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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
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Confucius is a name most readers know and few can place. This profile introduces the philosopher behind it: his ideas of ren, ritual, the exemplary person and the rectification of names; his claim that good government begins in character; and the compiled, argued-over text we call the Analects.
Confucius
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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
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
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.
To read Cicero merely as a 'great orator' is to miss the intellectual fight he was actually in. Long treated as the man who carried Greek philosophy into Latin, he is now read as a thinker of independent weight. His question is still open: does a republic survive on good institutions, or on good citizens?
The Chicago philosopher objects, in Open Socrates, to the familiar portrait: Socrates was not a sceptic but an intellectualist. In conversation with Merve Emre she explains why the distinction matters — and why philosophy cannot be done on one's own.
