Political Philosophy

Who belongs, and who decides? Demography as a problem for political philosophy

Falling fertility and ageing in rich societies, and migration across every border, force an old question back open: who makes up a political community, and who gets to decide? A reading through Arendt, Carens, Walzer, Miller, Pogge and Parfit.

Will Kymlicka, Thomas Pogge, Philippe Van Parijs, Hannah Arendt

The ownership question: property, labour and the economics of artificial intelligence

Strip away the talk of minds and machines and a plainer question sits underneath artificial intelligence: who owns the compute, the data and the models, and who keeps the returns. The labour evidence is more modest than the valuations assume, and the disagreement among economists is real.

David Harvey, Karl Marx, Shoshana Zuboff

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

Unamuno, Cervantes and Mises: what it takes to convince, and what it takes to win

Miguel de Unamuno was born in Bilbao on 29 September 1864. The sentence he is remembered for, 'you will win but you will not convince', was probably never said in that form; the truer version is better. Cervantes was born, by inference from his name, on the day in 1547; Ludwig von Mises in 1881. Zola and Auden died today.

A birthday nobody can prove: Confucius, David Lewis and the logic of convention

East Asia keeps 28 September as Confucius's birthday, a date fixed by a recalculation in Taipei in 1952. David Lewis, born on the day in 1941, wrote the book that explains why a date nobody can document is kept anyway. Immanuel Wallerstein, born in 1930, spent a career refusing a convention of his discipline. Melville and Pasteur died today.

Immanuel Wallerstein

Bossuet, Loyola's order and Vincent de Paul: the day history was given a plan

Paul III approved the Society of Jesus on 27 September 1540. Bossuet, educated by Jesuits and the last great theologian of history as God's design, was born at Dijon on 27 September 1627. Vincent de Paul, whose Tuesday conferences the young Bossuet attended, died on the date in 1660. Three institutions of providence, and the philosophers they trained.

Security Council meets on losing control of AI, briefed by the men who build it

This afternoon in New York, under the French presidency, the Security Council holds its first meeting devoted to the possibility that frontier AI systems slip out of human control. The briefers are Yoshua Bengio and the chief executives of OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face. Whether the Council is the right room is itself in dispute.

Norbert Wiener

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

Strauss, Montague, Rose and Piper: what a text hides and what it shows

Leo Strauss was born on 20 September 1899, Richard Montague in 1930, Gillian Rose in 1947 and Adrian Piper in 1948; Annie Besant died on the date in 1933. Four births and a death, and between them a quarrel about whether meaning is something hidden between the lines or something fully on the surface.

Leo Strauss