Pages: 98
Published: December 2025
Edited(s): Nishok G U, Kate Warlow-Corcoran and James Andow 
 
A central concept in Buddhism is dukkha, commonly translated as suffering or dissatisfaction. The title of this issue, ‘Crossing the Floods’, is inspired by the parable of the same name, wherein the Buddha is asked how he managed to cross the flood of suffering. The Buddha’s paradoxical answer is taken to be the secret to enlightenment: ‘By not halting, friend, and by not straining I crossed the flood’. Struggle too hard to escape suffering’s grasp and you risk being swept away by its rapid currents, while passivity might lead you to drown in its depths. But this is not easy to understand or achieve, meaning that for most of our lives, we will suffer. Yet despite being an inescapable and enduring part of life, we all too often hide our pain and deny the pain of others. This ‘silencing’ of suffering further compounds the difficulty of developing a shared language and understanding of these experiences.
 
The essays and conversations that follow demonstrate how  philosophical reflection can enhance the understanding of our own suffering and that of others, thus better equipping  us to cross the floods together. Havi Carel argues that illness often fundamentally transforms the ill person’s relationship with their body and their sense of being in the world; Kaitlyn Creasy reflects on her own experiences of loneliness, arguing that it can be a valuable source of self-knowledge and a catalyst for personal transformation;  Kathleen M. Higgins proposes that aesthetic activities can counter certain aspects of mental suffering;  Rebekah Humphreys asks what it means to bear witness to such widespread animal suffering in factory farms and laboratories; David Loy shows that realising the constructed nature of our selves is a way to overcome alienation from other humans, the natural world, and the earth itself; and Boris Sotomayor explores the exhaustion and anxiety that can result from contemporary practices of self-quantification and optimisation.
 
Our main section concludes with edited transcripts of three conversations from our online event series: Mariana Alessandri and Kieran Setiya discuss how we can live with dark moods in a world saturated with ‘toxic positivity’; Samir Chopra and Maryam Aghdami consider existential anxiety and how we might come to terms with its enduring presence; and Matthew Ratcliffe and Kathleen M. Higgins discuss how phenomenology can help us understand the nature of grief.
 
Later in this issue, Maryam Aghdami explores a tension between the desire to protect marginalised groups from harmful language and the need to respect their agency as knowledge-producers; Rebecca Buxton highlights the difficulty of reconciling a researcher’s right to privacy with the demand that they reflect on how their identity and experience informs their work; Hossein Dabbagh and Patrick Hassan address a moral paradox at the heart of calls for regime change in Iran: the risk of reinforcing an oppressive regime through the very means meant to end it; Heather King and Timothy Morton discuss the importance of teaching humanities to STEM students; and Kathleen Murphy-Hollies and Rosa Ritunnano explore how delusions can, paradoxically, anchor a person back in the world.
 
Throughout this issue, we feature artworks by Emma Fielden, Artur Majka, Sun Smith-Forêt, and Hanae Utamura, whose images echo the theme of crossing the floods in their own visual language.