Philosophy For Our Times

The secret history of cool | Joel Dinerstein

Who was the first person to be cool? What connects the civil rights movement and Albert Camus' 'The Rebel'? How has the coopting of black terminology impacted American so

Rebalancing the global order | Kishore Mahbubani

Is it truly the beginning of the end of Western dominance? Where did it all go wrong? And is this more than just an upheaval of the status quo? For centuries, Western po

The future of the right | Sohrab Ahmari, Gawain Towler, Rachel Maclean, Mark Littlewood

Is the populist right opposed to liberalism and the free market? Does this mark a change in what it is to be right-wing, or was it a mistake to see populism as far right

Love is more than magic | Alain de Botton

What do voyeurs want? What can the Greeks teach us about love? Why do we pursue those who we now are going to hurt us? Despite our longing for lasting connection, love o

In the name of reason | Steve Fuller, Miriam Schoenfield, Dan Sperber

Is the future one where we accept tribalism and conflict as inherent in the human condition, where moral and scientific beliefs based on reason are badges, shaped by clas

The mind is not a machine | Iain McGilchrist

For most scientists, the mind is little more than a machine. With the rise of AI, some now claim that computers may themselves become conscious. For acclaimed neuroscient

Anxiety and the soul's itch | Sarah Wilson

Is anxiety something to be embraced, rather than fixed? Why are more and more of us feeling the 'soul's itch'? How we can start living more meaningfully? Anxiety is ofte

Truth, beauty and other misconceptions | Lisa Randall

Is beauty a reliable indicator of scientific truth? Or is it merely a distraction? Some of the best scientists throughout history have equated beauty with truth. But is

The world after liberalism | Maurice Glasman & Sohrab Amari

Is this the end of liberalism, or just another temporary crisis? If it is the end, what will follow it? And where did it all go wrong? Since the end of WWII, the Western

Why artists shouldn't fear AI | Jaron Lanier

What does originality mean in the age of AI? Why should artists resist the temptation to fear AI? What role will human creativity play in the future we're building? Jaro

Copying consciousness: the future of mind uploading | Anders Sandberg

What makes you 'you'? If scientists made a digital replica of your mind, would this new 'you' be conscious? And what does this all mean for what it means to exist? Whole

The return of idealism | James Tartaglia

Is materialism mistaken in its understanding of consciousness? How can dividing experience into the phenomenal and the transcendent provide a new angle from which to view

Reimagining the right | Richard Tice

Is this the end of Britain's two-party system? How has Reform brought together seemingly contradictory left- and right-wing ideas? Why do they think that we should get us

Is philosophy becoming irrelevant? | Mary Midgley

Does philosophy still matter in today's world? If so, why are students less and less interested in studying in it? In a special episode from the IAI archives, Mary Midgl

Who's afraid of gender? | Judith Butler

Why has gender identity become such a controversial talking point in modern politics? Judith Butler, pioneering gender theorist whose changed the way we think about gend

Human perception is imagination | Nadine Dijkstra

Nadine Dijkstra is a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Neurology at UCL. Her research in Imaging Neuroscience explores how the brain generates mental images and

The brain filters consciousness | Alex Gomez-Marin

Is the brain actually productive? Or is it instead permissive, simply acting as a filter through which consciousness passes? Can near death experiences help us to get clo

Overcoming evolution | Subrina Smith, Keith Frankish, Simon Baron-Cohen

Is evolutionary psychology merely a way of excusing outdated behaviours? Is it instead culture which really defines how we behave? As with the animal kingdom, we see hum

Slavoj Žižek on quantum history and the end of the past

Does the past even exist anymore? Quantum mechanics has long unsettled our understanding of matter and measurement. But what if its implications reach further — into his

How they ruined philosophy | Babette Babich, Genia Schönbaumsfeld, and Christoph Schuringa

Did analytic philosophy ruin the entire discipline? For more than a century there has been a divide in Western philosophy between two distinct approaches, often describe