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Cognition and intelligence
Theories of perception are heavily tilted to the visual: we have much to learn from our surprisingly acute sense of smell
Your nose is the best biosensor on the face of the Earth. This claim must sound counterintuitive since the sense of smell has acquired a rather poor reputation over the past centuries. Philosophers and scientists alike have only rarely singled it out for close study. The Enlightenment philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Cond...
Ann-Sophie Barwich
https://aeon.co//essays/why-might-it-be-easier-to-fool-your-eyes-than-your-nose
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Mental health
It was one terrifying, exciting night of delusions, hallucinations and paranoia. What would it teach a future psychologist?
What does it feel like to lose your grip on reality? I know the answer. Thirty years ago, I experienced an intense and terrifying episode of psychosis that lasted around 24 hours. It turned out to be a one-off, but it left me shaken and it permanently changed my attitude to my own mental health. As a psychologist and n...
Tom Hartley
https://aeon.co//essays/what-one-night-of-psychosis-felt-like-to-a-young-psychologist
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Environmental history
We are demigods of discards – but our copious garbage became a toxic burden only with the modern cult of ‘disposability’
We are turning the world inside-out. Massive mining operations rip into rock, unearthing lithium, coltan and hundreds of other minerals to feed our gargantuan appetite for electronic stuff. Sand dredged from riverbeds and ocean floors becomes concrete; so far, there’s enough to cover the globe in a 2mm-thick shell. Oil...
Gabrielle Hecht
https://aeon.co//essays/the-idea-of-disposability-is-a-new-and-noxious-fiction
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Quick-fix psychotherapies have been hailed as the gold standard. But depth therapies can be far more enduring and profound
Even as more celebrities and athletes speak out about their mental health challenges and the stigma lessens, a mental health crisis looms – especially in the United States. More than 45 million adults – one in five – experience mental illness, and one in 25 are diagnosed with a serious mental illness. The mental health...
Linda Michaels
https://aeon.co//essays/why-depth-therapy-is-more-enduring-than-a-quick-fix-of-cbt
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Cognition and intelligence
Are your decisions made by your brain, or via the experience of the world relative to your body? A dialogue on consciousness
For any materialist vision of consciousness, the crucial stumbling block is the question of free will. A modern, enlightened person tends to feel that he or she has rejected a mystical, immaterial conception of the eternal soul in exchange for a strictly scientific understanding of consciousness and selfhood – as somet...
Tim Parks & Riccardo Manzotti
https://aeon.co//essays/the-question-is-what-are-we-a-conversation-on-consciousness
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Medicine
How a concern to protect the autonomy of patients leads to the exclusion of families just when they are needed the most
‘I wouldn’t show them the note,’ a retired nurse told my mother. It was a request to meet with my father’s physicians. He had undergone a cardiac surgery, and soon after became lethargic and difficult to rouse. The nurses thought he was simply fatigued from his procedure, and my mother didn’t want to question their pro...
Anita Ho
https://aeon.co//essays/why-doctors-should-involve-a-patients-family-in-decisions
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Human rights and justice
What the Lord’s Resistance Army can teach us about flaws in the ideal of human rights and the fight for justice
For more than a generation, the idea of human rights has served as a guiding star of the liberal West. Faced with atrocities and injustices around the world, some of the most prominent and powerful institutions and individuals in the West responded by invoking the human rights of the asylees, migrants or persecuted. Th...
Sam Dubal
https://aeon.co//essays/lessons-on-human-rights-from-the-lords-resistance-army
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
The environment
We know how to replace toxic, intensive livestock raising with beautiful, efficient grasslands. Do we have the will?
With each step, Zeke’s boot disappears from sight, swallowed by a lush canopy of grasses and clovers. He jabs his walking stick through the foliage to gauge its height. ‘’Bout ready for turn in,’ he thinks, taking a minute to soak up the scene – buzzing bees, chirping birds, a babbling brook full of trout. At the end o...
Randall D Jackson
https://aeon.co//essays/our-grasslands-have-been-poisoned-by-intensive-farming
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Political philosophy
Judith Shklar fled Nazis and Stalinism before discovering in African-American history the dilemma of modern liberalism
An astute commentator recently suggested that Isaiah Berlin would be Riga’s greatest political thinker ‒ if not for Judith N Shklar. We are seeing the beginning of a rediscovery of Shklar and her contribution to 20th-century intellectual life, but she remains something of an insider’s reference. Who was she and what di...
Samantha Ashenden & Andreas Hess
https://aeon.co//essays/discovering-judith-shklars-skeptical-liberalism-of-fear
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Race and ethnicity
To counter racism, scholars must trace the idea of ‘race’ to its origins, but asking the right questions is half the battle
The history of race helps us understand the conditions in which racism flourishes. If we could find the origins of racial classification, then we would know for certain that racism is not an inevitable aspect of social life. Furthermore, if it turns out that ‘race’ is a modern invention, then dismantling certain modern...
Adam Hochman
https://aeon.co//essays/fact-check-the-idea-of-race-is-not-modern-but-late-medieval
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
The environment
Climate change is an emergency but despair is not the answer. The world is full of untold stories of people-powered change
In 2000, Tsai Jen-Hui, a professor of architecture at the National Taipei University of Technology, had the walls of the campus torn down. In their place, he had a stream built that functions like a moat, fed by recycled water and rain. He gave the university an entranceway inspired by – and incorporating – living tree...
Christof Mauch
https://aeon.co//essays/we-need-slow-hope-in-a-world-of-accelerating-ecological-change
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Human evolution
Every human is both an animal with a deep evolutionary history and an individual who must bring their existence into being
My mother was born in July 1944 in Holland, 10 months before the Netherlands was liberated by Allied soldiers. Decades later, the long shadow of the war extends to me through stories that my mother tells, drawn from the novels, memoirs and family lore she collects about Nazi-occupied Holland. She’s sure that her own ea...
Ada Jaarsma
https://aeon.co//essays/in-genetics-as-in-philosophy-existence-precedes-essence
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Sex and sexuality
Popular stereotypes of Islam as a prudish religion ignore rich traditions of freewheeling, explicit erotica and advice
The Muslimah Sex Manual: A Halal Guide to Mind Blowing Sex, a slim volume self-published in 2017 by a Muslim woman using the pen name Umm Muladhat, is a compilation of well-worn sex tips. The book offers no new spin on this tired advice, nor a real anchor to hold it all together. Even Muladhat’s prose feels ripped from...
Mark Hay
https://aeon.co//essays/islam-has-a-long-tradition-of-explicit-sexual-discussion
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Stories and literature
Superman et al were invented amid feverish eugenic speculation: what does the superhero craze say about our own times?
On 18 April 1938, a new kind of hero flew out of the pages of Action Comics. The hero was Superman, and the action strip set out the story of his extraterrestrial origins, arrival on Earth, and acquisition of superhuman powers. Action Comics was itself an example of a fairly new kind of literary genre. Comics were chea...
Iwan Rhys Morus
https://aeon.co//essays/why-superheroes-are-the-shape-of-tech-things-to-come
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Sports and games
While some keep their cards close to their chest, others try raising the stakes. What can poker teach us about dating?
Relationships are hard. So is poker. The analogy is well-documented in song lyrics: think of Amy Winehouse’s ‘Love is a Losing Game’ (2006): ‘Over futile odds, and laughed at by the gods’; or Ray Charles’s ‘Losing Hand’ (1953): ‘I gambled on your love baby, and got a losing hand.’ But losing is not the only point of co...
Suki Finn
https://aeon.co//essays/why-dating-is-like-poker-a-gamblers-tips-on-the-game-of-love
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Illness and disease
Survivors of life-threatening illness can be left in profound fear and distress. Are they suffering from a form of PTSD?
Noah Wolfson was just 12 when he learned he had cancer. What made his case unusual was his father’s response. Phil Wolfson, a psychiatrist in Marin County, California and veteran 1960s activist, mined not just his training as a physician but also his connections to countercultural healers and psychedelic medicine pione...
Liza Gross
https://aeon.co//essays/cancer-treatment-brings-its-own-trauma-and-can-cause-ptsd
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Animals and humans
They are sentient beings with rich emotional lives, yet we subject them to experimental cruelty without conscience. Why?
In the late 1990s, Jaak Panksepp, the father of affective neuroscience, discovered that rats laugh. This fact had remained hidden because rats laugh in ultrasonic chirps that we can’t hear. It was only when Brian Knutson, a member of Panksepp’s lab, started to monitor their vocalisations during social play that he real...
Kristin Andrews & Susana Monsó
https://aeon.co//essays/why-dont-rats-get-the-same-ethical-protections-as-primates
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Knowledge
The risk of nihilism is that it alienates us from anything good or true. Yet believing in nothing has positive potential
Nihilism is a constant threat. As the 20th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt recognised, it is best understood not as a set of ‘dangerous thoughts’, but as a risk inherent in the very act of thinking. If we reflect on any specific idea long enough, no matter how strong it seems at first, or how widely accepted, we’ll s...
Nolen Gertz
https://aeon.co//essays/if-you-believe-in-nihilism-do-you-believe-in-anything
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Illness and disease
It is a crab; no, a worm; no, a wolf. Early physicians weren’t entirely wrong to imagine cancer as a ravenous disease
One day this fall, I came home from work and found, among the usual pile of bills and flyers and mass mailings pulled from the mailbox, a crisp white letter from the hospital where I’d recently had a mammogram. I am used to these letters: one appears every year, a week or two after my annual appointment, confirming my ...
Ellen Wayland-Smith
https://aeon.co//essays/cancer-is-the-voracious-animal-that-early-moderns-imagined
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Philosophy of language
It’s one thing to say something. It’s quite another for a person to do (or not do) something because of what you’ve said
Total autonomy is a myth. Much of what each of us does depends on others playing their part. I can’t close the suitcase without your help. You can’t find your way to the station without mine. Neither of us will drive the train that gets us to Blyth. And so on, and so on. However, some of what I do seems closer to being...
Guy Longworth
https://aeon.co//essays/how-pornography-works-to-undermine-womens-freedom-of-speech
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Nature and landscape
Our cities are filled by the hubbub of human-made noise. Where shall we find the quietness we need to nurture our spirit?
To walk from south to north on the peripatos, the path encircling the Acropolis of Athens – as I did one golden morning in December last year – takes you past the boisterous crowds swarming the stone seats of the Theatre of Dionysus. The path then threads just below the partially restored colonnades of the monumental P...
Liam Heneghan
https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-need-an-absence-of-noise-to-hear-anything-important
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
War and peace
For 400 years, Americans have argued that their violence is justified while the violence of others constitutes barbarism
Torture was a traditional tool of statecraft when Europeans began the conquest of North America during the 17th century. Its legitimacy as an appropriate means to punish treason, heresy and other grave offences was secure across the European continent. When Europeans confronted the native peoples along the eastern seab...
William Fitzhugh Brundage
https://aeon.co//essays/the-conversation-about-american-torture-is-400-years-old
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Philosophy of religion
Aldous Huxley argued that all religions in the world were underpinned by universal beliefs and experiences. Was he right?
When I was a teenager, I came across Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy (1945). I was so inspired by its array of mystical jewels that, like a magpie, I stole it from my school’s library. I still have that copy, sitting beside me. Next, I devoured his book The Doors of Perception (1954), and secretly converted to...
Jules Evans
https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-we-learn-from-the-perennial-philosophy-of-aldous-huxley
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History of science
How the quick thinking of internationally minded astronomers avoided stamping the solar system with petty European rivalries
It was the autumn of 1846, and John Herschel (1792-1871), the British astronomer and natural philosopher, was not sleeping well. He had just put his foot into the century’s most acrimonious astronomical dispute, and now he was being abused by those on both sides of the matter – his British colleagues on the one hand, a...
Stephen Case
https://aeon.co//essays/how-gods-beat-astronomers-in-the-solar-system-name-game
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Stories and literature
In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton gave his life to charting a Renaissance disease both alluring and dangerous
Melancholy was the most pervasive and elusive of Renaissance diseases, and Robert Burton (1577-1640) its most dedicated, even obsessive, chronicler. His memorial stone on the wall of Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford is inscribed: ‘Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus, hic jacet Democritus Junior, cui vitam dedit et morte...
Mary Ann Lund
https://aeon.co//essays/robert-burton-lived-and-died-for-his-anatomy-of-melancholy
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Love and friendship
Humans teeter on a knife’s edge. The same deep chemistry that fosters bonding can, in a heartbeat, pivot to fear and hate
An infant is born. The radiant mother holds the baby in her arms and immediately begins to scan the infant’s face, softly caressing the little fingers while uttering repetitive sing-song vocalisations, her face lighting up in an affectionate smile. She has never had a baby before but intuitively knows what to do. Proud...
Ruth Feldman
https://aeon.co//essays/why-care-and-the-scare-are-inseparable-when-you-love-someone
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Death
The fear of death drives many evils, from addiction to prejudice and war. Can it also be harnessed as a force for good?
Many people think consciously about their mortality only once in a blue moon. Maybe if an odd mole appears. Or after a close call in the car. Or when they read about the death of a celebrity their age. Maybe it’s in the middle of the night, when they can’t get back to sleep and the reality of their inevitable ending si...
Jeff Greenberg
https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-apply-terror-management-theory-to-improve-human-lives
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Technology and the self
Our world is a system, in which physical and social technologies co-evolve. How can we shape a process we don’t control?
This is a disorienting time. Disagreements are deep, factions stubborn, the common reality crumbling. Technology is changing who we are and the society we live in at a blinding pace. How can we make sense out of these changes? How can we forge new tools to guide our future? What is our new identity in this changing wor...
Doyne Farmer, Fotini Markopoulou, Eric Beinhocker & Steen Rasmussen
https://aeon.co//essays/how-social-and-physical-technologies-collaborate-to-create
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Economics
Paul Samuelson’s mathematical brilliance changed economics, but it was his popular touch that made him a household name
For 30 to 40 years after the end of the Second World War, Paul Samuelson was one of the best-known economists of all time. His name would have been familiar not just to other economists and students but to readers of The New York Times, The Washington Post and, above all, Newsweek, where he had a regular column for 15 ...
Roger Backhouse
https://aeon.co//essays/paul-samuelson-brought-mathematical-economics-to-the-masses
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Bioethics
The body is warm, but the brain has gone dark: why the notion of brain death provokes the thorniest of medical dilemmas
What happens when there are two competing definitions of death, confounding our understanding of the end of life? On 9 December 2013, Jahi McMath, a 13-year-old African-American girl living in Oakland, California, entered the hospital for a tonsillectomy, still one of the most common surgical procedures performed on ch...
Sharon Kaufman
https://aeon.co//essays/why-medics-and-the-law-clash-with-family-in-brain-death-cases
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Nations and empires
Moving between the Russian, Iranian and Young Turk revolutions, cosmopolitan Armenians helped usher in the 20th century
On a day like any other, in early 20th-century Tbilisi, the skilled bomb-maker Rostom runs into his wife on the street. Eghsapet, surprised by the sight of her long-absent husband, asks: ‘When did you arrive?’ Most likely rushing to meet his comrades, Rostom stops and responds: ‘It’s been seven days … but I was very bu...
Houri Berberian
https://aeon.co//essays/how-cosmopolitan-armenian-radicals-launched-the-20th-century
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Love and friendship
A polyamorous friend challenges me: are you really happily monogamous or are you just hung up about your philandering dad?
Recently, a friend offered to put up some shelves for me. As we drove to the hardware shop, we got to talking about relationships and he mentioned that he was polyamorous: though he lives with his primary partner, he is free to be with other women too. He told me how once, by chance, he’d found himself dancing in a nig...
Lily Dunn
https://aeon.co//essays/what-my-fathers-infidelities-taught-me-about-intimacy
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Political philosophy
Should philosophy express the national character of a people? Bertrand Russell’s ‘scientific’ philosophy was a bulwark against nationalism
In November 1914, Bernard Bosanquet delivered the inaugural address to the Aristotelian Society’s 36th session. An ageing titan of British idealism, Bosanquet called his talk ‘Science and Philosophy’. It was a broadside on Bertrand Russell’s now-legendary book Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) in which Russell...
Alexander Klein
https://aeon.co//essays/philosophy-at-war-nationalism-and-logical-analysis
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Love and friendship
For Simone de Beauvoir, authentic love is an ethical undertaking: it can be spoilt by devotion as much as by selfishness
The desires to love and be loved are, on Simone de Beauvoir’s view, part of the structure of human existence. Often, they go awry. But even so, she claimed, authentic love is not only possible but one of the most powerful tools available to individuals who want to be free. So what, exactly, is this authentic love? In T...
Kate Kirkpatrick
https://aeon.co//essays/simone-de-beauvoirs-authentic-love-is-a-project-of-equals
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Sports and games
Many athletes are propelled by childhood trauma to succeed, but it’s a toxic myth that healing the wounds blunts the edge
Keyon Dooling, a 13-year veteran of the US National Basketball Association (NBA), grew up in South Florida navigating urban blight, high crime and a community with disparate access to healthcare, economic opportunity and education. His story, chronicled in his memoir What’s Driving You? How I Overcame Abuse and Learned...
William D Parham
https://aeon.co//essays/if-trauma-can-propel-athletes-healing-can-make-them-soar
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Global history
Antisemitism flourished in response to the unsettling, abstract growth of finance capitalism in the early modern world
The question of what links medieval to modern antisemitism is one of the most controversial topics in modern history. Among the most thought-provoking arguments about the matter is a lecture that the renowned Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi delivered in 1982: ‘Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian ...
Francesca Trivellato
https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-the-link-between-medieval-and-modern-antisemitism
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Sex and sexuality
Coitus reservatus is an ancient technique promising bliss and longevity. Does orgasm data back up these tantric ideas?
Coitus reservatus, also known as ejaculation control, is the age-old practice of a man withholding ejaculation during intercourse, either through training or willpower. In our orgasm-obsessed culture, such an idea might seem counterintuitive and even perverse. After all, the male orgasm evolved over millions of years t...
Peter von Ziegesar
https://aeon.co//essays/tantric-sex-promises-healthy-bliss-what-does-the-science-say
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Thinkers and theories
Pastness, presentness and futurity seem to be real features of the world, but are they? On McTaggart’s philosophy of time
Events happen in order – you whisk icing before decorating a cake. Some events seem to be present, while others are future or past. A birthday party lies in the future, approaching slowly. When the big day arrives, the party is present; afterwards, it slips into memory and the past. Pastness, presentness and futurity s...
Emily Thomas
https://aeon.co//essays/how-one-man-changed-the-meaning-of-past-present-and-future
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Stories and literature
Woolf loathed it but it spurred her on. Hemingway drew ideas of manliness from it. Self-help haunted the modernist imagination
‘How-to writers are to other writers as frogs are to mammals; they are not born, they are spawned.’ So jeered the influential New Yorker journalist Dwight Macdonald in a 1954 screed against the self-help guides he worried were taking over the culture. Macdonald voiced the prevailing view that the distinct spheres – or ...
Beth Blum
https://aeon.co//essays/how-did-self-help-shape-the-minds-of-woolf-and-hemingway
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Anthropology
Mead argued that non-Western cultures offered alternative (often better) ways to be human. Why was she so vilified for it?
In 1978, after 50 years at the pinnacle of American opinion, the anthropologist Margaret Mead died with a secure reputation and a lustrous legacy. Her ascent seemed to mirror the societal ascent of American women. In some two dozen books and countless articles, she gave a forceful voice to a sturdy if cautious liberali...
Sam Dresser
https://aeon.co//essays/how-margaret-mead-became-a-hate-figure-for-conservatives
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Global history
Must radical political change generate uncontainable violence? The French Revolution is both a cautionary and inspiring tale
If the French Revolution of 1789 was such an important event, visitors to France’s capital city of Paris often wonder, why can’t they find any trace of the Bastille, the medieval fortress whose storming on 14 July 1789 was the revolution’s most dramatic moment? Determined to destroy what they saw as a symbol of tyranny...
Jeremy Popkin
https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-we-learn-from-the-french-revolution-today
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Global history
The West focuses only on slavery, but the history of Africa is so much more than a footnote to European imperialism
To understand the complexity and significance of West African history, there is no better thing to do than to go to Freetown. Sierra Leone’s capital is sited in the lee of the ‘lion-shaped’ mountain that gives the country its modern name. Portuguese sailors began to visit this part of West Africa in the second half of ...
Toby Green
https://aeon.co//essays/liberating-the-precolonial-history-of-africa
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Animals and humans
It is not enough to conserve species and ecosystems. We have an ethical duty to care for each individual animal on earth
At the time of writing, Australia is on fire. The fires have killed at least 25 humans and more than a billion animals. Animals such as koalas are especially at risk, since their normal response to threats – climbing to the tops of trees – leaves them vulnerable in the case of fire. As a result, an estimated 25,000 koa...
Jeff Sebo
https://aeon.co//essays/we-cant-stand-by-as-animals-suffer-and-die-in-their-billions
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Rituals and celebrations
We can choose how we live – why not how we leave? A free society should allow dying to be more deliberate and imaginative
One day you wake early, walk into town, and a large advertising billboard attracts your attention. The image on the poster is mysterious but appears to depict a ceremony in a forest. You didn’t choose to come into this world, says the text across the middle, but you can choose how you leave. To the bottom right of the ...
Daniel Callcut
https://aeon.co//essays/if-you-could-choose-what-would-make-for-a-good-death
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Philosophy of language
A novel, by definition, tells a fictional story – but does that make its author a liar? On the space between stories and lies
Suppose I’ve advertised a postdoctoral researcher position, and in one applicant’s file I find a very short reference letter from a PhD supervisor praising her student’s excellent command of English, impeccable use of MS Word templates, and remarkably regular seminar attendances. Even though the letter doesn’t say anyt...
Emar Maier
https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-tell-fact-from-fiction-in-fiction-and-other-forms-of-lies
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Mental health
We keep chasing happiness, but true clarity comes from depression and existential angst. Admit that life is hell, and be free
I remember being depressed. It was a frightening state of mind that seemed to go on indefinitely. The very idea of waking up was riddled with dread. A state of internal turbulence, apprehension and negativity about the future propelled the total collapse of a positive and optimistic attitude. I felt like my mind sudden...
Julie Reshe
https://aeon.co//essays/the-voice-of-sadness-is-censored-as-sick-what-if-its-sane
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Nations and empires
Jesuits knew the miserable truth of European empire in India and Brazil, yet their writings rendered it grandiose and sacred
On 12 May 2010, the former pope Benedict XVI addressed a gathering at the Cultural Center of Belém in Lisbon. The building, though modern, evokes nostalgia for the Portuguese empire, which spanned six centuries, from the capture of Ceuta in 1415 to the handover of Macau in 1999. Here, the stone caravel of the Padrão do...
Ananya Chakravarti
https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-jesuits-cultivated-the-idea-of-european-empire
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Cosmology
Are we part of a dying reality or a blip in eternity? The value of the Hubble Constant could tell us which terror awaits
What determines our fate? To the Stoic Greek philosophers, fate is the external product of divine will, ‘the thread of your destiny’. To transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, it is an inward matter of self-determination, of ‘what a man thinks of himself’. To modern cosmologists, fate is something else entirel...
Corey S Powell
https://aeon.co//essays/how-they-pinned-a-single-momentous-number-on-the-universe
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Cognition and intelligence
The challenge of chess – learning how to hold complexity in mind and still make good decisions – is also the challenge of life
Arriving at the chess board is like entering an eagerly anticipated party. All my old friends are there: the royal couple, their associates, the reassuringly straight lines of noble infantry. I adjust them, ensuring that they are optimally located in the centre of their starting squares, an anxious fidgeting and tactil...
Jonathan Rowson
https://aeon.co//essays/playing-chess-is-an-essential-life-lesson-in-concentration
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Human rights and justice
History shows that tumult is a companion to democracy and when ordinary politics fails, the people must take to the streets
One evening in 1992, my parents, younger sister and I sat on the fold-out futon on the living room floor, petting our cats and watching fires consume buildings in Los Angeles. The images that spilled from the screen are only vague memories now: a dark night, broken windows, police sirens echoing, people rampaging acros...
Antonia Malchik
https://aeon.co//essays/the-history-of-riot-shows-the-importance-of-democratic-tumult
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Why therapy works is still up for debate. But, when it does, its methods mimic the attachment dynamics of good parenting
In 2006, a team of Norwegian researchers set out to study how experienced psychotherapists help people to change. Led by Michael Rønnestad, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oslo, the team followed 50 therapist-patient pairs, tracking, in minute detail, what the therapists did that made them so ef...
Elitsa Dermendzhiyska
https://aeon.co//essays/how-attachment-theory-works-in-the-therapeutic-relationship
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
The environment
Jürgen Habermas offers a framework for action on climate change – justice and deliberation are as important as the science
For a long time, discourse about climate change was principally about science, and required expert knowledge to assess. Starting in the 1820s, scientists were keen to find out more about the heat of the planet and the variables that would explain its warming and cooling. The French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fo...
Emilie Prattico
https://aeon.co//essays/how-can-habermas-help-us-think-about-climate-change
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Religion
When we strip away the myths, such as his princely youth in a palace, a surprising picture of this enigmatic sage emerges
At Wat Doi Kham, my local temple in Chiang Mai in Thailand, visitors come in their thousands every week. Bearing money and garlands of jasmine, the devotees prostrate themselves in front of a small Buddha statue, muttering solemn prayers and requesting their wishes be granted. Similar rituals are performed in Buddhist ...
Alexander Wynne
https://aeon.co//essays/was-the-buddha-an-awakened-prince-or-a-humble-itinerant
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Consciousness and altered states
Consciousness is neither a spooky mystery nor an illusory belief. It’s a valid and causally efficacious biological reality
These days it is highly fashionable to label consciousness an ‘illusion’. This in turn fosters the impression, especially among the general public, that the way we normally think of our mental life has been shown by science to be drastically mistaken. While this is true in a very specific and technical sense, conscious...
Massimo Pigliucci
https://aeon.co//essays/consciousness-is-neither-a-spooky-mystery-nor-an-illusory-belief
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
The ancient world
Ancient Athenian and Greek practices afford us insights into how and why to maintain real accountability in public life
What is anarchy? The word evokes lawlessness, a generalised disorder. But the root meaning of anarchia has nought to do with law or lawlessness. It is formed in classical Greek from an-archē, a negative or privative compound of the noun hē archē, among the meanings of which are ‘beginning, origin’; ‘first place or powe...
Melissa Lane
https://aeon.co//essays/the-classical-solution-to-the-problem-of-public-integrity
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Virtues and vices
True modesty is not to be timid or meek but a way of being in the world that means you don’t get in the way of your life
Having spent a large part of my life as a professional philosopher thinking about modesty, I can honestly say there’s plenty to hate about it. Talk of modesty seems hopelessly outdated. It can feel like a dusty relic from a worse time, a time when men were men and women were baby factories too irrational to vote. Even ...
Nicolas Bommarito
https://aeon.co//essays/modesty-is-not-a-cranky-killjoy-but-a-way-to-get-more-from-life
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Thinkers and theories
One can only imagine how much nobler and more decent the world might be if it took more notice of Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin’s lecture on political liberty ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958) created a new standard for understanding the individual and society. It has become a classic work. What set it apart was not so much that an Oxford don was prepared to engage directly and polemically with a theme of near-universal human conce...
Johnny Lyons
https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-isaiah-berlin-tell-us-about-political-freedom-today
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Political philosophy
There are two ways of seeing order in the world: as a spontaneous system or as an intentional project. Which way lies freedom?
Ludwig Wittgenstein once spoke of the way in which a picture can hold us captive. The picture he had in mind was that of the correspondence theory of truth. We imagine words representing things in the world as if we match a linguistic sign to a real object. We think of children learning a language as if it is a game of...
Paul Kahn
https://aeon.co//essays/is-the-world-ordered-as-a-system-or-as-a-project
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Love and friendship
Romantic expectations are often ridiculous and unhelpful, but attachment science can guide us to real and lasting love
Romantic love – seeking it, glorifying it, dishing it – is a human obsession. My English barmaid mother called it a ‘funny five minutes’ never to be trusted and basically dangerous for women. The feminist author Marilyn Yalom saw a mysterious but ‘intoxicating mixture of sex and sentiment’. Until the turn of the centur...
Sue Johnson
https://aeon.co//essays/how-emotionally-focused-couple-therapy-can-help-love-last
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Education
Meritocracy emphasises the power of the individual to overcome obstacles, but the real story is quite a different one
Occupants of the American meritocracy are accustomed to telling stirring stories about their lives. The standard one is a comforting tale about grit in the face of adversity – overcoming obstacles, honing skills, working hard – which then inevitably affords entry to the Promised Land. Once you have established yourself...
David Labaree
https://aeon.co//essays/pluck-and-hard-work-or-luck-of-birth-two-stories-one-man
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Art
John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing’ exploded a discipline. But his greatest legacy might be a quieter project of re-enchantment
At the start of the first TV episode of Ways of Seeing, John Berger takes a scalpel to Botticelli’s Venus and Mars. The opening beat of the programme is the audio of the incision – the blade’s rough abrasion on canvas – before the soundtrack settles into voiceover. ‘This is the first of four programmes,’ Berger says, ‘...
Joshua Sperling
https://aeon.co//essays/john-bergers-ways-of-seeing-and-his-search-for-home
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
History of science
Protestantism didn’t hold back science – it revolutionised its methods, its theoretical content and its social significance
There is a stubbornly persistent version of the history of science, much beloved of more than a few popular writers, that has science first emerging with the ancient Greeks, sliding into a moribund stagnation in the Christian Middle Ages, and bursting forth again in the 17th century with scientific heroes such as Galil...
Peter Harrison
https://aeon.co//essays/how-protestantism-influenced-the-making-of-modern-science
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Politics and government
What people most fear is not difference, but a world in which nothing and nowhere is unique, in which everyplace is the same
In the run-up to Hungary’s parliamentary elections in 2018, one of the cabinet ministers of the country’s ‘illiberal’ prime minister Viktor Orbán travelled to Vienna in neighbouring Austria, where he filmed himself walking through a part of the city where a number of immigrants have settled. As pedestrians go about the...
Holly Case
https://aeon.co//essays/left-and-right-are-both-gripped-by-an-identical-fear-homogeneity
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
The ancient world
Is the figure of the author bad for literature? Un-authored Roman literature and the transcendence of mere individuality
Anonymous works of art and literature tend to rend and vex their audience. Debate still simmers over whether the UK street artist Banksy’s fugitive identity is a compelling act of cultural critique, or an annoying and cynical publicity stunt. The same goes for the elusive, self-created pseudonym of an Italian novelist,...
Tom Geue
https://aeon.co//essays/lessons-from-ancient-rome-on-the-power-of-anonymity
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Human rights and justice
Disability activists who look to queer theory for their politics end up limiting their real transgressive potential
I came across Robert McRuer’s ‘crip’ theory in 2015. At the time, I was preparing to write up my experience of touring India with a dramatic monologue that I had written, in verse, on life with my disabled son, Nihal, who died in 2001, and to dramatise our struggles for inclusion. The American theorist’s bold attempt t...
Rahila Gupta
https://aeon.co//essays/does-using-crip-like-queer-empower-disability-activism
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Animals and humans
Trainers working with dogs every day have documented extraordinary talents and skills. Will science ever catch up?
I am a dog-training geek. Much of my life revolves around training dogs, taking training classes, and listening to dog-sports webinars. Although my dogs share my house, my hobbies and my couch, as a veterinarian who studies canine behaviour, I’m appalled by how little I or anyone else knows about how dogs perceive the ...
Jessica Hekman
https://aeon.co//essays/why-science-needs-to-catch-up-with-what-dog-trainers-know
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Religion
The science-versus-religion opposition is a barrier to thought. Each one is a gift, rather than a threat, to the other
To riff on the opening lines of Steven Shapin’s book The Scientific Revolution (1996), there is no such thing as a science-religion conflict, and this is an essay about it. It is not, however, another rebuttal of the ‘conflict narrative’ – there is already an abundance of good, recent writing in that vein from historia...
Tom McLeish
https://aeon.co//essays/its-not-science-vs-religion-but-each-one-via-the-other
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Deep time
Wild, feral and fossil-fuelled, fire lights up the globe. Is it time to declare that humans have created a Pyrocene?
From the Arctic to the Amazon, from California to Gran Canaria, from Borneo to India to Angola to Australia – the fires seem everywhere. Their smoke obscures subcontinents by day; their lights dapple continents at night, like a Milky Way of flame-stars. Rather than catalogue what is burning, one might more aptly ask: w...
Stephen J Pyne
https://aeon.co//essays/the-planet-is-burning-around-us-is-it-time-to-declare-the-pyrocene
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Sex and sexuality
What is it like to feel love and share physical intimacy yet feel no sexual attraction to the person you are with?
Asexuality isn’t a complex. It’s not a sickness. It’s not an automatic sign of trauma. It’s not a behaviour. It’s not the result of a decision. It’s not a chastity vow or an expression that we are ‘saving ourselves’. We aren’t by definition religious. We aren’t calling ourselves asexual as a statement of purity or mora...
Natasha McKeever & Luke Brunning
https://aeon.co//essays/what-being-asexual-or-aromantic-tells-us-about-sex-and-romance
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Thinkers and theories
Pragmatism was not eclipsed after Dewey: it has been a constant and dominant force in philosophy for nearly 100 years
At the dawn of the 20th century, there emerged in the United States a distinctive philosophical movement known as pragmatism. Although the term is often used today to denote the blunt desire to get results, the founders of pragmatism – Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), William James (1842-1910), John Dewey (1859-1952...
Cheryl Misak & Robert B Talisse
https://aeon.co//essays/pragmatism-is-one-of-the-most-successful-idioms-in-philosophy
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Meaning and the good life
A decades-long conversation between friends about books, photography and life, exploring what it is to know, to look, to see
Since we first met some 20 years ago, my friend the writer Christopher Benfey and I have had innumerable long conversations, many of which revolved around the topics of chance, coincidence and serendipity. These conversations were themselves serendipitous, often moving from one shared associative convergence to another...
Sven Birkerts & Christopher Benfey
https://aeon.co//essays/what-does-it-mean-to-know-or-to-see-something-as-it-really-is
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Education
A classical education was never just for the elite, but was a precious and inspiring part of working-class British life
The hero of Thomas Hardy’s tragic novel Jude the Obscure (1895) is a poor stonemason living in a Victorian village who is desperate to study Latin and Greek at university. He gazes, from the top of a ladder leaning against a rural barn, on the spires of the University of Christminster (a fictional substitute for Oxford...
Edith Hall
https://aeon.co//essays/why-working-class-britons-loved-reading-and-debating-the-classics
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Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Existential therapy explores the darkest corners and craggy edges of the many-sided self. The result is true transformation
Over the past 60 years, I’ve had the privilege to witness many poignant transformations. As a practising psychologist, I’ve witnessed them in state hospitals, in psychiatric emergency clinics, in drug and alcohol agencies, and in private practice; and as a youth I experienced them in my own intensive psychotherapies. T...
Kirk Schneider
https://aeon.co//essays/to-feel-the-awe-of-living-learn-to-live-with-terror-and-wonder
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Environmental history
The world’s last climate crisis demonstrates that surviving is possible if bold economic and social change is embraced
Midway through the 17th century, Dutch whalers bound for the Arctic noticed that the climate was changing. For decades, they had waited for the retreat of sea ice in late spring, then pursued bowhead whales in bays off the Arctic Ocean islands of Jan Mayen and Spitsbergen. They had set up whaling stations and even town...
Dagomar Degroot
https://aeon.co//essays/the-little-ice-age-is-a-history-of-resilience-and-surprises
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Rituals and celebrations
Whether via music, dance or prayer, the trance state was key to human evolution, forging society around the transcendent
A change has come over the public discussion of religion in recent years. In the decade of the New Atheists, religion was the root of all evil. Nowadays, however, it tends to be thought of as a good, even necessary, part of society. In his recent book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (2019), the agnostic histor...
Mark Vernon
https://aeon.co//essays/how-trance-states-forged-human-society-through-transcendence
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Family life
All families have secrets, from the innocent to the deeply sinister. Are there good reasons to keep them under wraps?
Every family has one. A trauma, a dubious deed, or a disgracing detail that is kept under wraps through more or less elaborate practices of concealment. Secrets tie families together through bonds of trust, they weigh on them as an often increasingly unbearable burden, or they tear them apart leaving behind hurt feelin...
Karen Vallgårda
https://aeon.co//essays/why-family-secrets-should-sometimes-stay-under-lock-and-key
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Thinkers and theories
A philosophy that values innocent pleasure, human warmth and the rewards of creative endeavour. What’s not to like?
Like many people, I am sceptical of any book, lecture or article offering to divulge the secrets of happiness. To me, happiness is episodic. It’s there at a moment of insight over drinks with a friend, when hearing a new and affecting piece of music on the radio, sharing confidences with a relative or waking up from a ...
Catherine Wilson
https://aeon.co//essays/forget-plato-aristotle-and-the-stoics-try-being-epicurean
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Human evolution
Conspiracy theories have always been with us, powered by an evolutionary drive to survive. How’s that working for us now?
The great fire of Notre Dame on 15 April 2019 broke the hearts of culture lovers around the world. Parisians wept in public while the flames reduced large parts of this monumental cathedral to smouldering ashes. The French president Emmanuel Macron Tweeted a sentiment that not only French people felt: ‘Je suis triste c...
Jan-Willem van Prooijen
https://aeon.co//essays/how-conspiracy-theories-evolved-from-our-drive-for-survival
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Mood and emotion
How did feeling good become a matter of relentless, competitive work; a never-to-be-attained goal which makes us miserable?
In 1920, the American psychologist John B Watson published the results of one of the more ethically dubious scholarly articles of the past century. Along with Rosalie Rayner, a 21-year-old graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he taught, Watson aimed to instil a specific fear in an otherwise ...
Cody Delistraty
https://aeon.co//essays/how-did-being-happy-become-a-matter-of-relentless-competitive-work
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
History
History and philosophy should reveal to us the baffling, strange and wondrous qualities of other lives and other times
They were there, and then they were gone. Thousands of history books destroyed by a wall of dirty water that punched its way through the university library. Grief and shock swelled in me, distending like the water-soaked books that buckled and burst the shelves, splaying their pages. I had got used to them being around...
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
https://aeon.co//essays/history-and-philosophy-should-make-us-feel-baffled-and-strange
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Animals and humans
The slaughterhouse ethic of Soviet and American whalers tells us we must look beyond communism and capitalism to survive
In the spring of 2017, a bowhead whale swam north through the Bering Sea. She kept, like all bowheads, near the sea ice, shadowing the white verge as lengthening days pulled it toward the Bering Strait. The whale was swimming into a season of bountiful eating, her preferred meal of miniscule crustaceans about to breed ...
Bathsheba Demuth
https://aeon.co//essays/the-act-of-giving-and-the-chance-of-life-on-a-finite-planet
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Knowledge
Assuming that another person’s opinions are immune from criticism is not a marker of respect. It is, in fact, dehumanising
Suppose that error could be abolished. What would someone who never makes a mistake be like? There are two very different responses to this question. One is to think of a superhuman, god-like being. The poet Alexander Pope’s line – ‘To err is human; to forgive, divine’ – is based on that thought. God might pardon but H...
Daniel Ward
https://aeon.co//essays/i-think-therefore-i-make-mistakes-and-change-my-mind
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Philosophy of science
To answer whether the fundamental building blocks of reality are particles, fields or both means thinking beyond physics
Long before philosophy and physics split into separate career paths, the natural philosophers of Ancient Greece speculated about the basic components from which all else is made. Plato entertained a theory on which everything on Earth is made from four fundamental particles. There are stable cube-shaped particles of ea...
Charles Sebens
https://aeon.co//essays/is-everything-made-of-particles-fields-or-both-combined
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Animals and humans
Chimps, dolphins and elephants pass, dogs and cats don’t. Is the mirror test a reliable mark of self-awareness?
When our collie, Buckaroo, was four months old, he began barking at his reflection in our glass patio door every evening, doing his best to alert us to this unknown, bold little pup outside. Of course, the reflected dog didn’t back away, so Buck lunged at him and scratched the door jamb – actions that did get our atten...
Virginia Morell
https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-the-mirror-test-say-about-self-awareness-in-animals
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Religion
Far from representing rationality and logic, capitalism is modernity’s most beguiling and dangerous form of enchantment
Perhaps the grandest tale of capitalist modernity is entitled ‘The Disenchantment of the World’. Crystallised in the work of Max Weber but eloquently anticipated by Karl Marx, the story goes something like this: before the advent of capitalism, people believed that the world was enchanted, pervaded by mysterious, incal...
Eugene McCarraher
https://aeon.co//essays/capitalism-is-modernitys-most-beguiling-dangerous-enchantment
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Social psychology
A ragged curtain, a creaking attic, a dark cellar – what explains the architecture of creepiness, and its enduring appeal?
The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, is reputed to be the most haunted house in the world: more than 1,000 ghosts are allegedly in residence. This house, the inspiration for the movie Winchester (2018) starring Helen Mirren, originally belonged to Sarah Winchester, who was the widow of William Wirt Win...
Francis McAndrew
https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-we-like-to-visit-scary-houses-that-creep-us-out
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Nations and empires
European colonisation put an abrupt end to political experiments towards a more equal, diverse and ecumenical Arab world
The Arab East was among the last regions in the world to be colonised by Western powers. It was also the first to be colonised in the name of self-determination. An iconic photograph from September 1920 of the French colonial general Henri Gouraud dressed in a splendid white uniform and flanked by two ‘native’ religiou...
Ussama Makdisi
https://aeon.co//essays/ottoman-cosmopolitanism-and-the-myth-of-the-sectarian-middle-east
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Nature and landscape
What if, rather than mere props in the background of our lives, trees embody the history of all life on Earth?
Place yourself on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, near the Franz Josef Glacier. Officially, this forest is a temperate podocarp-hardwood rainforest, but these dry words belie the rich diversity of plant life around, encompassing every imaginable shade of green, brown and grey. They also do an injusti...
Dalia Nassar & Margaret M Barbour
https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-an-embodied-history-of-trees-teach-us-about-life
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Thinkers and theories
Visiting Wittgenstein’s home evokes the philosopher’s serious, ascetic mind (no doubt he would disapprove its restoration)
Westerners who see ancestor worship as something only other cultures do should look around: signs of its devout practice are everywhere. We have park benches in memory of those who once sat there, plaques to the famous inhabitants of buildings, statues of the great and good in every square. Our greatest acts of devotio...
Julian Baggini
https://aeon.co//essays/if-you-stand-in-wittgensteins-home-will-you-think-like-him
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Love and friendship
Female friendship is central to much recent fiction and film. What can it say about the role of relationships in identity?
A few years ago, a curator I know professionally invited me to Arizona to give a lecture. The talk would be in Phoenix and we would stay at her house in Tucson. The invitation made me nervous – not due to the public speaking, or the fact I was travelling to a part of the United States that I had not been to before, but...
Susan Bright
https://aeon.co//essays/how-stories-of-female-friendship-construct-a-sense-of-self
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Beauty and aesthetics
We need a radical new paradigm for thinking about blackness that recognises beauty’s potential to save lives
As an American born to Nigerian parents, I was raised primarily in the United States, the United Kingdom and Côte d’Ivoire. The women in my family – my mother, grandmother and aunts – are formidable characters but, throughout my childhood, stories about their physical beauty preceded them. In the various circles of fam...
Enuma Okoro
https://aeon.co//essays/how-we-think-about-beauty-and-blackness-can-save-lives
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Thinkers and theories
Centuries before Spinoza, there was Ḥiwi al-Balkhi, a Jewish freethinker for whom the Bible was too irrational for faith
In the history of the Jewish people, there have always been freethinkers: Jews who refused to conform to the prevailing modes of thought and conduct in their communities. The names that cross one’s mind first and foremost are those of Baruch de Spinoza and his predecessor Uriel da Costa in the 17th century, both of the...
Pieter van der Horst
https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-jewish-freethinker-iwi-al-balkhi-criticised-the-bible
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Stories and literature
The sympathetic plot is a type of story, rich in tropes, that is universal to human cultures. With one big twist…
The quickest way to an audience’s heart is to kill off one or both of your character’s parents. Aladdin, Bambi, David Copperfield, Frodo Baggins, Han Solo, Inigo Montoya, Jane Eyre, Little Orphan Annie (of course), Mowgli, Pippi Longstocking, Snow White, Tarzan, Vito Corleone, Professor X: all were parentless. Orphaned...
Manvir Singh
https://aeon.co//essays/what-makes-the-sympathetic-plot-a-universal-story-type
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Philosophy of science
Theoretical physicists who say the multiverse exists set a dangerous precedent: science based on zero empirical evidence
There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience, or just plain ordinary bullshit, opening the door to all manner of metaphysics masquerading as science. This is ‘post-empirical’ science, where truth no longer matters, and it is potentially very dangerous. It’s not difficult to find recent example...
Jim Baggott
https://aeon.co//essays/post-empirical-science-is-an-oxymoron-and-it-is-dangerous
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Cities
When you stare at your phone or use Uber to navigate your neighbourhood, you flatten the rich texture of urban life
Wandering north up the Broad Walk, within the expansive and exquisitely manicured grounds of Kensington Gardens in west London, just past the grand Kensington Palace and up the whimsically curved ‘Wiggly Walk’ bordering the Sunken Garden, one soon arrives at the Orangery. On a clear summer day, the brick and glass faça...
Kathleen Vandenberg
https://aeon.co//essays/how-smartphones-silence-what-the-urban-landscape-tries-to-say
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Nations and empires
Facing annihilation, the Lakota instead remade themselves – and took a lead role among the world’s Indigenous peoples
By the late-18th century, Native Americans and European newcomers had lived together in the Americas for nearly 400 years. They had cajoled, fought, killed and hated one another, and Europeans had built colonies on coastal plains and along major river valleys, dispossessing dozens of Indigenous societies – with the cru...
Pekka Hämäläinen
https://aeon.co//essays/in-the-north-american-interior-the-lakota-have-persevered
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Animals and humans
How a chimpanzee named Clint trained a psychologist to question human exceptionalism and reconsider the intelligence of apes
Human language, as far as we know, is unique in the animal kingdom. There has been long-standing academic debate over whether linguistic communication should be viewed as a biological adaptation or a cultural invention. On the one hand, the range of human articulation far surpasses that of our nearest living relatives,...
David Leavens
https://aeon.co//essays/how-clint-the-chimp-revised-theories-of-language-and-cognition
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Illness and disease
Living with chronic illness is hard. But there are psychological techniques that make it possible to thrive even when ill
‘Don’t let what you can’t do interfere with what you can do.’ John Wooden (1910-2010), NCAA basketball coachBefore Donna got her diagnosis, she thought of herself as a musician, a busy professional, a volunteer, a mother, a grandmother. After she got her diagnosis – Parkinson’s disease, at age 58 – she thought of herse...
Joseph Trunzo
https://aeon.co//essays/it-takes-psychological-flexibility-to-thrive-with-chronic-illness
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Consciousness and altered states
Phenomenal consciousness is a fiction written by our brains to help us track the impact that the world makes on us
In the movie The Matrix (1999), Morpheus offers Neo a red pill. If he takes it, he will discover that reality as he knows it is an illusion created by machine overlords to keep humans enslaved. I am going to offer you a different pill, which – if it works – will convince you that your own consciousness is a sort of ill...
Keith Frankish
https://aeon.co//essays/what-if-your-consciousness-is-an-illusion-created-by-your-brain
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Gender and identity
Humans, like other mammals, exhibit sex differences in their brains and psychological traits. But what do they signify?
Sex differences really do exist. Men and women, boys and girls, really do behave differently. The question – and difficultly – lies in establishing where these differences come from. Are the sexes wired differently? Or does culture explain observed behavioural differences? The answers are yes and yes; but, unfortunatel...
Kevin Mitchell
https://aeon.co//essays/the-gender-wars-will-end-only-with-a-synthesis-of-research
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