What you don’t know won’t hurt you . . . maybe. But it could change your mind about things you believe to be true. We all know this, of course, but do we really keep it in mind when we …
The philosophy of Count Dracula
Those visiting Romania for the first time will often be told that its association with vampires is really an unfair imposition, having mostly to do with Bram Stoker’s invention of a Transylvanian setting for his 1897 novel, Dracula. His tale, …
Charles will be our Perennialist King
King Charles III has often been accused of heresy. As the Prince of Wales, his early support of environmental activism and his (tenuous) involvement in the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset marked him out as a dissenter who might break …
Effective altruism is the new woke
Around 2014, I started to notice that something was up in academic philosophy. Geeky researchers from fancy universities, having first made their names in abstract and technical domains such as metaphysics, were now recreating themselves as public-facing ethicists. Knowing some …
What is it like to be a dolphin?
Imagine you are at the seaside. Sunlight is hitting the surface of the ocean. Some wavelengths of light pass into the water, while others bounce off it, scattering in all directions. A tiny fraction of reflected light happens to reach …
The timeless beauty of Novalis
Penelope Fitzgerald, until her death in 2000, was, by a country mile, my favourite living author. Her novels offer a view of life the wisdom of which is belied by the physical slenderness of the texts. I love all her …
How to save sex
“Is it okay if I touch you?” Half an hour after I’d started chatting with this guy on Grindr he was in my bedroom, beginning a series of questions meant to lead from touching to any number of other acts. …
Where is the moral case for abortion?
The question of when human life begins is like the question of when human life ends: it is a question of values not science. Interviewed by NBC, a woman stood before the Supreme Court building in the US with her …
Your Fitbit has stolen your soul
Philosophers have seldom lived up to the ideal of radical doubt that they often claim as the prime directive of their tradition. They insist on questioning everything, while nonetheless holding onto many pieties. Foremost among these, perhaps, is the commandment …
Why we need fairies
Some years ago, when I was a Man Booker judge, I had a running scrap with one of my fellow judges, David Baddiel. David and I got on well (we all did that year; we even went on holiday together) …
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s war on philosophy
My Cambridge tutor would refuse to shake hands with colleagues out of term because of some medieval university statute which nobody else had ever heard of. I wrote about it for UnHerd and an outraged reader from South Carolina writes …
Dr Strange and the perils of the multiverse
This is a story about choices and consequences, so let’s start with DC’s decision in 1961 to publish a landmark issue of The Flash called “Flash of Two Worlds!” In the story, created by Gardner Fox and Carmen Infantino, the …
How philosophy sacrificed the truth
Back when I was a graduate student in the Nineties, first at St Andrews University and then at Leeds, philosophy departments were terrifying places. Seminar rooms often felt like amphitheatres.
Every week, the same ritual would unfold in the senior …
Why comedians stopped being funny
The most exciting stand-up comedy show I’ve ever seen was Bill Hicks in a student union in the autumn of 1992. Being a comedy naïf probably helped. I had seen Hicks’ sensational Channel 4 special Relentless earlier that year but …
The importance of Bronze Age Pervert
The radical Right in the United States is discussed far more than it is understood. Anyone to the Right of the Republican Party is generally assumed to be a skinhead, redneck, or Nazi Germany-revivalist. To those who have studied the …