Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679-1749) is best known as a contemporary and defender of John Locke - but she was also a fascinating philosopher in her own right. Writing at a time when secular philosophy was beginning to challenge the Christian religious monopoly on moral authority, Cockburn was a devout Anglican - and, for a time, a devout Catholic - who nevertheless believed that virtue could be attained via reason.

Reading seems like a simple, uncomplicated activity that most of us enjoy without thinking too much about it - but how simple is it really? Literary theorists have been arguing for decades over what it is to read, what it is to interpret a text, what it is for something to be a text. This week we're catching up on some of the recent debates.

It's been said that the work of the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer should come with a health warning, so stark and pessimistic was his outlook on life. And the man was no less confronting than the philosophy: he could be rude, intemperate and misanthropic. But a new biography of Schopenhauer shows him to have been a more complex and even endearing figure than his reputation might suggest.

The 2023 Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme exposed a system that unfairly (and illegally) subjected vulnerable people to stress and trauma - but was it deliberately punitive? And to what extent does our welfare system reflect negative public attitudes toward people living in poverty?

There's an app for everything these days, including parenting and childrearing - but at what cost? Women in the Global South are increasingly using parenting apps, whose Western developers say their advice is scientific and reliable. But that modern, scientific advice is edging out older, traditional childrearing wisdom and causing intergenerational tension.

Democracy is a powerful force for progress, but it's also vulnerable and beset by its own internal contradictions. Plato thought that democracy was a bad idea, as it gave unmerited power to the ignorant and the malevolent. Looking around the world today, can we confidently say he was wrong?

Conservation is the name of the game in most ecological thinking - but in the eyes of some environmental philosophers, conservation is a backward-looking concept. What if, instead of looking to conserve nature, we tried to recreate and improve it via biotechnology? This year's Alan Saunders Lecture explores such futuristic interventions as reviving extinct species, turning carnivores into herbivores and genetically engineering less resource-intensive humans.

Are you troubled by the way that social media has enabled the spread of propaganda? Well, get ready for slopaganda, which is propaganda that's AI-powered and unprecedented in terms of speed, scale, audience reach and persuasiveness. "AI slop" is the term used to identify unwanted AI content - the algorithm-driven equivalent of spam email. Slopaganda is turning out to be just as annoying as spam, but far more dangerous.

As an academic discipline, Australian literature has been a largely white affair, with the canon of "great Australian authors" dominated by Anglo-European men. Indigenous writers are working to change this, and Australian indigenous literature is flourishing. But how comfortably does it sit within the traditional university structure?

Living and writing through the years before, during and after the Second World War, French author and philosopher Albert Camus witnessed the rise of fascism and its terrible endgame in German National Socialism. Today, amid fears of a neo-fascist resurgence in the USA, his work well is worth revisiting.