All posts on Daily Philosophy

Todd May, Should We Go Extinct? A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times. Crown, 2024. 176 pages. Humans are the only species that can both cause and contemplate their own extinction. Our enormous technological and philosophical abilities put us in a unique existential situation – one that informs discussions about whether we are wise enough to keep ourselves in existence. Many of the arr…

On noble shepherds and just rulers What better way to start this discussion than at the beginning? So let’s go back in time, close to the very roots of Western philosophy, Chapter I from Plato’s Republic . In here, we have Socrates discussing the nature of just rule with a variety of characters. One of them, Thrasymachus, uses the timeless argument of comparing rulers to shepherds (indeed, it is …

Public discourse in the post-truth era is shifting from “what happened?” to “who possesses the authority to narrate what happened?” Truth no longer flows solely from evidence; it moves through institutions, media infrastructures, and digital platforms as a sociological process. Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt renders this shift visible through a sexual misconduct allegation at Yale University. T…

James Romm (2026). Since You’re Mortal…: Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays. W.W. Norton and Company. 176 pages. Get it here: Amazon US , publisher’s website . Amazon UK doesn’t seem to have the book yet. If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me! I was delighted to open James Romm’s little collection of ancient wisd…

In Vietnam, many families and businesses keep a songbird. Housed in ornate bamboo cages, these birds are the centerpieces of a Vietnamese tradition known as chơi chim cảnh (‘playing’ ornamental birds). The birds are often meticulously cared for, fed premium diets of insects and fruit, bathed daily, and protected from the harsh realities of urban predators. If humans provide food, care, and most i…

Not many seminal works of philosophy are the product of an unoccupied mind in the midst of a failed mining project, but that, it seems, was the story behind Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics . At the beginning of January 1686, he travelled to the Harz mountains to continue his (ultimately ill-fated) project to improve the productivity of the mines there via wind machines and water pumps of his o…

On 31st March 2026, the University of Cambridge announced the establishment of a new constituent of the university, the Rokos School of Government. The ‘Rokos’ name was justified by an exceedingly large donation to found the school, a donation made by Chris Rokos, a hedge fund manager. The school is “to equip future leaders to navigate increasingly complex domestic and global political environmen…