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Philosopher
Founder of the Academy — the theory of Forms
The Academy, Athens · Ancient Greece · d. c. 428/427 BC — c. 348/347 BC
Athenian pupil of Socrates and founder of the Academy, the school that trained Aristotle and survived in some form for nine centuries. He wrote almost entirely in dialogue, and his theory of Forms — that the objects of knowledge are eternal and non-sensible — set the terms for later metaphysics.
The Swedish Academy gave the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature to Anne Carson on 8 October. Before the verse novels and the box of grief came a doctorate in classics and a 1986 book on Sappho's one word for desire. Why philosophers have read her for forty years, and what the prize gets right.
Plato
Four awards fill in the autumn prize map. Martha Nussbaum takes the Library of Congress Kluge Prize; Barbara Vetter the German Research Foundation's Leibniz Prize; Monique Dixsaut the Academie francaise's grand prix de philosophie; and three sixth-formers from Mexico, Bulgaria and Singapore the gold medals at the Warsaw philosophy olympiad.
Michael Sandel, Martha Nussbaum, Plato
The argument about artificial intelligence runs almost entirely on questions from the philosophy of mind. Deleuze and Guattari offer a different unit of analysis — desire as production, the machine as a cut into a flow, the assemblage as the thing that actually does something. What that buys, and what it cannot buy.
David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Nick Land, Yuk Hui, Plato, Gilles Deleuze
The nostos is older than philosophy and has outlasted most of it. Odysseus refuses immortality to go home; Neo swallows a pill to find out where home is. Between Homer and the Wachowskis lies a question neither can settle: what becomes of a return when there may be nothing to return to.
Plato
The founding text of Western political philosophy argues that most people cannot be trusted to govern themselves. The ship of state, the guardians' curriculum, the quarrel with the sophists and the noble lie belong to one argument — and the modern replies to it, from Karl Popper to David Estlund, are less conclusive than they look.
Elizabeth Anderson, Plato
