is a Classics graduate student at Stanford University in California. His primary research interests include archaic poetry and ancient philosophy. He works on the digitalisation of Homeric manuscripts ...

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 ...

Featuring an unforgettable opening motif – ‘dun dun dun duuun’ is just one of the myriad ways it’s been expressed in writing – Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No 5 in C minor, Op 6 (aka ‘Beethoven’s ...

Pompeii is famous for being destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, which buried the once-thriving ancient Roman city under some 5 m of volcanic debris. With a dark irony, it was this ...

is a social philosopher and author of History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity (forthcoming, July 2024). He is senior research fellow at the Centre for Eudaimonia and ...

To the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, technology was far more than just tools that people develop, but systems through which the world both reveals itself to us and shapes the way we see it. For ...

In the US, long-term solitary confinement is still widely practised, with an estimated 122,000 people isolated in small prison cells for 22 to 24 hours a day. This persists despite movements across ...

In late 2016, a team of palaeontologists, led by Julia Clarke from the University of Texas at Austin, confirmed they had discovered the oldest known fossil of a bird’s voice box, known as a syrinx. It ...

is the author of The Moral Economists: R H Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E P Thompson and the Critique of Capitalism (2017). He lives in Sydney. Critiques of capitalism come in two varieties. First, there is ...

Political philosophy – a discipline we trace back to Plato and Aristotle – is reasoning about how we live together in political units. It is about states, government, laws, institutions and ...

Every society depends on violence workers, but what makes young men take a job that risks their lives and harms others?

‘It’s natural,’ says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘to think that time can be represented by a line.’ We imagine the past stretching in a line behind us, the future stretching in an unseen ...