What we would today call cash assistance for the differently abled could in a different era permissibly have been called welfare for cripples. The terms welfare and crippled sound somewhere between ...

Between 1950 and 1980, an estimated 2 million people fled China for Hong Kong by traversing some 5 miles of perilous waters. Countless others were captured and sent to labour camps, or died trying.

What would it take to build a more just society? In contemporary debates about justice, identity is frequently front and centre, but the 20th-century American philosopher John Rawls thought that ...

Human beings are the only creatures who can make themselves miserable. Other animals certainly suffer when they experience negative events, but only humans can induce negative emotions through ...

Political philosophy – a discipline we trace back to Plato and Aristotle – is reasoning about how we live together in political units. It is about states, government, laws, institutions and ...

The idea that success is deserved has great traction in the world. But Zhuangzi argues that it is a deeply flawed notion ...

Attacked by the Left and Right, the Enlightenment can only be saved through use of its greatest legacy: permanent critique ...

From a broken life to a broken nail, ‘trauma’ has been bleached by overuse. But it names something real – and must be reclaimed ...

At Wat Doi Kham, my local temple in Chiang Mai in Thailand, visitors come in their thousands every week. Bearing money and garlands of jasmine, the devotees prostrate themselves in front of a small ...

‘Whose day isn’t gonna be better after watching a pink and yellow rosy maple moth fly in super-slow motion?’ You might think of moths primarily as the pesky creatures that get drawn to your lamplight ...

A slight shift in Cleopatra’s beauty, and the Roman Empire unravels. You miss your train, and an unexpected encounter changes the course of your life. A butterfly alights from a tree in Michoacán, ...

The history of logic should be of interest to anyone with aspirations to thinking that is correct, or at least reasonable. This story illustrates different approaches to intellectual enquiry and human ...