Concepts

Confucius: how a good person is formed and a good society built

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

Robert Stalnaker's common ground and the machines that borrow it

A fifteen-page paper from 1978 modelled conversation as the narrowing of a set of live possibilities. In 2026 the vocabulary turns up in AI research on whether chatbots grasp the unsaid. We set out Robert Stalnaker's theory, and the care needed before saying a language model 'tracks common ground'.

David Chalmers, Robert Stalnaker

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.

Tractatus Prize goes to Maria-Sibylla Lotter for a cool look at the victim as self-image

The Philosophicum Lech has given its 25,000-euro Tractatus essay prize to the Bochum philosopher Maria-Sibylla Lotter for Opfer. Über Verwundbarkeit als Selbstbild, a study of how 'victim' became the most authoritative word in public life. The jury praised a 'crystal-clear' book; the ceremony is at Lech am Arlberg on 25 September.

Why Gadamer insisted that Truth and Method offered no method

Hans-Georg Gadamer spent four decades correcting readers of his own title. Truth and Method, published in 1960, argues that the humanities were reaching truth long before the natural sciences arrived to tell them they were not. What survives of the argument, including its quarrels with Habermas and Derrida, and what it can and cannot say about talking to a machine.

Jürgen Habermas, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer

Kripke, Eucken and Lazarus: three ways a name gets hold of a thing

Saul Kripke died on 15 September 2022, aged 81. Rudolf Eucken, the 1908 Nobel literature laureate, died on this day in 1926 and was forgotten within a generation. Moritz Lazarus, who defined a people as those who count each other as one, was born on this day in 1824.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke

Heidegger's danger was never the machines, but how the world shows up

Seventy-three years after Heidegger asked what technology is, the answer that matters is the one most often skipped: the essence of technology is nothing technological. A reading of Gestell, the Rhine passage, the sentence he cut, the Nazi record, and the objections of Feenberg and Ihde.

Yuk Hui, Martin Heidegger

Jean Nicod Prize 2026 goes to Elisabeth Camp, philosopher of the unsaid

The Rutgers philosopher takes the field's most watched award in philosophy of mind, and will give the Nicod Lectures in Paris this autumn. Her subject is the part of communication that is never actually asserted: metaphor, sarcasm, slurs, insinuation, and the perspectives that organise what we notice.

David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Elena Esposito, Elisabeth Camp

Deleuze, desire and the machine: asking a better question about AI

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