David Harvey at 90, and the theory that capital produces space

For half a century the Marxist geographer has argued one thing: capital does not simply move through space, it builds space, and it escapes its own crises by rearranging what it has built. From Haussmann's Paris to the data centres of rural Louisiana, an assessment of the idea and of what it cannot do.

Immanuel Wallerstein, David Harvey

Philosophers ask governments for an AI treaty modelled on nuclear arms control

An open letter written by Molly Gardner and published on 11 September asks elected officials for a treaty on the model of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to pause, slow or halt frontier AI development everywhere. Its signatories are mainstream ethicists. On Daily Nous, Justin Weinberg proposed something stranger, and David Wallace objected.

Robot rights: three questions the debate keeps running together

Can a machine be conscious? Can it have interests? Should it have legal standing? The three questions come apart, and almost every argument about robot rights confuses at least two of them. A report on what the philosophers, the labs and the lawyers have actually said.

Eric Schwitzgebel, Peter Singer, David Chalmers

Midgley, Montaigne and Feuerbach: the things we make and then obey

Mary Midgley was born on 13 September 1919, Montaigne died on 13 September 1592 and Feuerbach on 13 September 1872. Three thinkers, one suspicion: that we manufacture gods, myths and certainties, then treat them as though they had arrived from somewhere else.

Mary Midgley, Ludwig Feuerbach

Autumn's philosophy list is arguing about mind, truth and the authority of reason

Eight books published or due between now and the end of December, none of them covered in this week's two surveys. Read together, they show a discipline that has stopped asking whether machines can think and started asking what thinking is worth — and a logic revival almost nobody has noticed.

Byung-Chul Han, Giorgio Agamben, David Chalmers

Templeton Prize goes to the palaeontologist who thinks minds are inevitable

Simon Conway Morris, whose Burgess Shale work supplied the evidence for Stephen Jay Gould's 'Wonderful Life', has taken the 2026 Templeton Prize for arguing that Gould read those fossils backwards. His thesis — that evolution converges on eyes, flight and intelligence — carries a philosophical bill that his critics say he has not paid.

Eric Schwitzgebel, Jeremy Pober, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Simon Conway Morris

Gilles Deleuze and the vocabulary that outran its arguments

Rhizome, assemblage, deterritorialisation, lines of flight: the words are everywhere and the metaphysics that made them mean something is largely gone. Three decades after his death, a reckoning with what Deleuze actually argued, what his critics actually alleged, and why three pages he wrote in 1990 still describe 2026.

Byung-Chul Han, Nick Land, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze