Ethics

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

Schopenhauer, Williams and Bunge on what philosophy can do for a life

Arthur Schopenhauer died on his sofa in Frankfurt on 21 September 1860. Bernard Williams was born on the date in 1929, Mario Bunge in 1919, Peter van Inwagen in 1942; Savonarola in 1452, and Virgil died on it in 19 BC. Each had a view on how much philosophy can settle, and they do not agree.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Bernard Williams

Brussels proposes an EU-wide age limit for social media and a ban on profiling feeds for minors

The European Commission's KIDS Act, presented in Strasbourg on 17 September, would bar under-13s from social media, confine 13- and 14-year-olds to parent-managed accounts, switch off profiling-based recommender feeds for everyone under 18 and shift the burden of proof onto platforms. It reopens a question Mill thought he had closed.

Seyla Benhabib awarded the Karl Jaspers Prize for her philosophy and her public voice

Heidelberg University, its Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the city have named Seyla Benhabib the 2026 laureate of the 25,000-euro Karl Jaspers Prize, citing a life's work on justice, rights and migration and a voice raised, in the jury's words, 'against the evil spirit of an age'. The ceremony is on 29 April 2027.

Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Hannah Arendt

F. H. Bradley was better than the caricature Russell needed

Analytic philosophy tells its origin story as an escape from F. H. Bradley, the Merton recluse who died on 18 September 1924. But the regress argument about relations in Appearance and Reality was never answered, only bypassed, and the ethics of Ethical Studies anticipated the communitarian turn by a century.

F. H. Bradley

What AI art exposes is how little we ever agreed about art

Generative systems have not answered the question of whether a machine can be an artist. They have made it impossible to leave the question vague. A survey of what Danto, Benjamin, Barthes, Collingwood, Dewey, Goodman, Adorno, Heidegger and Boden actually help with, and where the courts have got ahead of the philosophers.

Martin Heidegger, Arthur Danto, Walter Benjamin, Margaret Boden

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.

The word problem: five political books and the vocabulary of the authoritarian turn

Susan Neiman wants the word 'evil' back. Byung-Chul Han wants 'respect'. Žižek and Butler think the words on offer are traps. Habermas, in a volume finished before his death, denied that anything was lost. The year's other book list, read as one argument.

Byung-Chul Han, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Jürgen Habermas, Susan Neiman