Philosopher's Zone

One of the more utopian promises of technology has always been that it will free us from the necessity of work - but not having to work poses its own problems. What will we do instead? how will we make money? and what...

Australian feminist philosopher Kate Manne memorably coined the term "himpathy" to describe what happens when a man commits a crime against a woman and finds himself the object of disproportionate sympathy. But as...

If someone's behaving badly, it can be hard to know how much of their behaviour stems from a deep character flaw, and how much of it is incidental - the stuff we might charitably filter out as unreflective of their true...

Western feminists often express support for women in Muslim majority countries, but sometimes that support is couched in the language of pity, as though Muslim women were held captive by their religion and culture, and...

If I pick up a tree branch and smash your window with it, you're going to be angry, and your anger will rightly be directed at me. But if a tree branch smashes your windscreen during a cyclone whose intensity has been...

Cultural Marxism is many things to many people — at one end of the political spectrum, it's the hidden force behind political correctness, identity politics and 'wokeness', while at the other end it's a shopworn...

The great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who died in March, wrote in his later works about what he called Unheimlichkeit — roughly translated as "the unease of the times" — to describe the global retreat of liberal...

When it comes to the ideal philosophical medium, most of us would identify the written word - or maybe the spoken word, if we're fans of Socratic dialogue - and this is because for centuries, philosophy has been a...

Ever since AI was founded in the 1950s, people have talked and written about 'intelligence' as though we all broadly agree on what that word means. But there's considerable debate on that score, and among the debaters...

GWF Hegel (1770-1831) wanted to construct nothing less than a complete explanation of reality - nature, consciousness, art, history, politics, the lot - based on a single self-explanatory idea. Whether or not he...

Philosophers have traditionally thought of grief as something that attaches to immediate loss - the death of a loved one, something terrible that's happened to us personally. But as the environmental crisis continues to...

There's something about space that's always captured the human imagination, but what happens when space begins to capture the imagination of billionaire tech entrepreneurs? In the past, we've visited space for...

Commercial surrogacy - the practice of paying someone to gestate your child and then hand it over when it's born - is banned in Australia, but it has its supporters. Defenders of commercial surrogacy argue that it...

The traditional philosophical view of belief is that it's a rational cognitive affair, evidence based and directed toward truth. According to this account, things like delusion and religious belief are "edge cases"...

Collins Dictionary made "permacrisis" their word of the year in 2022 - a prescient choice because since then, the crises have just kept coming. Permacrisis is forcing us to take a close look at the way we communicate...