Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love my tsundoku.

The part of your brain responsible for ASMR catalogs music, and appears to be a stronghold against Alzheimer's and dementia.

Forget ‘I think therefore I am’. In a new theory of embodied consciousness, the neuroscientists Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio propose that feelings are the source of consciousness. Long dismissed...

“Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself — and there isn’t one.”

Three new books examine the brilliant if eccentric minds nurtured there.

A key aspect of how we think separates us from even the most advanced AI

Metaphysics has been criticised as unscientific, speculative, and redundant. But any critic of metaphysics inevitably ends up making metaphysical claims of their own. Metaphysics is in fact inescap...

Shame on those scientists who are unwilling to embrace the importance of philosophers

Philosophical letters from a possible Renaissance romance

Groundbreaking neuroscience confirms what Sigmund Freud first theorized.

It's increasingly popular to believe that humans are merely machines and therefore can't control their behavior. But biology doesn't let us off the hook.

Throughout history, women thinkers and their ideas have been intentionally erased from public memory. There is even a mistaken belief that women’s cultural history doesn’t exist at all. Today it’s...

A few clips of Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault discussing justice, power, and the notion of human nature in their famous 1971 debate. This is a version of a...

The best logic books, and an explanation of what formal logic is and how to learn it, by Professor Tom Stoneham, a philosopher at the University of York.

The work of John Rawls shows that liberal values of equality and freedom are fundamentally incompatible with capitalism

Dostoevsky and Nietzsche both regarded the creeping nihilism and meaninglessness of their time as a fundamental threat to humanity. While both were critical of modernity and rationalism, their...

Philosophers seldom change their mind about anything as much as Wittgenstein did about language. The shift from his early masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, to his later work, Philoso...

Scientific narratives project social hierarchies onto nature. That’s why we need better metaphors to describe cellular life

The philosopher was a champion of political and intellectual freedom, but he had no interest in being a martyr. Instead, he shows us how prudence and boldness can go hand in hand.

The intrepid logician Kurt Gödel believed in the afterlife. In four heartfelt letters to his mother he explained why

Adrian Moore, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, explains Kant’s significance to the Age of Enlightenment.

The connection between mother and child is ever deeper than thought

Angie Hobbs remembers Bryan Magee, who brought philosophy onto TV and radio in the 1970s.

Is consciousness an illusion? Only a philosopher could convince himself of something as implausible.

The links between math, music and art have been explored for thousands of years. Sarah Hart is now turning a mathematical eye to literature.

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" For Schopenhauer, the answer is no. And he takes the reasoning even further, before there were conscious beings,...

Nature - Physicists believe that at the tiniest scales, space emerges from quanta. What might these building blocks look like?

The best critical thinking books, as recommended by British philosopher Nigel Warburton, author of Thinking from A to Z.

Alan Turing attended Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics’ in Cambridge in 1939. The following is one account…

Quantum physics shows that there is no such thing as "nothing." Even in a vacuum, particles can blink into and out of existence.

Clare Carlisle: For this 17th century outsider, philosophy is like a spiritual practice, whose goal is happiness and liberation

In 10th-century Baghdad, readers of Arabic had about the same degree of access to Aristotle that readers of English do today

For most of its history western philosophy was dominated by metaphysics, the attempt to know the necessary features of the world simply by thinking. Then came Kant, who showed that reason alone can’t...

Why is there something instead of nothing? For Henri Bergson, this misguided question leads traditional metaphysics astray

In an era where poetry is often dismissed as inaccessible and disconnected from everyday life, John Gibson challenges these assumptions. He argues that the enigmatic nature of poetry is not so...

The long read: A flood of new research is overturning old assumptions about what animal minds are and aren’t capable of – and changing how we think about our own species

According to philosopher David Hume, it takes a lifetime to get our emotions right. Neuroscience has much to learn from him

10 useful tips that can make math easy for you

Scientific papers are dense, jargon-filled, and painful to read. It wasn’t always this way – and it doesn’t have to be.

A strong philosophical tradition has continued in the centuries since the Islamic Golden Age, says Peter Adamson. He chooses the best books on the subject.

What if cognition--thinking--is not simply a function of neurons interacting in the brain, but a process involving the entire human organism?

Philosopher Peter Carruthers insists that conscious thought, judgment and volition are illusions. They arise from processes of which we are forever unaware

Some recommendations for those interested in learning about the philosophy of science

Motivated by Darwin’s theory of evolution, we think consciousness must have a function. We think consciousness must play some role in our behaviour, and be able to cause and influence what we do. We...

The renowned German author, theoretical physicist and Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies thinks she’s found the root of evil: quantum mechanics.

Some have thought that logic will one day be completed and all its problems solved. Now we know it is an endless task

Nature Human Behaviour - Large language models (LLMs) are impressive technological creations but they cannot replace all scientific theories of cognition. A science of cognition must focus on...

Your brain is not the root of cognition.

During Wittgenstein's stay in Norway, he engaged in profound contemplation and a transformative journey. Learn more about the time in Norway that provided him with the space to challenge traditional...

Niccolò Machiavelli’s profound insights about the violent origins of political societies help us understand the world today

The philosophy of Baruch Spinoza is without a question one of the supreme achievements of modern thought. This is but a brief overview of his views on ethics...

A recently identified stage of sleep common to narcoleptics is a fertile source of creativity.

Octopuses, crabs and lobsters will receive greater welfare protection following an LSE report demonstrating they have capacity to experience pain or distress.