What happens when loss alters the very world we inhabit? In this conversation, Matthew Ratcliffe and Kathleen Higgins discuss grief as an unfolding emotional journey marked by disrupted meaning and shifting possibilities that reshape how we experience ourselves, others, and the world. They consider the differences between grief and depression, examine why grief can feel inexpressible, how it transforms identity and meaning, and what philosophy can contribute to understanding

Rebekah Humphreys examines the moral significance of truly seeing animal suffering rather than merely looking past it. She argues that the Animal-Industrial Complex normalises immense suffering through invisibilisation, objectification and compartmentalisation. By framing "seeing" as a moral act of recognition, she challenges readers to confront their complicity, reconsider accepted norms, and engage in the political and ethical work of transforming human relationships with a

Havi Carel explores the challenge of articulating and understanding suffering, focusing on illness as a deeply embodied and transformative experience. Drawing on phenomenology, she examines how illness profoundly reshapes a person's relationship to their body, identity and environment. Carel reveals how illness disrupts the taken-for-granted certainty of bodily existence, leading to 'bodily doubt'. This gives way to uncertainty, vulnerability and sometimes the collapse of age

Kaitlyn Creasy understands loneliness not as simple isolation but as a complex emotional response to unmet needs for recognition and connection. Drawing on philosophy and personal experience, she investigates the many forms loneliness can take and argues that loneliness can reveal hidden desires, neglected aspects of identity, and aspirations that depend on others' affirmation. Rather than a condition to escape, loneliness can serve as a source of self-understanding and growt

In "Escape from Freedom", Erich Fromm wrote about the tension between our needs for freedom and independence, on the one side, and for belonging and security, on the other. The work was first published more than eighty years ago and now is the right time to revisit it, not so much for the psychoanalytic theory put forward in it, as for the more universal insights into the social and political situation at the time, which in many ways parallel our own.

Grant Farred examines Martin Heidegger’s paradoxical claim that we do not know what thinking is, but can recognize when we are not thinking. Heidegger's claim is that thinking emerges through speaking, not prior to it. Moreover, thinking begins in negation and requires awareness of our failure to think. By unsettling everyday assumptions, Heidegger reframes thinking as an active, reflective practice that demands attentiveness to language and a conscious effort to avoid unthin

This essay explores Marx’s break from philosophy, arguing that his materialism emerges from a commitment to understanding and transforming real social life. Rejecting both idealism and traditional materialism, Marx develops a theory centered on practical, sensuous human activity embedded in historical social relations. By prioritizing lived reality over abstract thought, he moves beyond philosophy toward a revolutionary framework aimed at grasping and changing the conditions

Deric Carner frames art as an embodied practice rooted in touch, repetition, and material play rather than detached intellect. His chaotic studio becomes a site where forms emerge through intuition and experimentation. Rejecting rigid planning, he treats materials as active collaborators, allowing accidents and physical engagement to guide meaning. Art, for him, is not conceived fully in the mind but discovered through the body’s interaction with the world.

In this follow-up essay, Mary Peterson examines how legal aggression, online misogyny, and public relations battles shape contemporary responses to accusations of sexual misconduct. Drawing on high-profile cases and philosophical debates, she argues that the legal system often amplifies harm rather than healing. Restorative justice, she suggests, offers an alternative framework focused on accountability, community responsibility, and the repair of damaged lives.

Liam Gillick explores the inescapable entanglement of contemporary art and philosophy. Through the figures of two fictional artists — one claiming to escape theory, the other striving to inhabit it — he reveals a paradox: artists are always both inside and outside philosophical discourse. He shows how both remain caught within philosophy’s terrain. Contemporary art thrives in this tension, endlessly “becoming” - navigating between guiding theories and open creative terrain.

What does it mean to call our era the Anthropocene, an age defined by “humanity” as a geological force? This essay interrogates that name and the universal “we” it assumes. Tracing the entanglements of colonialism, slavery, racial capitalism and environmental extraction, it offers a philosophical counterhistory of the human and its others. Drawing on decolonial thought and philosophical genealogy, it asks whether rethinking our past might open the possibility of a more just e

This essay advances a Marxist feminist claim that the family is the capitalist form of appearance of unwaged reproductive labour. Using a Hegelian-Marxist method centered on capital’s necessary appearances, it shows how the family mystifies, privatizes, and extracts reproductive labour. Revisiting Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, it argues that the family is necessitated by capital and concludes by calling for its abolition and the socialization of reproductive

This essay explores the unstable boundary between nature and culture, showing how science, philosophy, and politics continually reshape what we call 'natural'. It shows how we continually reinterpret natural phenomena through cultural lenses and how this distortion shapes public responses to the climate crisis, turning a stark natural threat into a cultural dispute. It argues that truly confronting climate change requires rethinking what we mean by nature itself.

It is often thought that Marx, despite starting out as a philosopher, sought to break with philosophy in order to carry out his mature work. In this essay, Christoph Schuringa argues that Marx's overall project, culminating in Capital, is not concerned with replacing philosophy with some other enquiry, but to raise philosophy itself to its highest power and to actualize it. As a philosopher, Marx, far from carrying out any derivative work, sought to surpass his predecessors s

This essay traces the global journey of Neoplatonism across Europe, Africa and Asia and how it evolved through encounters with Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. From its origins in Alexandria to its translation and reinterpretation in Ethiopia, the Islamic world and Mughal India, Neoplatonism was not simply transmitted, but was transformed. The essay reveals how a single philosophical system was reshaped across linguistic and cultural borders by those who engaged with it.

Hannah Arendt’s experiences of exile, from Nazi Germany to the U.S., shaped her reflections on statelessness, belonging, and the limits of the nation-state. In this essay, Anna Argirò explores Arendt's urgent call to rethink human rights, citizenship, and politics beyond borders. In a world of walls and displacement, her thought invites us to imagine a political community grounded not in exclusion, but in plurality, responsibility, and shared humanity.

What does it mean to truly forgive and when is it morally right to do so? In this essay, Luke Russell examines the remarkable case of Abdirashid Abdi, a refugee who forgave his attacker and advocated for her leniency. Russell challenges our assumptions about justice, asks whether forgiveness can coexist with punishment, if compassion might sometimes carry risks and what role victims play in shaping the moral landscape of accountability.

Alan Shepherd examines Bergson’s view of intuition as a key to metaphysical knowledge. Unlike Kant, Bergson believes we can directly access reality through our experience of time, or “duration.” Intuition expands through memory, evolution, and mystical insight, revealing a creative, loving force behind life. More than intellect, it offers deep, spiritual truths and reclaims metaphysics as a meaningful, ethical, and experiential pursuit.

In 1975, Australian philosopher Peter Singer asked a deceptively simple question of animals: ‘Can they suffer?’ The implications launched a revolution in our thinking about animal rights and food ethics. But has animal suffering diminished in the fifty years since?

This essay critiques the moral and strategic failure of foreign-imposed regime change in Iran, arguing that such interventions paradoxically reinforce the Islamic Republic's legitimacy rooted in anti-imperialism. Drawing on post-colonial theory and historical precedent, Dabbagh and Hassan call for “solidaristic non-imperialism”: supporting grassroots Iranian movements without replicating imperialist dynamics that undermine authentic agency and indigenous democratic change.