguished Professor at the School of International...

There exists a fine line that sociologists—and all social scientists—must tread as they try to knit together empirical, objective[1]...

Then from out the cave the mighty Polyphemus answered them: ‘My friends, it is Noman that is slaying me by guile and not by force’. And they made answer and addressed him with winged words: ‘If, then, no man does violence to thee in thy loneliness, sickness which comes from great Zeus thou mayest in no wise escape’. —Homer , The Odyssey, Book IX […] for when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows

Artists have drawn ideas, thoughts, and concepts from the works of others for centuries. However, copyright infringement issues frequently arise in the contemporary world. The case discussed in this piece concerns contemporary artworks from the ‘Canal Zone’ series by Richard Prince. Most of the works had photographs by Patrick Cariou incorporated in them, which were previously published in Cariou’s Yes Rasta book. Following an analysis of appropriation art history, postmode

A front-runner in the fight for equality and justice, Professor Judith Butler is one of the most influential philosophers of the past...

‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ is a phrase that has been raptured up into the popular English lexicon, cited, quoted, parodied, remixed, and dissolved into an ironic confirmation of the satire that produced it. It was the most iconic line from Network (1976), a now-classic film that told the dark tale of a fictional American network news anchor, Howard Beale (played by posthumous Academy Award-winner Peter Finch), whose blooming madness was exploite

Introduction The work of many 17th-18th century thinkers on politics and society continues to shape modern discourse, with notable contributions including Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750). The renown enjoyed by a small number of thinkers should not, however, divert us from more obscure but equally significant works from the period. The Anglo-Dutch crit

Had any of the players who competed for the inaugural tennis grand slam of 2022 in Melbourne been complete (i.e. sovereign,...

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values are prestigious gatherings of globally renowned scholars across the humanities and the sciences. This year’s lectures addressed the questions of Providing for a nation’s health, in a global context , where philosophers, economists, a physician and a social psychologist offered their take on different aspects of the healthcare response to global pandemics. In this piece, students, research fellows, and visiting fellows currently at Clare Ha

In the 1967 gangster road movie Bonnie and Clyde , the often-horrific events of the real-life story are cut with ingenuous humour and...

Introduction The human–animal relationship, as a concept of study, spans multiple disciplines and indeed has been an area of interest across both time and geography. At its core are historic and cultural norms which often go unchecked and unquestioned. The set of legal rules governing human–animal relationships is known as animal law.[1] This area of law is a complex web of rules that govern many relationship types and situations related to animals. At an academic level this

It would be pointless to list all the issues driving so much of society to take on a pessimistic view of our near future and view us as...

I became an atheist at the age of eight. After one of my Hebrew-school teachers devoted a 90-minute class to recounting her experiences...

Sylvana Tomaselli is a historian and lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where she is a fellow of St John’s...

The recent upsurge of interest in the history of the British Empire has produced a wealth of literature that often presents empire and imperialism in a hegemonic light, couched in a dichotomy that sets the ‘oppressor’ against the ‘oppressed’, the ‘coloniser’ against the ‘colonised’, and so on. Underpinning fashionable postcolonial discourse, this binary terminology can obscure important nuances of political thought in its proper historical context, such as how prominent figur

Funding for the arts is quite frequently commended by political philosophers and political pundits—whom I shall call ‘edificatory perfectionists’—as a policy that can incline people to improve their ways of life by taking advantage of cultural opportunities.[1] By contrast, this article advocates such funding because it can promote the occurrence of outstanding achievements and thereby help to bring about the conditions under which every citizen can be warranted in feeling a