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The Hume scholar who put trust at the centre of moral philosophy made a proposal about academic assessment thirty years ago: judge a candidate not on everything they have published but on four papers of their own choosing. Now that machines write for nothing, it is back.
More than a hundred books, running from hedonism to atheism and from readings of Nietzsche to political polemic. Onfray has now begun a four-volume series that sets out to rewrite the history of Western thought. What makes him contentious is not only what he argues but where he chooses to argue it.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France has bought the Camus archive for nine million euros, the largest acquisition of literary heritage the French state has ever made. It holds the only known working manuscript of The Outsider and the draft of The First Man, found in the car in which Camus died.
Cast out of his congregation at twenty-three under the heaviest curse its elders could pronounce, he ground lenses for a living and left his masterwork unpublished. But Spinoza's real radicalism was never his atheism: he did not deny God, he stripped God of personhood.
The ethicist Kathryn Lawson calls Arendt, Levinas and Weil as witnesses against Nolan's Odyssey: Homer's Odysseus feels no guilt for his violence, and that is not a defect but a warning. Fitting the hero with a conscience cuts away the story's ethical depth.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in London on 30 August 1797. Frankenstein, written when she was eighteen, has become two centuries later the most cited literary text in the ethics of artificial intelligence. The same day in 1871 brought the birth of Ernest Rutherford, who would discover the atomic nucleus.
The Stanford philosopher's new book from Harvard University Press prises apart rationality and reasonableness. For Lawlor, the reasonable person is not merely the one who infers correctly but the one who can see what matters. The New Yorker named it among the year's best.
A study led from Harvard and MIT and written by ninety-three researchers claims to have built a profile for every inhabitant of the planet, against which artificial intelligence systems can be tested. The technical claim is strong; the philosophical question is larger still.
Love, loneliness, status anxiety and the search for meaning. The Anglo-Swiss writer is the best-known figure taking philosophy beyond the bounds of academic specialism and applying it to ordinary concerns. His question is as old as Socrates': how should we live?
