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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
John Locke was born at Wrington on 29 August 1632. A theory of knowledge that made the mind a blank sheet, a political philosophy that tied property to labour and a defence of toleration place him among the founding writers of the modern world.
Newsroom · 29 August 2026
Entries for the Berggruen Institute's 100,000-dollar essay competition closed on 17 August. This year's subject is Karl Jaspers's notion of the Axial Age: is humanity once again on the hinge of history? For the first time the competition also accepted works of fiction.
A study led from Harvard and MIT and written by ninety-three researchers claims to have built a profile for every inhabitant of the planet, against which artificial intelligence systems can be tested. The technical claim is strong; the philosophical question is larger still.
Love, loneliness, status anxiety and the search for meaning. The Anglo-Swiss writer is the best-known figure taking philosophy beyond the bounds of academic specialism and applying it to ordinary concerns. His question is as old as Socrates': how should we live?
The journal that deliberately published a largely machine-written article at the start of August reversed itself within a fortnight and prohibited AI authorship. The argument has now moved to a harder question: how can it be proved that a text is the work of a machine?
Anthony Kenny, Cain Todd, David Charles, Tom Rockmore and Gabriele Taylor all died within a single month. Between them they stood for lines of work running from Aristotelian scholarship to German idealism, and from moral psychology to aesthetics.
The Albanian-born philosopher has been awarded this year's Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. The jury singled out the way she turns a childhood spent in socialist Albania into philosophical analysis, and the fresh urgency her account of freedom acquires as authoritarianism rises.
The philosopher who carries the Frankfurt School's inheritance argues that behind social conflict lies an invisible demand: recognition. In his recent work he has taken that framework into working life, asking whether democracy can be learnt on the job.
Axel Honneth
