Philosopher's Zone

Technology and the lure of ancient Athens

One of the more utopian promises of technology has always been that it will free us from the necessity of work - but not having to work poses its own problems. What will

Sympathy, himpathy and feminism

Australian feminist philosopher Kate Manne memorably coined the term "himpathy" to describe what happens when a man commits a crime against a woman and finds himself the

Signal, noise and interpersonal conflict

If someone's behaving badly, it can be hard to know how much of their behaviour stems from a deep character flaw, and how much of it is incidental - the stuff we might ch

Feminism, generosity and cross-cultural support

Western feminists often express support for women in Muslim majority countries, but sometimes that support is couched in the language of pity, as though Muslim women were

Getting angry at the system

If I pick up a tree branch and smash your window with it, you're going to be angry, and your anger will rightly be directed at me. But if a tree branch smashes your winds

Who's afraid of Cultural Marxism?

Cultural Marxism is many things to many people — at one end of the political spectrum, it's the hidden force behind political correctness, identity politics and 'wokeness

Habermas and the retreat of reason

The great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who died in March, wrote in his later works about what he called Unheimlichkeit — roughly translated as "the unease of the t

Visual art as philosophy

When it comes to the ideal philosophical medium, most of us would identify the written word - or maybe the spoken word, if we're fans of Socratic dialogue - and this is b

How smart are machines, anyway?

Ever since AI was founded in the 1950s, people have talked and written about 'intelligence' as though we all broadly agree on what that word means. But there's considerab

Hegel: The philosopher with the (one) big idea

GWF Hegel (1770-1831) wanted to construct nothing less than a complete explanation of reality - nature, consciousness, art, history, politics, the lot - based on a single

Eco-grief and environmental loss

Philosophers have traditionally thought of grief as something that attaches to immediate loss - the death of a loved one, something terrible that's happened to us persona

Colonising space

There's something about space that's always captured the human imagination, but what happens when space begins to capture the imagination of billionaire tech entrepreneur

Can pregnancy be a job? the ethics of commercial surrogacy

Commercial surrogacy - the practice of paying someone to gestate your child and then hand it over when it's born - is banned in Australia, but it has its supporters. Defe

Belief, emotion and trust

The traditional philosophical view of belief is that it's a rational cognitive affair, evidence based and directed toward truth. According to this account, things like de

Communication in an age of crisis

Collins Dictionary made "permacrisis" their word of the year in 2022 - a prescient choice because since then, the crises have just kept coming. Permacrisis is forcing us

Can sport survive AI?

Elite sport is traditionally a celebration of the human, but for how much longer? We watch in awe as athletes perform feats of skill, strength and endurance,  and experie

Purity, filth and 'promiscuous defecators': why we're weird about poo

Why are we so repelled yet fascinated by bodily waste? Today we're talking purity, pollution, colonial sanitation regimes, medicine and public health, and how they've bee

Bad faith and 'just asking questions'

There's a certain kind of question that raises suspicion as to the motives of the person asking it. 'Was the Holocaust really as bad as historians have made out?' 'Is the

'Natural' disasters and climate justice

To call the effects of a fire, flood or cyclone these days a 'natural' disaster only tells part of the story, as climate change makes us realise that vulnerability to har

Where am I? Buddhist philosophy and the self

Behind the familiar Buddhist doctrine that "there is no self" lies a centuries-long tradition of dispute and disagreement. Reductionists believe that the self is no more