Forum for Philosophy

Stephen Baxter/ Amelie Saintonge/ Karim Thébault Listen to the recording here or on YouTube What are black holes, why are physicists so sure they exist, and how did we come to know about them? Can we know, or at least imagine, what happens inside a black hole? The science of black holes has long inspired science fiction writers, but might science fiction […]

Hannah Dawson/ Robert Rowland Smith/ Helen Tyson Listen to the recording here or on YouTube When the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau set out to write his Confessions in 1782, he proposed ‘to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; this man shall be myself’. Philosophers have long engaged with the confessional form, from Plato and […]

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca/ Hamish MacPherson/ Anna Pakes Listen to the recording here or on YouTube Humans are not mere brains in vats. We are living, moving creatures, and this fact matters for not only for how we think about ourselves, but also how we think about thinking itself. We consider dance’s contribution to philosophical debates about knowledge. What can we learn […]

Matthew Festenstein/ Clara Fischer/ Paniel Reyes Cardenas Listen to the recording here or on YouTube What if instead of worrying about truth as a fundamental, objective notion, we just focused on what works? What if we just believed in what is practical or beneficial to us to believe? Pragmatism is the great American contribution to philosophy, and it has serious […]

Steven French/ Melanie Keene/ Alice Murphy Listen to the recording here or on YouTube Science is often mistakenly thought to involved nothing but cold reason. In reality, very human acts of creativity appear everywhere. We explore the role of imaginative thinking in science. Are thought experiments sources of knowledge or just hypotheses? Can a story or narrative also be a scientific explanation? And how […]

Marina Benjamin/ Russell Foster/ Simon Morgan/ Shahidha Bari Listen to the recording here or on YouTube Philosophers have diligently examined consciousness, but what do they have to say about our nightly loss of consciousness? In an age of mindfulness, is there something to be said for sleepfulness too? And for those of us still rubbing our eyes at 4am, what […]

Anat Pick / Mark Post / Adam Shriver Listen to the recording here or on YouTube Lab-grown meat promises a future of burgers, meatballs, and even foie gras, without the side order of animal suffering and environmental damage. But is fake meat a real solution to these problems? And will its success lead to the extinction of farm animals? If lab-grown […]

Simon Critchley/ Gerald Moore/ Emily Ryall Listen to the recording here or on YouTube ‘All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football’, observed Albert Camus. And it is football, above all other sports, that so many philosophers revere. So there’s everything to play for in this panel discussion exploring the relationship between football and […]

Alexander Douglas/ Peter Millican/ Kirsten Walsh Listen to the podcast here or on YouTube ‘Reason’ and ‘knowledge’, and the relationship between them, were major themes in Enlightenment philosophy, and drew the attention of some of the most respected philosophers of the time, including Decartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, often referred to as the rationalists, and Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, the so-called […]

John Ó Maoilearca/ Undine Sellbach/ Lynn Turner Listen to the recording here or on YouTube Humans have always co-existed with animals, using them as tools, resources, and, more recently, companions. More abstractly, animals help us to understand ourselves; they are ‘good to think with’ (Claude Lévi-Strauss). What roles do animals play in our understanding of issues as wide as ethics, […]