title stringclasses 114
values | description stringlengths 71 138 | essay stringlengths 412 63.4k | authors stringlengths 7 67 | source_url stringlengths 52 104 | thumbnail_url stringlengths 113 249 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Work | Men from the Shetland Islands worked the whaling expeditions to the Antarctic. Until the whales were gone | Where the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean merge, a small Scottish archipelago sits barren and bald, hundreds of clumped islands of grey and green rock. Shetland is a 12-hour ferry ride from the granite port city of Aberdeen, and its population of about 23,000 stretches across one larger island and a few smaller ones t... | Lyndsie Bourgon | https://aeon.co//essays/the-last-whalers-commuting-from-the-north-sea-to-antarctica | |
Subcultures | The theory that the brain produces its own psychedelic compound provokes pop-culture enthusiasm and scientific controversy | Even Dr Gonzo, the hell-raising Samoan attorney in Hunter S Thompson’s novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), wouldn’t touch ‘extract of pineal’. That stuff was the limit: ‘One whiff of that shit would turn you into something out of a goddamn medical encyclopaedia! Man, your head would swell up like a watermelon,... | Graham St John | https://aeon.co//essays/could-the-brain-produce-its-own-psychedelic-compound | |
Love and friendship | Robot relationships need not be kinky, exploitative or fake. In fact they might give human relationships a helpful boost | There is a heartbreaking scene in the middle of Blade Runner 2049 (2017). The hero of the movie, a replicant called K, lives a drab existence in a dystopian, future Los Angeles. The one bright spot in his life is his patient and sympathetic partner, Joi. They share many affectionate moments on screen. But then she is k... | John Danaher | https://aeon.co//essays/programmed-to-love-is-a-human-robot-relationship-wrong | |
Earth science and climate | The ancient Earth was profoundly alien. How do we distinguish between the living and non-living in the fossil record? | In September 2016, Nature reported that 3.7-billion-year-old putative stromatolites had been discovered in Greenland. Stromatolites are somewhat like ancient fossilised coral reefs, if those reefs had been built by microbes rather than coral. They are some of the most easily identifiable evidence of life on early Earth... | Sophia Roosth | https://aeon.co//essays/the-shape-of-life-before-the-dinosaurs-on-a-strange-planet | |
Political philosophy | In the postwar period it was understood to be the fundamental malaise of modern life. Why aren’t we ‘alienated’ any more? | The fear of ‘alienation’ from a perceived state of harmony has a long and winding history. Western culture is replete with stories of expulsion from paradise and a yearning to return, from Adam and Eve’s departure from the Garden of Eden to the epic journey of Odysseus back to Ithaca. In the modern era, ‘alienation’ re... | Martin Jay | https://aeon.co//essays/in-the-1950s-everybody-cool-was-a-little-alienated-what-changed | |
Logic and probability | It seems only logical: if A is better than B, and B is better than C, then A is better than C. Right? Not necessarily | Some parents urge their children to be the best in everything they do. They push them to be the best athlete, and the best scholar, and the best musician, and so on. Other parents urge their children to pursue whatever they are best at, whether it be athletics, academics or music. Some parents push their children to tr... | Larry Temkin | https://aeon.co//essays/attempts-to-choose-the-best-life-may-be-doomed-to-failure | |
Stories and literature | You probably know a quote from him. He probably never said it. How did Einstein become a touchstone of all that is wise? | In late 2017, a sheet of paper bearing a 13-word sentence in German in the original handwriting of Albert Einstein went on sale at an auction house in Jerusalem. The city is home to the archives of Einstein, which he willed before his death in 1955 to the Hebrew University, the institution that he helped to found in th... | Andrew Robinson | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-we-love-to-quote-and-misquote-albert-einstein | |
Beauty and aesthetics | In China and Japan, temples may be rebuilt and ancient warriors cast again. There is nothing sacred about the ‘original’ | In 1956, an exhibition of masterpieces of Chinese art took place in the museum of Asian art in Paris, the Musée Cernuschi. It soon emerged that these pictures were, in fact, forgeries. In this case, the sensitive issue was that the forger was none other than the most famous Chinese painter of the 20th century, Chang Da... | Byung-Chul Han | https://aeon.co//essays/why-in-china-and-japan-a-copy-is-just-as-good-as-an-original | |
Thinkers and theories | When we encounter another individual truly as a person, not as an object for use, we become fully human: Martin Buber | Walter Benjamin; Marc Bloch; Ernst Cohen; Georg Alexander Pick. Some of the finest Jewish minds of the 20th century were lost to Nazi bloodlust. Martin Buber was one of the lucky ones. In March 1938, at 60 years of age, he left Germany for Jerusalem and a professorship at the Hebrew University. He had planned to return... | M M Owen | https://aeon.co//essays/all-real-living-is-meeting-the-sacred-love-of-martin-buber | |
Ethics | As a philosopher, I can’t conceal my class. But I prefer the counsel of my grandmother to platitudes about ‘impostor syndrome’ | When I was in graduate school, a professor came upon me listening to music on my headphones. The piece had stunned me and it must have shown in my face, for he asked if something was wrong. I told him no, but explained that I’d just heard the ‘Ode to Joy’. I can’t recall exactly what I said next, but I enthused about w... | Amy Olberding | https://aeon.co//essays/how-useful-is-impostor-syndrome-in-academia | |
Race and ethnicity | An 18th-century creole slaveholder invented the idea of ‘racial prejudice’ to defend diversity among a slaveowning elite | In 1791, Julien Raimond published one of the first critiques of racial prejudice. Raimond was a free man of racially mixed ancestry from the French colony of Saint-Domingue (today the country of Haiti), and his essay ‘Observations on the Origin and Progress of White People’s Prejudice against People of Colour’ argued t... | Blake Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/what-if-prejudice-isnt-what-causes-racism | |
Thinkers and theories | Zany and earnest, political yet puckish, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were philosophy’s most improbable duo | In 1969, at the height of the French summer, a radical psychoanalyst went in search of a well-known philosopher. After driving three hours south to Limousin – a region in central France renowned for its forests and cattle-farms – the man found his quarry at home in bed, convalescing after surgery to remove a tubercular... | Edward Thornton | https://aeon.co//essays/a-creative-multiplicity-the-philosophy-of-deleuze-and-guattari | |
Human evolution | Early hominins who sailed across oceans left indirect evidence that they might have been the first to use language | What is the greatest human technological innovation? Fire? The wheel? Penicillin? Clothes? Google? None of these come close. As you read this, you are using the winning technology. The greatest tool in the world is language. Without it there would be no culture, no literature, no science, no history, no commercial ente... | Daniel Everett | https://aeon.co//essays/tools-and-voyages-suggest-that-homo-erectus-invented-language | |
Values and beliefs | We need a philosophy of Slow Thought to ease thinking into a more playful and porous dialogue about what it means to live | In 1986, a McDonald’s restaurant opened at the foot of the Spanish Steps, in the Piazza di Spagna, the most famous square in Rome. The invasion of cheap American fast food into the heart of Rome caused a sensation. One protester was Carlo Petrini, a Leftist Italian journalist, who initiated a movement called Slow Food.... | Vincenzo Di Nicola | https://aeon.co//essays/take-your-time-the-seven-pillars-of-a-slow-thought-manifesto | |
Animals and humans | Can they shape their own lives? Or the course of history? It’s time to reconsider the significance of animal agency | Plato’s attempt 2,500 years ago to define the human as ‘a featherless biped’ had to be swiftly qualified –‘with broad flat nails’ – when Diogenes presented him with a plucked chicken. Many subsequent attempts at human self-definition have faced similar problems in relation to exceptionality. Yet lately, scholars have b... | Amanda Rees | https://aeon.co//essays/can-animals-shape-their-own-lives-or-the-course-of-history | |
Future of technology | Robo-bees and drone-seeded forests: can technology mend our broken relationship with the natural world? | I’ve tried many ways to free my brain from my iPhone. I’ve invented rules, bought books, deleted apps, installed other apps. But the only thing that reliably works is to leave the phone at home and to walk along a path through the nearby woods. With trees overhead, and mud below, you quickly forget the last social medi... | Henry Mance | https://aeon.co//essays/tech-broke-our-relationship-with-wilderness-can-it-mend-it-too | |
Mental health | My anxiety has been lifelong but I would not wish it away. It has made me the philosopher – and person – that I am today | One morning, my father died at home. I awoke to a call for help – my name shouted once, loudly, desperately, fearfully, by my mother – ran into my parents’ bedroom, and found my father convulsing in the throes of a massive heart attack. His body bucked on a deadly trampoline, his chest heaved, spittle flecked his lips ... | Samir Chopra | https://aeon.co//essays/dread-accompanies-me-through-life-but-it-is-not-without-consolation | |
Beauty and aesthetics | For Adorno, popular culture is not just bad art – it enslaves us to repetition and robs us of our aesthetic freedom | Classical music and high European culture were at the heart of Theodor Adorno’s philosophy and outlook on life. He was born in 1903 in Frankfurt in Germany, and grew up with music, both as a listener and a practitioner: his mother, Maria Calvelli-Adorno, was a singer, and the young Adorno was a talented pianist. He att... | Owen Hulatt | https://aeon.co//essays/against-guilty-pleasures-adorno-on-the-crimes-of-pop-culture | |
Economics | The financial world is a theatrical production, abundantly lubricated by that magical elixir of illusionists: confidence | On 10 June 2008, Dick Fuld, the soon-to-be infamous CEO of a soon-to-be infamous investment bank, Lehman Brothers in New York, assembled his executive committee in response to a second-quarter earnings report registering nearly $3 billion in losses. The purpose of the meeting was for everybody in Fuld’s inner circle to... | Matt Seybold | https://aeon.co//essays/the-financial-world-and-the-magical-elixir-of-confidence | |
Education | Writing essays by a formula was meant to be a step on the way. Now it’s the stifling goal for student and scholar alike | Schools and colleges in the United States are adept at teaching students how to write by the numbers. The idea is to make writing easy by eliminating the messy part – making meaning – and focusing effort on reproducing a formal structure. As a result, the act of writing turns from moulding a lump of clay into a unique ... | David Labaree | https://aeon.co//essays/writing-essays-by-formula-teaches-students-how-to-not-think | |
Nations and empires | Eighteenth-century Indian arms were as sophisticated as European. Then came the British Empire to drive industry backwards | In the mid-18th century, advanced areas of northwest Europe and east and south Asia enjoyed roughly comparable life expectancy, rates of consumption, and potential for economic growth. But around 1800, in what scholars call the ‘great divergence’, the power and wealth of the West suddenly and dramatically eclipsed that... | Priya Satia | https://aeon.co//essays/is-the-gun-the-basis-of-modern-anglo-civilisation | |
Human evolution | It’s not tools, culture or communication that make humans unique but our knack for offloading dirty work onto machines | In the 1920s, the Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov used artificial insemination to breed a ‘humanzee’ – a cross between a human and our closest relative species, the chimpanzee. The attempt horrified his contemporaries, much as it would modern readers. Given the moral quandaries a humanzee might create, we can be... | Antone Martinho-Truswell | https://aeon.co//essays/the-offloading-ape-the-human-is-the-beast-that-automates | |
Personality | Psychoanalysis explains how authoritarians energise hatred, self-pity and delusion while promising heaven on Earth | Why have people welcomed tyrannical, authoritarian leaders time after time? For millennia, philosophers and political theorists have tried to explain why we willingly participate in our own oppression by submitting to authoritarian leaders. And today, the ominous rise of authoritarian regimes the world over renders thi... | David Livingstone Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/the-omnipotent-victim-how-tyrants-work-up-a-crowds-devotion | |
Philosophy of science | Cosmopsychism might seem crazy, but it provides a robust explanatory model for how the Universe became fine-tuned for life | In the past 40 or so years, a strange fact about our Universe gradually made itself known to scientists: the laws of physics, and the initial conditions of our Universe, are fine-tuned for the possibility of life. It turns out that, for life to be possible, the numbers in basic physics – for example, the strength of gr... | Philip Goff | https://aeon.co//essays/cosmopsychism-explains-why-the-universe-is-fine-tuned-for-life | |
History | Medieval people knew that love and pain and dread and desire made the experience of education possible, and could also sow ruin | Around the year 1116, Fulbert, the canon of Notre-Dame Cathedral, sought a live-in tutor for his gifted niece. The young woman was already well-known for her learning, so Fulbert chose an ostentatiously brilliant philosopher for the job. The man he hired had already challenged some of the best minds of his time, and wa... | Irina Dumitrescu | https://aeon.co//essays/medieval-wisdom-about-teachers-behaving-badly | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | The Anthropocene feels different depending on where you are – too often, the ‘we’ of the world is white and Western | Every year, human activity moves more sediment and rock than all natural processes combined, including erosion and rivers. This might not shock you. In fact, you’ve probably seen similar soundbites circulating online, signals of the sheer scale of how we’re terraforming the planet in the era of the Anthropocene. Natura... | Gabrielle Hecht | https://aeon.co//essays/if-we-talk-about-hurting-our-planet-who-exactly-is-the-we | |
The environment | The thugs of the barnyard, roosters were bred to fight and strut. Does our highly tamed world have room for them any more? | My neighbour James brings us his rooster, carrying him across the street in his arms. I watch from the dining room window where I sit working, watch the rooster’s succulent comb tremoring lightly, his long yellow legs dangling below the crook of James’s arm. They are smooth, still spurless, and remind me of a rubber ch... | Amanda Giracca | https://aeon.co//essays/is-the-rooster-with-its-thuggish-ways-a-domestic-animal | |
Biology | Networks regulate everything from ant colonies and middle schools to epidemics and the internet. Here’s how they work | We live enmeshed in networks. The internet, a society, a body, an ant colony, a tumour: they are all networks of interactions, among people, ants or cells – aggregates of nodes or locations linked by some relation. The power of networks is in their local connections. All networks grow, shrink, merge or split, link by l... | Deborah M Gordon | https://aeon.co//essays/the-most-important-connection-in-any-network-is-the-local | |
History of science | Is Earth inside the Universe, or vice versa? Since we can grasp only a model of reality, how do we know what’s real? | In 1869, the Baptist fundamentalist Cyrus Reed Teed reported his divine revelation that the Earth was hollow. At first glance, nothing novel. Jules Verne had explored a similar concept five years prior in his science-fiction adventure Journey to the Centre of the Earth. But while Verne imagined a subterranean cavern of... | Joel Frohlich | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-hollow-earth-hypothesis-illuminates-falsifiable-science | |
Pleasure and pain | Philosophers have traditionally been highly suspicious of fleeting pleasures, but to enjoy the moment is a radical act | One fine evening a band is playing. People are dancing and enjoying themselves. A woman is there, relishing the event. Then she thinks to herself: Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And there will be other summers, other band concerts, but never this one, never again, never as no... | Sandy Grant | https://aeon.co//essays/enjoyment-no-matter-how-brief-is-a-philosophical-good | |
Knowledge | Contrary to recent opinion, there is such a thing as the self, and it is empirically amenable to scientific investigation | ‘Know thyself’ is one of philosophy’s most ancient aphorisms. But is there such a thing as the self and, if there is, can it be empirically investigated through scientific methods? Antirealists deny the existence of the self – for them it is an illusion, a fiction of the mind. If there was no one to perceive it, there ... | Şerife Tekin | https://aeon.co//essays/the-self-does-exist-and-is-amenable-to-scientific-investigation | |
Stories and literature | Pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed? | The first time we see Darth Vader doing more than heavy breathing in Star Wars (1977), he’s strangling a man to death. A few scenes later, he’s blowing up a planet. He kills his subordinates, chokes people with his mind, does all kinds of things a good guy would never do. But then the nature of a bad guy is that he doe... | Catherine Nichols | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-pop-culture-obsessed-with-battles-between-good-and-evil | |
The environment | Debates about whether to protect these ghostly white deer demonstrate deep connections between our humanity and the hunt | Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851) by Herman MelvilleSeveral years ago, conspicuous black-and-white banners and yard signs began to appear in my rural neighbourhood in southwest Wisconsin. Planted in lawns, posted on barns, displayed in tavern windows, they read: SAVE The Rare White Deer. S... | Curt Meine | https://aeon.co//essays/to-hunt-or-not-our-humanity-is-defined-by-the-act-of-asking | |
History | Medieval people feared death by celibacy as much as venereal disease, and practiced complex sexual health regimens | In the popular imagination, the history of sex is a straightforward one. For centuries, the people of the Christian West lived in a state of sexual repression, straitjacketed by an overwhelming fear of sin, combined with a complete lack of knowledge about their own bodies. Those who fell short of the high moral standar... | Katherine Harvey | https://aeon.co//essays/getting-down-and-medieval-the-sex-lives-of-the-middle-ages | |
Philosophy of mind | Given how little control we have of our wandering minds, how can we cultivate real mental autonomy? | Imagine you are standing on the prow of a sailboat, watching a school of dolphins leaping left and right. When travelling long distances, jumping saves dolphins energy, because there’s less friction in the air than in the water below. It also seems to be an efficient way to move rapidly and breathe at the same time. Ty... | Thomas Metzinger | https://aeon.co//essays/are-you-sleepwalking-now-what-we-know-about-mind-wandering | |
History of science | How spiritualists of the 19th century forged a lasting association between higher dimensions and the occult world | For a moment the Canterville ghost stood quite motionless in natural indignation … There was evidently no time to be lost, so, hastily adopting the Fourth Dimension of Space as a means of escape, he vanished through the wainscoting, and the house became quite quiet. The Canterville Ghost (1887) by Oscar WildeJohann Zöl... | Paul Halpern | https://aeon.co//essays/the-occult-roots-of-higher-dimensional-research-in-physics | |
Evolution | Is evolutionary science due for a major overhaul – or is talk of ‘revolution’ misguided? | When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchi... | Kevin Laland | https://aeon.co//essays/science-in-flux-is-a-revolution-brewing-in-evolutionary-theory | |
Political philosophy | He might be the poster boy for free-market economics, but that distorts what Adam Smith really thought | If you’ve heard of one economist, it’s likely to be Adam Smith. He’s the best-known of all economists, and is typically hailed as the founding father of the dismal science itself. Furthermore, he’s usually portrayed as not only an early champion of economic theory, but of the superiority of markets over government plan... | Paul Sagar | https://aeon.co//essays/we-should-look-closely-at-what-adam-smith-actually-believed | |
Philosophy of mind | Music reminds us that the mind is more than a calculator. We are resonant bodies as much as representing machines | The 55 Bar in Greenwich Village, with its bulging ceiling tiles and strings of fairy lights taped haphazardly to the walls, looks more like the clubhouse of a rural Irish sports team than a New York City jazz venue. Yet some of the musical experiences I’ve had in that dingy basement have bordered on the otherworldly. W... | Jenny Judge | https://aeon.co//essays/the-way-music-moves-us-shows-the-mind-is-more-than-a-machine | |
Human reproduction | Women are chimeras, with genetic material from both their parents and children. Where does that leave individual identity? | When Lee Nelson first began researching autoimmune disorders in the 1980s, the prevailing assumption was that conditions such as arthritis and lupus tend to show up more commonly in women because they are linked to female sex hormones. But to Nelson, a rheumatologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Sea... | Katherine Rowland | https://aeon.co//essays/microchimerism-how-pregnancy-changes-the-mothers-very-dna | |
Physics | Relativity says we live in four dimensions. String theory says it’s 10. What are ‘dimensions’ and how do they affect reality? | Writing away at my desk, I reach my hand up to turn on a lamp, and down to open a drawer to take out a pen. Extending my arm forward, I brush my fingers against a small, strange figurine given to me by my sister as a good-luck charm, while reaching behind I can pat the black cat snuggling into my back. Right leads to t... | Margaret Wertheim | https://aeon.co//essays/how-many-dimensions-are-there-and-what-do-they-do-to-reality | |
War and peace | Nuclear deterrence continues to dominate international relations. Yet there is no proof it ever worked, nor that it ever will | In his classic The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (1989), Lawrence Freedman, the dean of British military historians and strategists, concluded: ‘The Emperor Deterrence may have no clothes, but he is still Emperor.’ Despite his nakedness, this emperor continues to strut about, receiving deference he doesn’t deserve, whi... | David P Barash | https://aeon.co//essays/nuclear-deterrence-is-more-ideology-than-theory | |
Neurodiversity | How an autism diagnosis became both a clinical label and an identity; a stigma to be challenged and a status to be embraced | In 1991, Donna Williams, a little-known Australian writer, released her memoir Nobody Nowhere: The Remarkable Autobiography of an Autistic Girl. The book sold astonishingly well and became an international hit, spending 15 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Williams recalled her frustration that ‘people were ... | Bonnie Evans | https://aeon.co//essays/the-intriguing-history-of-the-autism-diagnosis | |
Economics | Money and brains are both quantum phenomena – so it’s not surprising that economics is overdue for a quantum revolution | ‘I’m not absolutely certain of my facts,’ wrote P G Wodehouse in his story ‘Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest’ (1925), ‘but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare … who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.’ It cer... | David Orrell | https://aeon.co//essays/has-the-time-come-for-a-quantum-revolution-in-economics | |
History of ideas | Each era of modernity has reinvented Marx to fit its needs. How can his analysis of capitalism help us today? | The 21st century has already welcomed back Karl Marx (1818-1883), rather on the assumption that he had faded away and has now returned to haunt us. After the financial crashes of 2008, his leonine face appeared on international news magazine covers, feature articles in quality broadsheets, TV documentaries and blogpost... | Terrell Carver | https://aeon.co//essays/who-is-marx-now-and-what-can-he-say-to-the-21st-century | |
Gender and identity | Misogynists are fascinated by the idea that human brains are biologically male or female. But they’ve got the science wrong | How many times did I say it – to myself, out loud alone or out loud to others, throughout my childhood? ‘I wish I were a boy.’ The words were mine, a fervent and frequent wish. They were not born of a feeling of mismatch between external expectations and internal signals. Except for a lifelong tension with society’s mi... | Emily Willingham | https://aeon.co//essays/why-its-so-unhelpful-to-talk-about-the-male-or-female-brain | |
Politics and government | Western liberalism is not the apex and terminus of human history, and it ought not to serve as the measure of Islam | We live in a liberal world. In some senses, liberalism enjoys a global victory. Even its opponents often make their case based on essentially liberal ideals of a society built on political liberties or free trade to best maximise individual freedom. In the vital details, liberalism comes in many guises. As the grounds ... | Zaheer Kazmi | https://aeon.co//essays/is-it-time-to-look-beyond-the-idea-of-liberal-islam | |
History of science | Thought experiments played a crucial role in the history of science. But do they tell us anything about the real world? | In Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), three Italian gentlemen – one philosopher and two laymen – debate the structure of the Universe. The philosopher, Salviati, argues in support of the Copernican theory, even though it requires a moving Earth – something that strikes his interlocutors a... | Dan Falk | https://aeon.co//essays/do-thought-experiments-really-uncover-new-scientific-truths | |
History | Henry Theophilus Finck sought to transform the modern United States, by appealing to Americans’ tastebuds | In 1913, when the world seemed to totter precariously between progress and catastrophe, Henry Theophilus Finck published a book arguing that the source of the United States’ troubles was its citizens’ indifference to the attractions of a good meal. ‘The most important problem before the American public,’ he insisted in... | Nadia Berenstein | https://aeon.co//essays/the-man-who-shook-the-united-states-by-its-tastebuds | |
Meaning and the good life | Ethics cannot be based on human nature because, as evolutionary biology tells us, there is no such thing | Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we were put in the world to rise above.Katherine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart in African Queen (1951)Questions about what matters, and why, and what exists in the world, are quintessentially philosophical. The answers to many of these questions are informed by how we conceive of ourselves. How... | Ronnie de Sousa | https://aeon.co//essays/how-evolutionary-biology-makes-everyone-an-existentialist | |
Medicine | Therapeutic hypothermia could save lives, propel interstellar travel and expand consciousness. Why the cold feet? | ‘Some, pale and depressed by inanition, swooned away and died, stretched on the snow … They were seen walking insensible and ignorant where they went … In a word, when no longer able to continue walking, having neither power nor will, they fell on their knees … Their pulse was small and imperceptible; respiration, infr... | Phil Jaekl | https://aeon.co//essays/how-freezing-patients-could-save-lives-and-even-reverse-death | |
Thinkers and theories | The highest ideals of Locke, Hume and Kant were first proposed more than a century earlier by an Ethiopian in a cave | The ideals of the Enlightenment are the basis of our democracies and universities in the 21st century: belief in reason, science, skepticism, secularism, and equality. In fact, no other era compares with the Age of Enlightenment. Classical Antiquity is inspiring, but a world away from our modern societies. The Middle A... | Dag Herbjørnsrud | https://aeon.co//essays/yacob-and-amo-africas-precursors-to-locke-hume-and-kant | |
Biology | From the memories of flowers to the sociability of trees, the cognitive capacities of our vegetal cousins are all around us | At first glance, the Cornish mallow (Lavatera cretica) is little more than an unprepossessing weed. It has pinkish flowers and broad, flat leaves that track sunlight throughout the day. However, it’s what the mallow does at night that has propelled this humble plant into the scientific spotlight. Hours before the dawn,... | Laura Ruggles | https://aeon.co//essays/beyond-the-animal-brain-plants-have-cognitive-capacities-too | |
History | During the Cold War, US propagandists worked to provide a counterweight to Communist media, but truth eluded them all | On 22 December 1949, with Cold War tensions running high, the United States president Harry S Truman gave a speech to dedicate the carillon at Arlington National Cemetery. Freedom, Truman declared, was the core of the American creed. Those buried at Arlington had given their lives to defend it. They had prevailed, but ... | Melissa Feinberg | https://aeon.co//essays/cold-war-propaganda-the-truth-belonged-to-no-one-country | |
Neuroscience | A revival of interest in the power of introspection and thought has brought Freud’s ideas back into the scientific fold | An old therapist of mine had a signed photograph of Sigmund Freud hanging on her wall. A gift from a former patient who had employed forgery skills in a side business of dubious legality, it was the iconic Freud photo: full suit, blank scowl, half-smoked cigar. Once, mid-session, I asked my therapist what she thought o... | M M Owen | https://aeon.co//essays/can-neuroscience-rehabilitate-freud-for-the-age-of-the-brain | |
Subcultures | At their best, daredevils rival philosophers and mystics in their exploration of human mortality and spirit | We watch them with locked attention even as we wonder if we should be watching them at all. Sometimes we feel guilty for our absorption in the daredevil’s endeavour, as if our bearing witness were alone responsible for their self-imperilment. The sanctimonious like to reinforce this feeling of guilt, attributing one’s ... | Lary Wallace | https://aeon.co//essays/daredevilry-combines-sport-magic-and-machismo | |
Ethics | The discovery of independent life beyond Earth would have deep philosophical implications for us, and our ideas of morality | Suppose we woke up tomorrow to learn that extraterrestrial life had been discovered. What difference would that make? Set aside the extreme scenarios of popular fiction. The truth will probably be more mundane – not massive spaceships suddenly filling the sky but, instead, microorganisms found deep inside an ice-covere... | Tim Mulgan | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-discovery-of-extraterrestrial-life-would-change-morality | |
History | To help rule its empire, Britain turned to psychoanalysis. But they weren’t willing to hear the truth it told | Every state needs to know about the people it rules. Censuses, property surveys and tax records are familiar and tangible expressions of the state’s need to maintain power by accumulating knowledge. This is not just a matter of tedious bureaucratic record-keeping: especially when confronted with unfamiliar problems, st... | Erik Linstrum | https://aeon.co//essays/britains-imperial-dream-catchers-and-the-truths-of-empire | |
Philosophy of science | The swarming, ever-changing character of the living world challenges our deepest assumptions about the nature of reality | If philosophy is a tree, metaphysics and epistemology are its two main branches. Epistemology asks how we can know about the world; metaphysics tries to figure out what the world is, at its most fundamental level. If our tree fell down in a forest and no one was around, the epistemologist would set about examining the ... | John Dupré | https://aeon.co//essays/science-and-metaphysics-must-work-together-to-answer-lifes-deepest-questions | |
Politics and government | Digital technologies are a market product and play politics by different means. It’s up to us to harness them for democracy | Shortly after midnight on Friday, 28 January 2011, someone in 26 Ramses Street, a nondescript 12-storey office building in downtown Cairo, turned off Egypt’s internet. No email, web access, WhatsApp or Skype. It didn’t matter. A few hours later, Egyptians came out and made a revolution anyway. Tahrir Square, the physic... | Jack Shenker | https://aeon.co//essays/digital-technologies-play-politics-lets-use-them-for-democracy | |
Thinkers and theories | Philippa Foot was one of a group of brilliant women philosophers who swam against the tide of 20th-century moral thought | ‘In moral philosophy it is useful, I believe, to think about plants.’ The words were spoken to an audience of American philosophers in 1989. The speaker was trying to provoke a reaction, but this might have gone unnoticed. After all, Philippa Foot – nearly 70 by then – didn’t look like a heretic. There is a clue in her... | Nikhil Krishnan | https://aeon.co//essays/how-philippa-foot-set-her-mind-against-prevailing-moral-philosophy | |
Anthropology | There is nothing so horrific as child murder, yet it’s ubiquitous in human history. What drives a parent to kill a baby? | If there’s one thing we can still agree on in this era of political polarisation, it is that the life of a child is sacred. A mass shooting, air strike or natural disaster in which children are killed is considered far worse than one that slaughters only adults. When the ethicist Peter Singer suggested that, in theory,... | Sandra Newman | https://aeon.co//essays/the-roots-of-infanticide-run-deep-and-begin-with-poverty | |
Earth science and climate | The Earth is not a solid mass of rock: its hot, dark, fractured subsurface is home to weird and wonderful life forms | The living landscape all around us is just a thin veneer atop the vast, little-understood bulk of the Earth’s interior. A widespread misconception about the deep subsurface is that this realm consists of a continuous mass of uniform compressed solid rock. Few are aware that this mass of rock is heavily fractured, and w... | Gaetan Borgonie & Maggie Lau | https://aeon.co//essays/deep-beneath-the-earths-surface-life-is-weird-and-wonderful | |
History of ideas | Better known as the face of non-violent protest, Gandhi was also a surprising, subtle philosopher in the Stoic tradition | Was Mahatma Gandhi a philosopher? He would not have thought so himself. But I want to show that he was a model for philosophy in the philosophical subtlety of his accounts of non-violence and in his thinking on a vital kind of freedom. Gandhi was full of surprises: in his defence of concrete particularity in ethics whe... | Richard Sorabji | https://aeon.co//essays/gandhi-was-a-subtle-surprising-philosopher-in-the-stoic-style | |
Sex and sexuality | The intensity of orgasm is sublime, but the gentle love cocktail that follows is what helps relationships to endure | Analyse a story or script, and you can break down the narrative into parts: exposition, inciting incident, rising action, conflict, climax, falling action, and resolution. Sex is much the same. Yet whether it’s a story or intercourse, we often focus our attention on the parts that bring us to climax and orgasm – the Bi... | Tove K Danovich | https://aeon.co//essays/why-post-sex-cuddles-and-pillowtalk-count-for-more-than-orgasm | |
History of science | It might style itself as a grassroots movement but citizen science is little more than a cheap land-grab by big business | Friends, citizens, dilettantes: we are tearing down the citadel, the inner sanctum of science awaits you. The era of unwieldy hierarchy is on the wane; now is the hour for networked knowledge, for the crowd and the cloud, for the hive mind to rise up and unleash its buzzing potential. Many of us can recall the joy of o... | Philip Mirowski | https://aeon.co//essays/is-grassroots-citizen-science-a-front-for-big-business | |
The ancient world | The idea that the Maya or Easter Islanders experienced an apocalyptic end makes for good television but bad archaeology | There’s a common story of how the Maya civilisation was wiped out: they fell foul of unstoppable climate change. Several periods of extreme drought withered their crops and killed off thousands in their overpopulated cities. ‘There was nothing they could do or could have done. In the end, the food and water ran out – a... | Guy D Middleton | https://aeon.co//essays/what-the-idea-of-civilisational-collapse-says-about-history | |
Metaphysics | Face transplants expose deep-held prejudices about identity and wellbeing. Are these ideas ripe for a radical rethink? | In 2005, Isabelle Dinoire received a partial face transplant after being mauled by her dog. Although Dinoire had her procedure less than seven months after her disfigurement, the operation was a long time coming. Surgeons had the technical expertise to perform a face transplant from at least 1998, when the first succes... | Sharrona Pearl | https://aeon.co//essays/what-do-face-transplants-say-about-identity-and-wellbeing | |
Rituals and celebrations | Evidence of burial rites by the primitive, small-brained Homo naledi suggests that symbolic behaviour is very ancient indeed | A mysterious cache of bones, recovered from a deep chamber in a South African cave, is challenging long-held beliefs about how a group of bipedal apes developed into the abstract-thinking creatures that we call ‘human’. The fossils were discovered in 2013 and were quickly recognised as the remains of a new species unli... | Paige Madison | https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-should-bury-the-idea-that-human-rituals-are-unique | |
Global history | For Westerners, the Bible and its prophecies have obscured as much as they’ve revealed about the Holy Land | The year was 1858 when Josias Leslie Porter, an Irish Presbyterian minister, travelled all across Palestine. Porter was making notes for one of the first modern travel guides to the country, to be published later that year by the London firm of John Murray. The John Murray guides, precursors to today’s well-known Blue ... | Michael Press | https://aeon.co//essays/biblical-imaginings-have-warped-our-perception-of-palestine | |
Mood and emotion | Cognitive behavioural therapy has created interventions that truly help people to change. Here are the best of them | A few years ago, while attending a conference in Berlin, I went out one evening to catch up with a friend I hadn’t seen in years. James lives in the United States and works in the field of psychology, but Berlin was the first time we’d been together in a good while. It was a beautiful evening and the city felt so alive... | David A Sbarra | https://aeon.co//essays/this-is-why-cognitive-behavioural-therapy-works-so-well | |
Economics | Small businesses enjoy an iconic status in modern capitalism, but what do they really contribute to the economy? | Small business is the hero of modern capitalism. Owners of small firms are the virtuous strivers, the job creators and the plucky entrepreneurs who drive the economy. ‘Small businesses make a huge contribution to national prosperity and supporting Australian jobs,’ states the Labor Party in Australia. And you would str... | Benjamin C Waterhouse | https://aeon.co//essays/what-does-small-business-really-contribute-to-economic-growth | |
History of science | Perverse incentives and the misuse of quantitative metrics have undermined the integrity of scientific research | The rise of the 20th-century research university in the United States stands as one of the great achievements of human civilisation – it helped to establish science as a public good, and advanced the human condition through training, discovery and innovation. But if the practice of science should ever undermine the tru... | Siddhartha Roy & Marc A Edwards | https://aeon.co//essays/science-is-a-public-good-in-peril-heres-how-to-fix-it | |
Social psychology | Unleashed by globalisation’s dark side and the collapse of communities, radical Islam and the alt-Right share a common cause | The last of the shell-shocked were being evacuated as I headed from home toward Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s famed tourist-filled walkway in August 2017. Another disgruntled ‘soldier of ISIS’ had just ploughed his van into the crowd there, killing 14 and wounding more than 100 people from nearly three dozen nations. I had ... | Scott Atran | https://aeon.co//essays/radical-islam-and-the-alt-right-are-not-so-different | |
Music | We never just hear music. Our experience of it is saturated in cultural expectations, personal memory and the need to move | It’s easy to think about music as just a sequence of sounds – recorded and encoded in a Spotify stream, these days, but still: an acoustic phenomenon that we respond to because of how it sounds. The source of music’s power, according to this account, lies in the notes themselves. To pick apart how music affects us woul... | Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis | https://aeon.co//essays/music-is-in-your-brain-and-your-body-and-your-life | |
Physics | The cliché that life transcends the laws of thermodynamics is completely wrong. The truth is almost exactly the opposite | Living things are so impressive that they’ve earned their own branch of the natural sciences, called biology. From the perspective of a physicist, though, life isn’t different from non-life in any fundamental sense. Rocks and trees, cities and jungles, are all just collections of matter that move and change shape over ... | Jeremy England | https://aeon.co//essays/does-the-flow-of-heat-help-us-understand-the-origin-of-life | |
History of ideas | Academic philosophy in ‘the West’ ignores and disdains the thought traditions of China, India and Africa. This must change | Mainstream philosophy in the so-called West is narrow-minded, unimaginative, and even xenophobic. I know I am levelling a serious charge. But how else can we explain the fact that the rich philosophical traditions of China, India, Africa, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas are completely ignored by almost all p... | Bryan W Van Norden | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-western-philosophical-canon-is-xenophobic-and-racist | |
Architecture | Before it became a staple of videogames, the maze was a test of reason and courage, a way to find yourself by getting lost | On a chalk down beneath an iron-age hillfort and a grove of beech trees near my home in Hampshire in the south of England, a labyrinth has been cut into the turf. It looks almost like a tinted engraving. The short-cropped grass pillows up around the narrow pathways as if they had been pressed into something soft, and i... | James McConnachie | https://aeon.co//essays/how-walking-a-labyrinth-can-trace-a-route-to-self-knowledge | |
Mathematics | Where does our number sense come from? Is it a neural capacity we are born with — or is it a product of our culture? | Why can we count to 152? OK, most of us don’t need to stop there, but that’s my point. Counting to 152, and far beyond, comes to us so naturally that it’s hard not to regard our ability to navigate indefinitely up the number line as something innate, hard-wired into us. Scientists have long claimed that our ability wit... | Philip Ball | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-humans-have-numbers-are-they-cultural-or-innate | |
Religion | Atheist museums, Satanic temples and Thomas Paine statues: how secularists push back against religion in the public sphere | In the hospital with severe heart problems, Christian Roman had been told he was dying. Then in his mid-60s, the sometime teacher, travelling salesman, farmer and lawyer from the town of Sidney in Ohio was counting up his regrets from his hospital bed, and the one that gnawed at him the most was that he had done nothin... | Leigh E Schmidt | https://aeon.co//essays/why-atheists-erect-monuments-to-honour-freedom-and-reason | |
Philosophy of science | Working out where one hare ends and another begins is easy; a siphonophore, not so much. What is an individual in nature? | When she was two years old, I took my daughter to the American Museum of Natural History for the first time. As we strolled through the displays of taxidermy animals, she would waddle towards each one, and point and ask what we were looking at. When we entered the Hall of African Mammals, she was so overwhelmed by the ... | Derek J Skillings | https://aeon.co//essays/what-constitutes-an-individual-organism-in-biology | |
History of science | Beastly births, ass-popes and satanic hybrids: nothing distils the weirdness of the early moderns like their woodcuts | Divine visions, terrifying monsters, bizarre beasts. The intricate woodcut prints of the 16th and 17th centuries capture the fear and wonder of a world transfixed by invention and transformed by knowledge. Known as the early modern period or, more lavishly, the Age of Discovery, these years represent a temporal space t... | Jon Crabb | https://aeon.co//essays/here-be-woodcuts-science-mysticism-and-early-modern-memes | |
Ethics | You don’t have to dislike children to see the harms done by having them. There is a moral case against procreation | In 2006, I published a book called Better Never to Have Been. I argued that coming into existence is always a serious harm. People should never, under any circumstance, procreate – a position called ‘anti-natalism’. In response, readers wrote letters of appreciation, support and, of course, there was outrage. But I als... | David Benatar | https://aeon.co//essays/having-children-is-not-life-affirming-its-immoral | |
Politics and government | How a generation of political thinkers has underestimated the abilities of ordinary people and undermined democracy | In early 2017, Scientific American published a symposium on the threat that ‘big nudging’ poses to democracy. Big Data is the phenomena whereby governments and corporations collect and analyse information provided by measuring sensors and internet searches. Nudging is the view that governments should build choice archi... | Nicholas Tampio | https://aeon.co//essays/why-rule-by-the-people-is-better-than-rule-by-the-experts | |
Architecture | In his Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard created a philosophy of at-homeness, rich in emotion and memory | I bought my copy of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space at the Architectural Association’s Triangle Bookshop, at a time when inner London telephone codes still began with ‘071’ and while I was the architectural correspondent of the Sunday newspaper The Observer. That copy has been on the bookshelf above my desk eve... | Gillian Darley | https://aeon.co//essays/how-gaston-bachelard-gave-the-emotions-of-home-a-philosophy | |
History of science | Staid and conformist, science risks losing its creative spark. Does it need more mavericks, or are they part of the problem? | At the end of his life, the English naturalist Charles Darwin became intrigued by the musicality of worms. In the last book he ever wrote, in 1881, he describes a series of experiments on his vermicular subjects. Worms, Darwin discovered, are sensitive to vibrations when transmitted through a solid surface, but tone-de... | Adrian Currie | https://aeon.co//essays/does-science-need-mavericks-or-are-they-part-of-the-problem | |
Philosophy of language | Endangered languages have sentimental value, it’s true, but are there good philosophical reasons to preserve them? | The year 2010 saw the death of Boa Senior, the last living speaker of Aka-Bo, a tribal language native to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. News coverage of Boa Senior’s death noted that she had survived the 2004 tsunami – an event that was reportedly foreseen by tribe elders – along with the Japanese occupatio... | Rebecca Roache | https://aeon.co//essays/should-endangered-languages-be-preserved-and-at-what-cost | |
Education | In its first century the American higher-education system was a messy, disorganised joke. How did it rise to world dominance? | From the perspective of 19th-century visitors to the United States, the country’s system of higher education was a joke. It wasn’t even a system, just a random assortment of institutions claiming to be colleges that were scattered around the countryside. Underfunded, academically underwhelming, located in small towns a... | David Labaree | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-us-college-went-from-pitiful-to-powerful | |
Love and friendship | Evolutionary theory says men stray to increase offspring, but what motivates women? Enter the mate-switching hypothesis | Scientists now know much about human mating. The menu includes at a minimum: brief sexual flings, long-term pair-bonding, some infidelity, some polygyny (one man, multiple wives), rare polyandry (one woman, multiple husbands), occasional polyamory, some divorce, and frequent serial mating. These strategies are not well... | David Buss | https://aeon.co//essays/does-the-mate-switching-hypothesis-explain-female-infidelity | |
War and peace | The traditional arena of war is no more. Will it give way to a perpetual continuum of military and paramilitary violence? | The image of the battlefield is one that exerts a powerful hold on our collective imagination. It immediately evokes in our minds the sight of massed troops clashing furiously with each other, culminating in a decisive outcome that determines the fate of a wider conflict. However, such military confrontations have larg... | Antoine Bousquet | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-bloody-field-of-battle-made-way-for-precision-drones | |
Cosmology | Maybe we don’t have to speculate about what life is like inside a bubble. It might be the only cosmic reality we know | My history with bubble universes began in 1968 when I met Robert Kirshner while we were both undergraduates at Harvard in Massachusetts. He was a lively, funny, interesting fellow. We met up again a few years later, when he was a graduate student at Caltech in California and I was a new postdoc there. At Caltech, he ha... | J Richard Gott | https://aeon.co//essays/did-our-cosmos-emerge-from-a-sea-of-inflating-bubbles | |
History | The veneration which surrounds the world’s last sacred kings shows how secular most of political life has become | For the great majority of human history, we have been governed by sacred kings: individuals who claim that their right to rule depends not on their relationship with the people, but on their relationship with the divine. If you want to know what sacred kingship might look like in the postmodern age, Thailand will give ... | Alan Strathern | https://aeon.co//essays/the-sacred-monarchies-that-survive-into-the-postmodern-age | |
Neuroscience | If each bout of depression, bipolar disorder or PTSD makes another more likely, should sufferers stay on medication for life? | When I got depressed for the first time, at age 27, what surprised me most was the sheer physicality of it. My arms and legs, numb and pendulous as dumbbells, resisted my half-hearted attempts to animate them, and my perception was equally leaden. Taking in the world felt like gazing through a stained-glass pane, tryin... | Elizabeth Svoboda | https://aeon.co//essays/should-the-kindling-concept-direct-mental-health-treatment | |
Nations and empires | The nation-state remains the best foundation for capitalism, and hyper-globalisation risks destroying it | The populist revolt of our day reflects the deep rift that has opened between the worldview of the global intellectual and professional elites, and that of ordinary citizens. These two groups now live in parallel social worlds and orient themselves using different cognitive maps. Yet the intellectual consensus that bro... | Dani Rodrik | https://aeon.co//essays/capitalists-need-the-nation-state-more-than-it-needs-them | |
History | Short of a battlefield, the most violent place in medieval England was Oxford. Why did Brits stop beating each other up? | On 10 February 1355, St Scholastica Day, two students at the University of Oxford got into a dispute with the landlord of the tavern at which they had been drinking. The quality of the wine, they felt, was not up to snuff. The landlord disagreed. In response, the students threw a quart pot of wine in his face and proce... | Jim Sharpe | https://aeon.co//essays/why-has-england-lost-its-medieval-taste-for-violence | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | From book critiques to music choices, computation is changing aesthetics. Does increasingly average perfection lie ahead? | When IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer defeated the world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, humanity let out a collective sigh, recognising the loss of an essential human territory to the onslaught of thinking machines. Chess, that inscrutably challenging game, with more possible game states than there are atoms in the Uni... | Ed Finn | https://aeon.co//essays/how-algorithms-are-transforming-artistic-creativity | |
Rituals and celebrations | Self-marriage promises love and fulfilment – but is it a radical act or a depressing concession to self-absorption? | This summer I got married for the second time. Unlike my first wedding, in a town hall 11 years ago, this one was strictly informal. The ceremony took place at the Karaoke Pit in Berlin’s Mauerpark, a dilapidated concrete amphitheatre in the middle of the former no-man’s land between East and West Berlin. There were so... | Polina Aronson | https://aeon.co//essays/does-self-marriage-challenge-romantic-ideals-or-just-cave-to-them | |
Political philosophy | The assumption that you own the contents of your pay-packet, although almost universal, is demonstrably confused | Some radical libertarians hold that all taxation is immoral, on the grounds that it amounts to the state stealing the money of private citizens. This is an extreme position, but the sense that tax involves the government taking ‘our money’ is ubiquitous, and hugely influential in real-world politics. The former British... | Philip Goff | https://aeon.co//essays/if-your-pay-is-not-yours-to-keep-then-neither-is-the-tax | |
Stories and literature | How markets, Marx, and provincial elites created world literature to fight both empire and nationalism | On the afternoon of 31 January 1827, a new vision of literature was born. On that day, Johann Peter Eckermann, faithful secretary to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, went over to his master’s house, as he had done hundreds of times in the past three and a half years. Goethe reported that he had been reading Chinese Courtshi... | Martin Puchner | https://aeon.co//essays/world-literature-is-both-a-market-reality-and-a-global-ideal | |
Philosophy of mind | Being the same person over time is not about holding on to every aspect of your current self but about changing purposefully | ‘Six years have passed since I discovered that my son was using drugs,’ wrote Vincenzina Urzia in Anthony and Me (2014), a memoir of her son’s drug addiction. ‘I was really sad all the time and devastated, not to mention how worried I was about his wellbeing. My son was not the same person anymore.’ This is a puzzling ... | Kevin Tobia | https://aeon.co//essays/to-be-true-to-ones-self-means-changing-to-become-that-self |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.