Heidegger, Benjamin, Eliot and Reichenbach: four clocks on one day

Martin Heidegger was born at Messkirch on 26 September 1889; Walter Benjamin died at Portbou on 26 September 1940, a day after crossing the Pyrenees on foot. T. S. Eliot was born on the date in 1888, Hans Reichenbach in 1891. Four accounts of time: a philosopher who joined the party, a critic who fled it, a poet, a physicist.

Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin

Suárez, Faulkner and Gould: three refusals of the given order

Francisco Suárez died in Lisbon on 25 September 1617, having written the first metaphysics arranged in its own order rather than Aristotle's. William Faulkner was born on the day in 1897 and Glenn Gould in 1932: one took chronology apart in the novel, the other left the concert hall for the splicing block. Three refusals of the given order.

The dose and the odds: Cardano and Paracelsus on 24 September

Gerolamo Cardano was born in Pavia on 24 September 1501; Paracelsus died in Salzburg on 24 September 1541. Two physicians who quarrelled with every authority they met, and who between them put a number where a quality had been: how much of a substance makes it poison, and how likely a throw of the dice is.

Three closures, one rescue and a haemorrhage that nobody has measured

Dundee has suspended its single honours philosophy degree and approved a philosophy-and-AI programme instead; Hertfordshire has stopped recruiting; Kingston's research centre has left the university altogether. Meanwhile the labs hire, Floridi speaks of a 'haemorrhage' and the Fed's table is quoted as vindication. An audit of what the year has actually established.

Luciano Floridi, Catherine Malabou

Security Council meets on losing control of AI, briefed by the men who build it

This afternoon in New York, under the French presidency, the Security Council holds its first meeting devoted to the possibility that frontier AI systems slip out of human control. The briefers are Yoshua Bengio and the chief executives of OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face. Whether the Council is the right room is itself in dispute.

Norbert Wiener

Life has no point, and Rivka Weinberg would like you to be sad about it

Rivka Weinberg's The Meaning of It All (Oxford, March 2026) argues that a life as a whole cannot have a point, that death is overrated as a threat to meaning, and that time is the real thief. A close reading, then the autumn's other titles: Ganeri's revised Indian philosophy introduction, Han, Žižek and Habermas.

Freud and Augustus: two men who arranged their own exits

Sigmund Freud died in Hampstead on 23 September 1939, after his physician Max Schur kept a promise made eleven years earlier. Augustus was born in Rome on 23 September 63 BC and died, Suetonius says, the easy death he had prayed for. Two lives that ended on their own terms, and two accounts of those endings argued over ever since.

Sigmund Freud