10 September: Wollstonecraft's death, Bataille's birth and the argument about limits

Mary Wollstonecraft died on this date in 1797, eleven days after giving birth. Georges Bataille was born on it a century later, and Paul Virilio died on it in 2018. Three lives with almost nothing in common, and one shared preoccupation: where the line is drawn, and who draws it.

Georges Bataille, Mary Wollstonecraft, Paul Virilio

Metaphysics returns to the timetable: philosophy's autumn conference season

Between the end of September and the middle of December, philosophers meet in Los Angeles, Columbus, Nijmegen, Evanston, Oxford, Durham and Athens. Read together rather than as a list, the programme says something specific: the question of what there is has stopped belonging to one tradition.

David Chalmers

Eight books, one question: the philosophy that defined 2026 so far

Six of the year's most consequential philosophy books are about artificial intelligence. The two that are not — a history of the concept and a history of prediction — are the reason the other six are worth reading. A survey of the year to September.

Eric Schwitzgebel, Yuk Hui, Carissa Véliz

Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics Lectures and the Question of What Understanding Is

A new edition of the courses Friedrich Schleiermacher gave in 1809-10 and 1819 returns to the moment when interpretation stopped being a craft with local rules and became a question about the mind — a question that machine reading has now made awkward again.

Friedrich Schleiermacher

Azra Erhat and the argument that translation can build a past

Expelled from her university in 1948, the Turkish classicist Azra Erhat did her most consequential work afterwards: a Homer that took root in a language, and a contested claim that the ancient cultures of Anatolia belong to the people living there now.

Ludwig Wittgenstein and the case against the two-sentence summary

Everyone carries a potted Wittgenstein: first he drew the limits of language, then he decided meaning is use. Specialists have largely stopped believing that story. What survives is stranger and more useful - a single long experiment in what philosophy is for.

Anthony Kenny, Ludwig Wittgenstein

Not equality but domination: the real subject of Elizabeth Anderson

For twenty-five years Elizabeth Anderson has been filed under 'equality'. Read her books in order and a different subject appears: who is in a position to give orders, and on what terms. It is a question that algorithmic management has made unavoidable.

Axel Honneth, Philippe Van Parijs, Elizabeth Anderson