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Philosophy of science | Is it possible that, in the new millennium, the mathematical method is no longer fundamental to philosophy? | When René Descartes was 31 years old, in 1627, he began to write a manifesto on the proper methods of philosophising. He chose the title Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii, or Rules for the Direction of the Mind. It is a curious work. Descartes originally intended to present 36 rules divided evenly into three parts, but th... | Jeremy Avigad | https://aeon.co//essays/does-philosophy-still-need-mathematics-and-vice-versa | |
Poverty and development | It’s difficult to test whether poverty relief actually works. Do randomised controlled trials provide a scientific measure? | Six years ago, a woman in rural Kenya told me her story. Every night when it rained, she’d have to move her children to a neighbour’s hut – one with a metal roof instead of her leaky, straw one. But then the nonprofit organisation GiveDirectly transferred $1,000 to her, so she bought a roof, and now her family could ge... | Stephanie Wykstra | https://aeon.co//essays/can-randomised-controlled-trials-test-whether-poverty-relief-works | |
Social psychology | In this febrile cultural moment filled with fear of the Other, horror has achieved the status of true art | In Ray Bradbury’s horror short story, ‘The Next in Line’ (1955), a woman visits the catacombs in Guanajuato, Mexico. Mummified bodies line the walls. Lying awake the next night, haunted by her macabre tour, she finds that her heart ‘was a bellows forever blowing upon a little coal of fear … an ingrown light which her i... | M M Owen | https://aeon.co//essays/horror-is-a-dark-and-piercing-reflection-of-our-anxious-times | |
Cosmology | Claims that the Universe is designed for humans raise far more troubling questions than they can possibly answer | Welcome to the ‘anthropic principle’, a kind of Goldilocks phenomenon or ‘intelligent design’ for the whole Universe. It’s easy to describe, but difficult to categorise: it might be a scientific question, a philosophical concept, a religious argument – or some combination. The anthropic principle holds that if such phe... | David P Barash | https://aeon.co//essays/why-a-human-centred-universe-is-not-a-humane-one | |
History of ideas | Human dignity is a concept with remarkably shallow historical roots. Is that why it is so presently endangered? | The popular Austrian tabloid Heute has a tradition of publishing pictures of the first babies born around the country in the new year. Vienna’s 2018 baby was a girl named Asel. She was born of Muslim parents. And she was received with hate. ‘Next terrorist born.’ ‘Deport the scum.’ ‘I’m hoping for a crib death.’ Hundre... | Remy Debes | https://aeon.co//essays/human-dignity-is-an-ideal-with-remarkably-shallow-roots | |
Neuroscience | From a very early age, children learn to talk to themselves. That voice in your head is the thing that makes you, you | ‘I think, therefore I am,’ the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes proclaimed as a first truth. That truth was rediscovered in 1887 by Helen Keller, a deaf and blind girl, then seven years of age: ‘I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no world … When I learned the meaning of “I” and “me” and foun... | Phil Jaekl | https://aeon.co//essays/our-inner-narrator-gives-us-continuity-and-a-sense-of-self | |
History | John Locke took part in administering the slave-owning colonies. Does that make him, and liberalism itself, hypocritical? | John Locke, who lived through two revolutions in 17th-century England, remains perhaps the most important theorist about democracy. Translated into many different languages, Locke’s ideas inform contemporary philosophical debates about justice and rights, from relative egalitarians such as John Rawls to libertarians su... | Holly Brewer | https://aeon.co//essays/does-lockes-entanglement-with-slavery-undermine-his-philosophy | |
History of science | Fake miniatures depicting Islamic science have found their way into the most august of libraries and history books. How? | As I prepared to teach my class ‘Science and Islam’ last spring, I noticed something peculiar about the book I was about to assign to my students. It wasn’t the text – a wonderful translation of a medieval Arabic encyclopaedia – but the cover. Its illustration showed scholars in turbans and medieval Middle Eastern dres... | Nir Shafir | https://aeon.co//essays/why-fake-miniatures-depicting-islamic-science-are-everywhere | |
Subcultures | How an impossibly flat expanse of absofreakinglutely nothing inspires creativity and transformation at Burning Man | Pushing beyond exhaustion, I’m enveloped by a fog of white dust unsettled from the flat expanse beneath my pedals. My head is wrapped in goggles and bandana – the mask de rigueur in this carnival at the edge of the known. Hitched on opposite sides of my utility belt are items of equal weight, albeit disparate utility: ... | Graham St John | https://aeon.co//essays/what-happens-when-you-set-foot-on-absofreakinglutely-nothing | |
Future of technology | Say you could make a thousand digital replicas of yourself – should you? What happens when you want to get rid of them? | If you’ve ever dabbled in role-playing games – either online or in old-fashioned meatspace – you’ll know how easy it is to get attached to your avatar. It really hurts when your character gets mashed by a troll, felled by a dragon or slain by a warlock. The American sociologist (and enthusiastic gamer) William Sims Bai... | Philip Ball | https://aeon.co//essays/what-are-our-ethical-obligations-to-future-ai-simulations | |
Economic history | Sicily’s mafia sprang from the growing global market for lemons – a tale with sour parallels for consumers today | The Sicilian mafia is probably the most famous criminal organisation in the world. It’s been known to exist at least since the 1870s, when a Sicilian landlord documented how a local group of mafia members threatened and harassed his business to the point that he had to escape from the island. Over the years, the Cosa N... | Ola Olsson | https://aeon.co//essays/how-a-growing-market-for-citrus-fruit-spawned-the-mafia | |
Music | We know music is pleasurable, the question is why? Many answers have been proposed: perhaps none are quite right | Can a melody provide us with pleasure? Plato certainly thought so, as do many today. But it’s incredibly difficult to discern just how this comes to pass. Is it something about the flow and shape of a tune that encourages you to predict its direction and follow along? Or is it that the lyrics of a certain song describe... | Roger Mathew Grant | https://aeon.co//essays/its-hard-to-know-why-music-gives-pleasure-is-that-the-point | |
Meaning and the good life | The fantasy of living forever is just a fig leaf for the fear of death – and comes at great personal cost | The finale of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) sees the quest for the Holy Grail reach a dramatic conclusion. The film’s villain – the Nazi collaborator and artifact hunter Walter Donovan – knows that drinking from the sacred goblet will bring him eternal life. But from a table laid out with... | Paul Sagar | https://aeon.co//essays/theres-a-big-problem-with-immortality-it-goes-on-and-on | |
Human reproduction | The idea that millions of sperm are on an Olympian race to reach the egg is yet another male fantasy of human reproduction | Before science was able to shed light on human reproduction, most people thought new life arose through spontaneous generation from non-living matter. That changed a smidgen in the middle of the 17th century, when natural philosophers were able (barely) to see the female ovum, or egg, with the naked eye. They theorised... | Robert D Martin | https://aeon.co//essays/the-idea-that-sperm-race-to-the-egg-is-just-another-macho-myth | |
Neurodiversity | Too many depictions of autistic people rely on tired clichés. The neurotypical world needs to take note of our own voices | I found myself at a lunch table recently with a journalist, a sociologist and a business psychologist, which sounds like the set-up for a bad joke. We were discussing Silicon Valley, and its notorious working culture of long hours and company-dictated leisure time. ‘The problem, of course,’ said the sociologist, ‘is th... | Katherine May | https://aeon.co//essays/the-autistic-view-of-the-world-is-not-the-neurotypical-cliche | |
Death | It takes a lifetime of preparation to grieve as the Stoics did – without weeping and wailing, but with a heart full of love | Imagine you are at a child’s funeral. The child is yours. The air is numb with silence. An ache so deep you can barely breathe moves through you, until it bursts and you cry out loud. Somebody passes a tissue; another rests his hand on your shoulder. In time, your eyes run out of tears. But now there is a hole in your ... | Brian D Earp | https://aeon.co//essays/do-not-weep-for-your-dead-how-to-mourn-as-the-stoics-did | |
History of science | The idea that nature is a humming, complex, clockwork machine has been around for centuries. Is it due for a revival? | The philosopher René Descartes, who lived for a time near the royal gardens of St Germain-en-Laye just outside Paris, was intrigued by the strange machines installed there. The grounds of the château were abuzz with water-powered automata that cavorted in grottoes, enacting scenes from Greek mythology and playfully spl... | Jessica Riskin | https://aeon.co//essays/can-animals-be-usefully-described-as-clockwork-machines | |
Education | The ethical formation of citizens was once at the heart of the US elite college. Has this moral purpose gone altogether? | In 1904, while touring the eastern half of the United States, the German sociologist Max Weber encountered an institution that would intrigue him for decades, the American college. Between delivering lectures and finishing the final drafts of what would become The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), W... | Chad Wellmon | https://aeon.co//essays/have-elite-us-colleges-lost-their-moral-purpose-altogether | |
Thinkers and theories | Hume believed we were nothing more or less than human: that’s why he’s the amiable, modest, generous philosopher we need now | Socrates died by drinking hemlock, condemned to death by the people of Athens. Albert Camus met his end in a car that wrapped itself around a tree at high speed. Nietzsche collapsed into insanity after weeping over a beaten horse. Posterity loves a tragic end, which is one reason why the cult of David Hume, arguably th... | Julian Baggini | https://aeon.co//essays/hume-is-the-amiable-modest-generous-philosopher-we-need-today | |
Values and beliefs | Optimists believe in good luck, pessimists in bad. But if it’s all a matter of perspective, does luck even exist? | Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a technical draughtsman for oil tankers when in the summer of 1945 his employer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries sent him to the Japanese city of Hiroshima for a lengthy business trip. His visit ended abruptly when the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on 6 August, and the equiva... | Steven Hales | https://aeon.co//essays/why-luck-might-be-subjective-and-not-part-of-the-world | |
Automation and robotics | What stands in the way of all-powerful AI isn’t a lack of smarts: it’s that computers can’t have needs, cravings or desires | In Henry James’s intriguing novella The Beast in the Jungle (1903), a young man called John Marcher believes that he is marked out from everyone else in some prodigious way. The problem is that he can’t pinpoint the nature of this difference. Marcher doesn’t even know whether it is good or bad. Halfway through the stor... | Margaret Boden | https://aeon.co//essays/the-robots-wont-take-over-because-they-couldnt-care-less | |
Physics | Does everything in the world boil down to basic units – or can emergence explain how distinctive new things arise? | If you construct a Lego model of the University of London’s Senate House – the building that inspired the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four – the Lego blocks themselves remain unchanged. Take apart the structure, reassemble the blocks in the shape of the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Eiffel... | Paul Humphreys | https://aeon.co//essays/atomism-is-basic-emergence-explains-complexity-in-the-universe | |
Fairness and equality | Economic inequality is an urgent problem. Deeper still is our loss of mutual respect, the foundation of a fair society | At the end of 2017, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority launched a new ad campaign. The Authority wasn’t selling anything. It was asking, on behalf of its bus drivers, for something; something that liberal societies need in order to flourish, that underpins social equality, and that today, is in short su... | Richard V Reeves | https://aeon.co//essays/restoring-respect-is-the-first-step-towards-a-better-society | |
Illness and disease | For big pharma, the perfect patient is wealthy, permanently ill and a daily pill-popper. Will medicine ever recover? | Just a few years ago, infection with the hepatitis C virus guaranteed a slow and certain death for many. Available treatments were effective in about half of all patients, and the side effects could be awful. Things changed in 2014, when a new medication called Harvoni was approved to treat the infection. With cure rat... | Clayton Dalton | https://aeon.co//essays/will-medicine-ever-recover-from-the-perverse-economics-of-drugs | |
Stories and literature | In Japan, ghost stories are not to be scoffed at, but provide deep insights into the fuzzy boundary between life and death | It was a moonlit night in early summer, about a year on from the great tsunami. As waves broke gently on a beach half-obscured in fog, Fukuji could just about make out two people walking along: a woman and a man.Fukuji frowned. The woman was definitely his wife.He called out her name. She turned, and smiled. Fukuji now... | Christopher Harding | https://aeon.co//essays/japanese-ghost-stories-dwell-in-the-spirit-of-their-times | |
Teaching and learning | Children learn best when their bodies are engaged in the living world. We must resist the ideology of screen-based learning | A rooster crows and awakens my family at the farm where we are staying for a long weekend. The air is crisp, and stars twinkle in the sky as the Sun rises over the hill. We walk to the barn, where horses, cows, chickens, pigs, dogs and cats vie for our attention. We wash and replenish water bowls, and carry hay to the ... | Nicholas Tampio | https://aeon.co//essays/children-learn-best-when-engaged-in-the-living-world-not-on-screens | |
History of ideas | Islamists and Western pundits speak of ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’ but such tribalism is dangerous colonial propaganda | On 17 May 1919 in Paris, three Indian Muslim leaders met the United States’ president Woodrow Wilson to make a case for the preservation of the Ottoman caliphate in Istanbul, and for the national self-determination of Anatolia as a homeland for Turkish Muslims. The Indians advocated for the independence of what they ca... | Cemil Aydin | https://aeon.co//essays/the-idea-of-a-muslim-world-is-both-modern-and-misleading | |
Cosmology | Ever since Heisenberg and Tagore, physicists have flirted with Eastern philosophy. Is there anything in the romance? | There is a story that the Buddha was once addressing his sangha, the monastic community who had gathered around to listen to him preach, when one of his bright young followers posed a series of questions. What, he asked his spiritual leader, is the origin of the Universe? Is the cosmos infinite? Is it eternal, or did i... | Zeeya Merali | https://aeon.co//essays/can-buddhist-philosophy-explain-what-came-before-the-big-bang | |
War and peace | Why some people choose to do evil remains a puzzle, but are we starting to understand how this behaviour is triggered? | In 1941, en route from a ghetto to a concentration camp in Ukraine, a Nazi soldier beat my grandfather to death. My father witnessed this murder. His is just one of millions of similar stories, of course, and I grew up aware of how death hovered on the other side of life, and brutality on the underside of humanity. The... | Noga Arikha | https://aeon.co//essays/is-neuroscience-getting-closer-to-explaining-evil-behaviour | |
Future of technology | All the great inventions took painstaking, risky, indirect routes to fruition. Has Silicon Valley really escaped history? | Last spring, I finally visited one of the United States’ industrial shrines: the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey. Before the rise of Silicon Valley, Thomas Edison was the country’s greatest technological celebrity and, even now, no Silicon Valley billionaire approaches Edison’s portfol... | Edward Tenner | https://aeon.co//essays/what-silicon-valley-wont-admit-about-technology-and-progress | |
History | In 1683 an Ottoman siege was repelled from the walls of Vienna. But it was far from a fight between Islam and Christendom | When the bomb exploded, I was at a café outside Oslo reading on my phone. It was a gloomy Friday afternoon, 22 July 2011, 3:25pm. The news was filled with reports that Norway’s high-rise government quarter had suffered serious damage from a 900-kilo car bomb. Eight people were killed. On TV and online, pundits immediat... | Dag Herbjørnsrud | https://aeon.co//essays/the-battle-of-vienna-was-not-a-fight-between-cross-and-crescent | |
Neuroscience | Even experts can’t predict violence or suicide. Surely we’re kidding ourselves that we can see inside the minds of others | ‘I don’t understand what you think that I’m saying.’(Marital argument, overheard at a local diner.)Following a mass shooting, the gunman’s next-door neighbours are stunned, and tell reporters that he was a good, kind man. Meanwhile, former classmates and co-workers describe him as a ticking time bomb. Pundits attribute... | Robert A Burton | https://aeon.co//essays/think-you-can-tell-what-others-are-thinking-think-again | |
Social psychology | As Hannah Arendt argued, there is one common thread that connects individuals drawn to all kinds of extremist ideologies | A few years ago I discovered that my friend Tom was a white supremacist. This put me in a strange position: I am a Muslim and the daughter of immigrants. I am a member of one of the so-called invading groups that Tom fears and resents. He broadcasts his views from his social media accounts, which are a catalogue of agg... | Nabeelah Jaffer | https://aeon.co//essays/loneliness-is-the-common-ground-of-terror-and-extremism | |
Stories and literature | Dandies in the age of decadence favoured synthetics over nature, nowhere more so than in perfumery’s fabulous counterfeits | ‘Nature has good intentions … but … she cannot carry them out,’ proclaims Vivian, the spokesman in Oscar Wilde’s latterday Socratic dialogue ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1889). Vivian’s remark could serve as the perfect banner ad for the perfume industry of the time, when many of the key synthetic aroma chemicals that make up... | Catherine Maxwell | https://aeon.co//essays/a-triumph-over-nature-perfume-in-the-age-of-decadence | |
Consciousness and altered states | Do psychedelics give access to a universal, mystical experience of reality, or is that just a culture-bound illusion? | In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in the middle of a psychedelic renaissance. Research into the healing potential of psychedelics has re-started at prestigious universities such as Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and Imperial College London, and is making rock stars out of the scientists carrying it out. Their findings are ... | Jules Evans | https://aeon.co//essays/is-psychedelics-research-closer-to-theology-than-to-science | |
Love and friendship | Envy is the dark side of love, but love is the luminous side of envy. Is there a way to harness envy wisely, for growth? | My best friend in high school was tall, lean and pretty. She had a long neck and luscious dark hair, alabaster skin punctuated by a constellation of beauty marks, and a teeth gap that she flaunted before it was fashionable. She was funny and fierce, smart but not particularly diligent, and more self-assured than me in ... | Sara Protasi | https://aeon.co//essays/envy-can-poison-love-but-it-can-also-nourish-growth | |
Technology and the self | Artificial intelligence promises ever more control over the highs and lows of our emotions. Uneasy? Perhaps you should be | In September 2017, a screenshot of a simple conversation went viral on the Russian-speaking segment of the internet. It showed the same phrase addressed to two conversational agents: the English-speaking Google Assistant, and the Russian-speaking Alisa, developed by the popular Russian search engine Yandex. The phrase ... | Polina Aronson & Judith Duportail | https://aeon.co//essays/can-emotion-regulating-tech-translate-across-cultures | |
Human rights and justice | In the tapestry of diverse social groups, the loudest and most extreme get heard. To whom should we actually listen? | The Disney film Moana came out in 2016. I watched it in the UK, a homesick Kiwi huddled in a dark cinema, days before a Christmas spent away from home and family. I loved it. Tapa cloth. Greenstone. Maori mythology. Tokelauan language. A curvy woman-of-colour protagonist. The telling of the incredible tale of Polynesia... | Holly Lawford-Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-speak-on-the-behalf-of | |
Meaning and the good life | Lightning can strike twice and people do call just when you’re thinking of them – but are such coincidences meaningful? | In the 1920s, one of Carl Jung’s female patients proved particularly frustrating to him – notwithstanding her ‘excellent education’ and ‘highly polished Cartesian rationalism’. She was ‘psychologically inaccessible’, the Swiss psychiatrist later wrote in his Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960), by whi... | Cody Delistraty | https://aeon.co//essays/just-how-meaningful-is-coincidence-beyond-the-statistics | |
Spirituality | It’s hailed as the panacea for everything from cancer to war. Does research into its efficacy meet scientific standards? | Among the promised psychological and physical benefits of meditation are the elimination or reduction of stress, anxiety and depression, as well as bipolar disorder, eating disorders, diabetes, substance abuse, chronic pain, blood pressure, cancer, autism and schizophrenia. It is a panacea for the individual. There are... | Ute Kreplin | https://aeon.co//essays/can-meditation-really-make-the-world-a-better-place | |
The ancient world | Was writing invented for accounting and administration or did it evolve from religious movements, sorcery and dreams? | Recent scholars of the history of writing describe what was first and foremost an administrative tool. According to their ‘administrative hypothesis’, writing was invented so that early states could track people, land and economic production, and elites could sustain their power. Along the way (their argument goes) wri... | Michael Erard | https://aeon.co//essays/the-roots-of-writing-lie-in-hopes-and-dreams-not-in-accounting | |
Cognition and intelligence | A new interpretation of a classic psychology experiment will change your view of perception, judgment – even human nature | Scientific experiments don’t generally attract widespread attention. But the ‘Gorillas in Our Midst’ (1999) experiment of visual attention by the American psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris has become a classic. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman highlights t... | Teppo Felin | https://aeon.co//essays/are-humans-really-blind-to-the-gorilla-on-the-basketball-court | |
Ethics | Aztec moral philosophy has profound differences from the Greek tradition, not least its acceptance that nobody is perfect | When Halloween rolled around last year, my wife and I were prepared to be greeted by scores of eager trick-or-treaters. Guided by the thought that too much candy was better than too little, we bought entirely too much, and simply poured the excess on to a platter in our living room. The problem is: I have a sweet-tooth... | Sebastian Purcell | https://aeon.co//essays/aztec-moral-philosophy-didnt-expect-anyone-to-be-a-saint | |
Gender and identity | Black life is world-making, born of gaps and dislocations, imaginative leavings and returns, generative escapes and arrivals | And this is how it begins. My grandmother Gertrude Berry passed away at the age of 53, when I was three or four years old. I remember the heartiness and grit of her laughter, her smell as she holds me on the front porch, smoking a cigarette. The traces of comfort and care. But because she was a smoker, and drank, on he... | Ashon Crawley | https://aeon.co//essays/black-queer-born-again-a-life-in-and-out-of-the-church | |
Politics and government | More than a century of death notices have not diminished the achievements and the necessity of liberalism | Modern democratic governments are founded on liberal principles meant to create the basis of a fair and just society. Liberalism emerged as a reaction against absolute power, in favour of individual autonomy protected by freedom of conscience and the rule of law. As the political theorist Judith Shklar put it in Politi... | Daniel H Cole & Aurelian Craiutu | https://aeon.co//essays/reports-of-the-demise-of-liberalism-are-greatly-exaggerated | |
The environment | The glass of orange juice at the breakfast table tells a tale about what’s natural, what’s whole and what’s healthy for us | What is a ‘natural’ food product? One common suggestion is that ‘natural’ things are not made of chemicals. But the whole biological world is chemicals! Another suggestion: natural products are not genetically modified (that is, a GMO). Alas, that won’t work either. While GMO designers do mix and match genes artificial... | Joseph LaPorte | https://aeon.co//essays/is-eating-natural-food-the-same-as-eating-whats-healthy | |
Gender | The free-market arguments won’t wash: prostitution trades on the lives of the poor and marginalised – just like slavery | Prostitution is a system of commercial sexual exploitation, which is reliant on and steeped in racism, colonialism, slavery, genocide and abuse of the most marginalised and disenfranchised women and girls. The sex trade has much in common with the slave trade. Transatlantic slavery was a centuries-long international tr... | Julie Bindel | https://aeon.co//essays/what-the-sex-trade-has-in-common-with-the-slave-trade | |
Mental health | Individuals living with depersonalisation disorder bring vivid insight to the question of whether the self is an illusion | One day in the late 19th century, the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach gets on a bus. As he stares down the aisle, he sees a person at the other end, a character he dismisses as a ‘shabby pedagogue’. In the next instant, Mach realises the shabby pedagogue is none other than himself, staring out from a mirr... | Anna Ciaunica & Jane Charlton | https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-depersonalisation-disorder-say-about-the-self | |
Political philosophy | The ideal of religious tolerance has crippling flaws. It’s time to embrace a civic philosophy of reciprocity | The purpose of religious tolerance has always been, and remains, to maintain the power and purity of the dominant religion in a given state. Most dominant religions in most states today profess tolerance, but they also seem to feel especially threatened. Religious nationalist movements in the United States, Europe, Ind... | Simon Rabinovitch | https://aeon.co//essays/reciprocity-not-tolerance-is-the-basis-of-healthy-societies | |
Physics | After the success of the Standard Model, experiments have stopped answering to grand theories. Is particle physics in crisis? | In recent years, physicists have been watching the data coming in from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with a growing sense of unease. We’ve spent decades devising elaborate accounts for the behaviour of the quantum zoo of subatomic particles, the most basic components of the known universe. The Standard Model is the p... | Ben Allanach | https://aeon.co//essays/has-the-quest-for-top-down-unification-of-physics-stalled | |
Gender and identity | Individual transgender lives track a wider cultural history of surgery, hormones and revolutionised gender identities | Mel Wymore started taking testosterone just before menopause hit. As it turned out, he and his son went through puberty together. His son developed an Adam’s apple and a deeper voice first. ‘I trailed him,’ Mel said. Mel, an engineer and community activist in New York City, had been divorced for nearly 10 years when he... | Randi Hutter Epstein | https://aeon.co//essays/how-hormones-made-the-transgender-journey-safer-than-surgery | |
Human rights and justice | Throughout history, people found truth at holy places. Now we build courts, labs and altars to be truth spots too | Some places make people believe. For nearly a millennium, archaic Greek city-states and diverse cultures throughout the Mediterranean world sought truthful accounts of the future from the Oracle at Delphi. Rival prognostications were available from prophets elsewhere, but none carried the authority of Delphi: you had t... | Thomas Gieryn | https://aeon.co//essays/labs-courts-and-altars-are-also-traveling-truth-spots | |
Ethics | The soldier in battle is confronted with agonising, even impossible, ethical decisions. Could studying philosophy help? | When I attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 2002-3, the leadership training was excellent. It included discussion of the British Army’s values and the laws of armed conflict. However, I received no ethics training for the occasions when neither values nor laws would fully prepare me to make complex moral de... | Andy Owen | https://aeon.co//essays/how-philosophy-helped-one-soldier-on-the-battlefield | |
Gender | In Indonesia, high ritual power is held by those whose identity goes beyond female and male. The West is just catching up | Transgender issues seem particularly modern in the West. Perhaps this is because of how highly structured Western societies are: every form that needs filling in and every public WC available demands choosing between being a woman or a man. Or maybe it seems modern because transgender is associated with surgery, and su... | Sharyn Graham Davies | https://aeon.co//essays/the-west-can-learn-from-southeast-asias-transgender-heritage | |
History of ideas | On Paul Gauguin, authenticity and the midlife crisis: how the philosopher Bernard Williams dramatised moral luck | ‘If there’s one theme in all my work it’s about authenticity and self-expression,’ said the philosopher Bernard Williams in an interview with The Guardian in 2002. Authenticity was already an influential cultural ideal during Williams’s lifetime (he was born in 1929 and died in 2003) but it has become only more so sinc... | Daniel Callcut | https://aeon.co//essays/living-the-life-authentic-bernard-williams-on-paul-gauguin | |
Space exploration | After centuries searching for extraterrestrial life, we might find that first contact is not with organic creatures at all | We have a problem. In a 10-billion-year-old galaxy there should have been ample opportunity for at least one species to escape its own mess, and to spread across the stars, filling every niche. That this species doesn’t seem to have come calling leads to Fermi’s Paradox – if life isn’t impossibly rare, then where is ev... | Caleb Scharf | https://aeon.co//essays/first-contact-what-if-we-find-not-organic-life-but-ets-ai | |
Politics and government | Is politics driven by pragmatic self-interest or by identities and ideals? The self-harming voter offers a clue | What drives political change – culture or economics? The surge of the Right in the United States and Europe in the past two years has renewed debate on this important question. On one side, the cultural determinists attribute Donald Trump, Brexit and the rise of European populist movements to nativism, anti-immigrant s... | Sharun Mukand & Dani Rodrik | https://aeon.co//essays/how-do-elites-manage-to-hijack-voters-ideas-of-themselves | |
Bioethics | Thought eugenics died with the Nazis? Think again: the eugenic programme of sterilising the ‘unfit’ continues even today | Eugenics was a mixture of science and social movement that aimed to improve the human race over generations. Those of good stock were to produce more children, and those of bad stock were to produce fewer (or no) children. The English polymath Francis Galton coined the term ‘eugenics’ in his Inquiries into Human Facult... | Robert A Wilson | https://aeon.co//essays/eugenics-today-where-eugenic-sterilisation-continues-now | |
Love and friendship | Lovers crave intensity, Buddhists say craving causes suffering. Is it possible to be deeply in love yet truly detached? | Humans are social animals. We live in groups. We care for our offspring for years. We cooperate with each other (the United States Congress notwithstanding). Most of all, we have lasting relationships with other individual humans – what biologists call long-term pair bonds. Some of these pair bonds, you’ve surely notic... | Lisa Feldman Barrett & John Dunne | https://aeon.co//essays/does-buddhist-detachment-allow-for-a-healthier-togetherness | |
Sex and sexuality | For one shining moment, being a Russian woman meant sexual freedom and radical equality. Never seen before – or since | ‘We don’t have sex in the USSR, and we are categorically against it.’ When a female hotel manager said this on Soviet state television in 1986, the studio audience laughed. The line soon became a catchphrase, exposing the gap between official discourse and a reality that was markedly less pure. But Russia’s conservativ... | Paula Erizanu | https://aeon.co//essays/the-shining-moment-when-russian-revolutionary-women-reinvented-sex | |
Mathematics | It’s no surprise that mathematics has influenced music. But did you know that the influence goes both ways? | My interest in the relations between music and mathematics started at an early age. My grandfather played his violin for me when I was about five years old, and I still remember it clearly. Later he explained to me various topics in his physics book, from which he himself had studied when he was young. In the chapter o... | Eli Maor | https://aeon.co//essays/ringing-the-chords-of-the-universe-how-music-influenced-science | |
Meaning and the good life | Modern self-help draws heavily on Stoic philosophy. But Aristotle was better at understanding real human happiness | In the Western world, only since the mid-18th century has it been possible to discuss ethical questions publicly without referring to Christianity. Modern thinking about morality, which assumes that gods do not exist, or at least do not intervene, is in its infancy. But the ancient Greeks and Romans elaborated robust p... | Edith Hall | https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-aristotle-teach-us-about-the-routes-to-happiness | |
Future of technology | The distributed network has gobbled the hierarchical firm. Only by seizing the platform can workers avoid digital serfdom | Why do corporations exist? These hierarchical, self-contained assemblies of labour, capital and know-how have been with us for so long that by now they seem almost ‘natural’. But apart from what they make or do or sell, the very structure of the company has a history. The clearest rationale for corporations comes from ... | George Zarkadakis | https://aeon.co//essays/workers-of-the-world-unite-on-distributed-digital-platforms | |
Nations and empires | Nations come with a vast array of peoples, languages and histories, but the strong ones share three simple things | Why do some countries fall apart, often along their ethnic fault lines, while others have held together over decades and centuries, despite governing a diverse population as well? Why is it, in other words, that nation-building succeeded in some places while it failed in others? The current tragedy in Syria illustrates... | Andreas Wimmer | https://aeon.co//essays/why-some-countries-come-together-while-others-fall-apart | |
Art | Forensics can’t be sure. Provenance can be fudged. This is why the expert eye still rules the game of art authentication | The drawing certainly looks right. In pen and ink and lightly shadowed, an anguished-looking Saint Sebastian is tied to a tree, wide-eyed and wild-haired, and about to be shot through with Roman arrows because of his Christian faith. (Miraculously, he will survive the arrows, though later, according to The Golden Legen... | Noah Charney | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-expert-eye-still-rules-the-game-of-art-authenticity | |
Poverty and development | International development has focused on material goods, but religion has an important role to play in human flourishing | The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom (1999) begins with a parable from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the oldest scriptures of Hinduism. Maitreyi asks her husband Yajnavalkya whether she would achieve immortality if she had all the riches in the world. Yajnavalkya replies that th... | Manini Sheker | https://aeon.co//essays/is-there-a-role-for-religion-in-international-development | |
Astronomy | We know that the Universe is awash with watery moons and planets. How can we pinpoint which of them could support life? | The largest and deepest body of water known to us has never been sailed upon; it has no islands or shores, no wind-churned waves, no sunlight-silvered surface. This dark ocean can’t be found on any map of Earth – it’s more than 300 million miles away, on Europa, one of at least 69 moons that orbit Jupiter. Data from th... | Tim Folger | https://aeon.co//essays/in-a-galaxy-awash-in-water-do-any-other-worlds-have-just-enough | |
History of science | One astronomer’s dimpled pie is another’s cratered moon. How can our mind’s eye learn to see the new and unexpected? | When Galileo looked at the Moon through his new telescope in early 1610, he immediately grasped that the shifting patterns of light and dark were caused by the changing angle of the Sun’s rays on a rough surface. He described something akin to mountain ranges ‘ablaze with the splendour of his beams’, their sides in sha... | Gene Tracy | https://aeon.co//essays/seeing-is-not-simple-you-need-to-be-both-knowing-and-naive | |
Mood and emotion | The Romantic stereotype that creativity is enhanced by a mood disorder is dangerous, and dissolves under careful scrutiny | Is creativity inherently related to mood disorders? It’s a common belief today that there exists some intimate relationship between the two. Consider common paragons of creativity: Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton (and countless others), all reaching new creative heights while str... | Christa L Taylor | https://aeon.co//essays/is-there-any-evidence-linking-creativity-and-mood-disorders | |
Ageing and death | Pet dogs often have a peaceful death that forestalls protracted suffering and pain. Why can’t we do the same for humans? | I killed my dog last year. Mika was a shelter mutt, so she was around 10 or 12 years old; I can’t be sure. Twelve dog years would have put her at around 80 human years, which is a pretty good run. But what’s strange about having a dog is how quickly they age relative to us – they start out younger than we are, catch up... | Joseph Pierre | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-we-give-dogs-a-better-death-than-we-give-ourselves | |
Cognition and intelligence | Across vast cultural divides people can understand one another through gesture. Does that make it a universal language? | In the spring of 1528, the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca made landfall on what is now the gulf coast of Florida. Over the next eight years, as he and a small party traversed thousands of miles, they found themselves in a new-world Babel, moving from ‘one strange tongue to another’. In their many encounter... | Kensy Cooperrider | https://aeon.co//essays/from-pointing-to-nodding-is-gesture-a-universal-language | |
Philosophy of religion | Liberating oneself from rebirths might seem irrelevant to the non-believer. But nirvana is also a profound psychological goal | The concept of nirvana occupies a unique place in Buddhist thought – not just because it represents the culmination of the Buddhist path, and not just because it represents the nicest imaginable place to be, but also because of the way it straddles the two sides of Buddhism. There is, on the one hand, the naturalistic ... | Robert Wright | https://aeon.co//essays/nirvana-can-seem-an-exotic-metaphysical-idea-until-you-look-closer | |
The ancient world | The Greeks didn’t have modern ideas of race. Did they see themselves as white, black – or as something else altogether? | Few issues provoke such controversy as the skin-colour of the Ancient Greeks. Last year in an article published in Forbes, the Classics scholar Sarah Bond at the University of Iowa caused a storm by pointing out that many of the Greek statues that seem white to us now were in antiquity painted in colour. This is an unc... | Tim Whitmarsh | https://aeon.co//essays/when-homer-envisioned-achilles-did-he-see-a-black-man | |
Neuroscience | Neuroscience gives us invaluable, wondrous knowledge about the brain – including an awareness of its limitations | More than 2,000 years ago, the semi-mythical father of medicine, Hippocrates of Kos, challenged the spiritualists of his time with a bold claim about the nature of the human mind. In response to supernatural explanations of mental phenomena, Hippocrates insisted that ‘from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights... | Alan Jasanoff | https://aeon.co//essays/we-are-more-than-our-brains-on-neuroscience-and-being-human | |
Beauty and aesthetics | Rather than a golden ratio or a moral judgment, beauty is more like a radical jolt that awakens us to the world | This portrait is beautiful. Sometimes, I find its beauty in the perfectly angled crook of the arm that rests easily across the sitter’s lap. At other times, it is in the unstudied grace of the hand that props up the head, the long fingers curled in repose. Often, it’s the dress that I find beautiful: expansive, heavy a... | Shahidha Bari | https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-beauty-if-not-a-jolt-that-awakens-us-to-the-world | |
History | Radical Quaker Benjamin Lay was a pioneer of abolitionism, who lived what he preached. So why was he erased from history? | In September 1738, Benjamin Lay, a radical Quaker barely four feet tall, filled an animal bladder with bright red pokeberry juice, then tucked it into the secret compartment of a book. He donned a military uniform and a sword, covered himself in an overcoat, hid the book, and set off from his home in Abington, Pennsylv... | Marcus Rediker | https://aeon.co//essays/the-abolitionist-benjamin-lay-was-a-hero-ahead-of-his-time | |
Anthropology | Namibian hunter-gatherers deride those who stand out. What does this tell us about why, and how, we care about fairness? | Selfish traits such as envy have a bad reputation. They are, after all, ‘deadly sins’, ‘impurities of the heart’ and, according to the Summa Theologica (c1265-1273) of Thomas Aquinas, their ‘object is contrary to charity, whence the soul derives its spiritual life’. And it is not just Catholicism that has it in for the... | James Suzman | https://aeon.co//essays/why-inequality-bothers-people-more-than-poverty | |
Knowledge | A growing number of philosophers are conducting experiments to test their arguments. Is this the future for philosophy? | Conducting thought experiments from the armchair has long been an accepted method in analytic philosophy. What do thought experiments from the armchair look like? Philosophers think about real and imagined scenarios involving knowledge, morality, free will and other matters. They then use those scenarios to elicit thei... | Stephanie Wykstra | https://aeon.co//essays/beyond-the-armchair-must-philosophy-become-experimental | |
Work | In 1890 William Morris imagined a world free from wage slavery. Thanks to technology, his vision is finally within reach | William Morris (1834-1896) is best-known today as a Victorian designer who has never gone out of fashion. You can buy Morris merchandise – from coasters to picture frames to ties to mugs – in the gift shops of every big design museum. And if you Google his name, your screen will erupt in cascades of dense, colourful or... | Vasilis Kostakis & Wolfgang Drechsler | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-utopian-vision-of-william-morris-is-now-within-reach | |
Stories and literature | Tech flourished in communist Bulgaria and so did a body of science fiction asking vital philosophical questions | The police report would have baffled the most grizzled detective. A famous writer murdered in a South Dakota restaurant full of diners; the murder weapon – a simple hug. A murderer with no motive, and one who seemed genuinely distraught at what he had done. You will not find this strange murder case in the crime pages ... | Victor Petrov | https://aeon.co//essays/how-communist-bulgaria-became-a-leader-in-tech-and-sci-fi | |
Values and beliefs | The only way to construct a robust philosophy for life is to have a clear and realistic picture of what makes humans tick | A strange thing is happening in modern philosophy: many philosophers don’t seem to believe that there is such a thing as human nature. What makes this strange is that, not only does the new attitude run counter to much of the history of philosophy, but – despite loud claims to the contrary – it also goes against the fi... | Skye C Cleary & Massimo Pigliucci | https://aeon.co//essays/theres-no-philosophy-of-life-without-a-theory-of-human-nature | |
Cities | Urbanisation might be the most profound change to human society in a century, more telling than colour, class or continent | At some unknown moment between 2010 and 2015, for the first time in human history, more than half the world’s population lived in cities. Urbanisation is unlikely to reverse. Every week since, another 3 million country dwellers have become urbanites. Rarely in history has a small number of metropolises bundled as much ... | Michael Goebel | https://aeon.co//essays/intellectual-life-is-still-catching-up-to-urbanisation | |
Mental health | Just one in five people will be lucky enough to avoid mental health problems throughout their life. How do they do it? | I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that I was vulnerable. From childhood on, I felt stress as acutely as a needle puncture – the familiar tightness in my ribcage, the trembling in my upper arms. In an attempt to dull the pain, I’d obsess endlessly about the current subject of my worries, whether it was a guy wh... | Elizabeth Svoboda | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-the-temperamentally-blessed-sail-through-lifes-storms | |
Religion | Behind the beatific image of Tibetan Buddhism lies a dark, complicated reality. But is it one the Western gaze wants to see? | Tibetan Buddhism, in the pop-cultural psyche of the United States, is the Dalai Lama’s face, grinning from a cover in the self-help section of your nearest bookstore. It’s a monk in a maroon robe sitting calmly in a full-skull electrode cap as researchers probe his mind to learn how meditation plays into his unique ser... | Mark Hay | https://aeon.co//essays/what-lies-behind-the-simplistic-image-of-the-happy-buddhist | |
Evolution | Living among humans favours fearless problem-solvers interested in new things. That’s how city birds get smarter | A crumbling concrete wall, a ramp and a vast expanse of asphalt on which identical silvery-grey sedans are slowly circling and zigzagging between traffic cones. It does not seem like much but, to urban biologists, the Kadan driving school in the Japanese city of Sendai is hallowed ground. The four of us (the biology st... | Menno Schilthuizen | https://aeon.co//essays/how-city-birds-evolved-to-be-smarter-than-rural-birds | |
Political philosophy | Marriage is what happens when the state gets involved in endorsing and regulating personal relationships. It’s a bad idea | What distinguishes marriage from other relationships? It is not set apart by its durability: unmarried partnerships can be more permanent than married ones. Children are not the sole preserve of marital relationships: in most liberal democratic states, it is just as common for children to be born to unmarried parents a... | Clare Chambers | https://aeon.co//essays/why-marriage-is-both-anachronistic-and-discriminatory | |
Genetics | War, famine and persecution inflict profound changes on bodies and brains. Could these changes persist over generations? | A few years ago, my husband was contacted by genealogists tracking descendants of rabbis from the Lithuanian shtetl of Kelm. The impoverished little town was known for its fierce schools of Talmudic learning, or yeshivas; it was a centre of Mussar – a strict system of ethics based on logic and the rigorous practice of ... | Pam Weintraub | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-sufferings-of-one-generation-are-passed-on-to-the-next | |
Medicine | When antibiotics fail, could phage therapy succeed? The germ’s-eye view of infection might open up revolutionary treatments | She was only 22 years old, but her attending doctor in Texas was running out of options. The sticky substance coating the patient’s lungs was par for the course with cystic fibrosis (CF); mucus is a signature of this heritable, progressive and incurable disease. So, too, is infection. But this time, a particularly nast... | Emily Monosson | https://aeon.co//essays/how-a-cocktail-of-live-viruses-can-work-when-antibiotics-fail | |
Politics and government | Imperial Chinese conscription shows how ordinary people exercise influential political skills, even in a repressive state | It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that because people in the past didn’t live in democracies, they must have faced fewer political choices and had fewer political skills than we do. It is true that imperial subjects did not choose their emperors in democratic elections. But if we think about politics in a broad... | Michael Szonyi | https://aeon.co//essays/the-junhu-and-the-art-of-everyday-politics-in-imperial-china | |
History of ideas | Science asks and answers its big questions, so why is philosophy taking its time? Because it’s only just getting started | Philosophers periodically fret about the apparent lack of progress in their discipline. The fact that science – always the comparator in these discussions – has been humming along so nicely doesn’t exactly help. By discovering its methods and unifying a lot of us around them, science has figured out how to get human be... | J L Schellenberg | https://aeon.co//essays/why-philosophy-is-taking-its-time-to-answer-the-big-questions | |
Knowledge | First you don’t hear other views. Then you can’t trust them. Your personal information network entraps you just like a cult | Something has gone wrong with the flow of information. It’s not just that different people are drawing subtly different conclusions from the same evidence. It seems like different intellectual communities no longer share basic foundational beliefs. Maybe nobody cares about the truth anymore, as some have started to wor... | C Thi Nguyen | https://aeon.co//essays/why-its-as-hard-to-escape-an-echo-chamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult | |
History of science | Demanding that a theory is falsifiable or observable, without any subtlety, will hold science back. We need madcap ideas | The Viennese physicist Wolfgang Pauli suffered from a guilty conscience. He’d solved one of the knottiest puzzles in nuclear physics, but at a cost. ‘I have done a terrible thing,’ he admitted to a friend in the winter of 1930. ‘I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.’ Despite his pantomime of despair, Pa... | Adam Becker | https://aeon.co//essays/a-fetish-for-falsification-and-observation-holds-back-science | |
The ancient world | The British, Irish and Lebanese have all claimed descent from the ancient Phoenicians. But ancient Phoenicia never existed | Modern nationalism created history as we know it today: what we learn in school, what we study at university, what we read at home is all shaped by the forms and norms of our nation-states. Modern nationalism took history from the province of the wealthy gentleman amateur, as nationalism’s focus on literacy and organis... | Josephine Quinn | https://aeon.co//essays/phoenicia-an-imaginary-friend-to-nations-in-need-of-ancestors | |
Human rights and justice | Behind bars in Texas, I saw masculinity in all its violence and vulnerability. Was this the war that men had primed me for? | I’ve been haunted for some time by an expression in The Fall (1956) by Albert Camus that goes: ‘After a certain age, each man has the face he deserves.’ The idea makes me instinctively scan all the faces that I’ve seen in my life so far. My neighbour growing up, ‘Mister Bruce’, who smoked weed all day and told us stori... | Steven Powers | https://aeon.co//essays/what-i-learned-about-masculinity-behind-bars-in-texas | |
Illness and disease | In a warming world, ticks thrive in more places than ever before, making Lyme disease the first epidemic of climate change | Evolution has endowed the big-footed snowshoe hare with a particularly nifty skill. Over a period of about 10 weeks, as autumn days shorten in the high peaks and boreal forests, the nimble nocturnal hare transforms itself. Where it was once a tawny brown to match the pine needles and twigs amid which it forages, the ha... | Mary Beth Pfeiffer | https://aeon.co//essays/how-lyme-disease-became-the-first-epidemic-of-climate-change | |
Human evolution | New evidence about the ancient humans who occupied Asia is cascading in: the story of our species needs rewriting again | Modern humans arose only once, in Africa, about 200,000 years ago. They then spread across Eurasia some time after 60,000 years ago, replacing whatever indigenous populations they met with no interbreeding. This is the ‘Out of Africa’ model, as it’s commonly known. In the 1990s, the hypothesis found widespread acceptan... | Christopher Bae | https://aeon.co//essays/new-evidence-about-the-human-occupation-of-asia-is-cascading-in | |
The environment | Our insatiable desire for acceleration exacts a mortal toll on the animal world. It’s time for humans to slow right down | This feather belonged to a Canada goose that summered in Labrador and migrated along the Atlantic flyway, to winter somewhere in New Jersey most likely. On a cold winter afternoon, 15 January 2009, the goose was flying with a skein of conspecifics at about 3,000 feet. Just as it was passing over the Bronx, the goose – ... | Gary Kroll | https://aeon.co//essays/what-roadkill-says-about-the-insatiability-of-human-speed | |
Future of technology | Fantasies about new power sources for human ambitions go back a century or more. Could these past visions energise our own future? | In his short story ‘Let There Be Light’, the science-fiction author Robert A Heinlein introduced the energy source that would power his Future History series of stories and novels. First published in Super Science Stories magazine in May 1940, it described the Douglas-Martin sunpower screens that would provide (almost)... | Iwan Rhys Morus | https://aeon.co//essays/how-science-fiction-feeds-the-fuel-solutions-of-the-future | |
Race and ethnicity | Race is a shapeshifting adversary: what seems self-evident takes training to see, and twists under political pressure | We think we know what race is. When the United States Census Bureau says that the country will be majority non-white by 2044, that seems like a simple enough statement. But race has always been a weaselly thing. Today my students, including Black and Latino students, regularly ask me why Asians (supposedly) ‘assimilate... | Gregory Smithsimon | https://aeon.co//essays/race-is-not-real-what-you-see-is-a-power-relationship-made-flesh | |
Politics and government | Millions of Russians and eastern Europeans now believe that they were better off under communism. What does this signify? | ‘[T]he people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears.’Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)The public memory of 20th-century communism i... | Kristen R Ghodsee & Scott Sehon | https://aeon.co//essays/the-merits-of-taking-an-anti-anti-communism-stance |
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