Joe Humphreys

Joe Humphreys

Assistant News Editor

Joe Humphreys is an Assistant News Editor with The Irish Times and author of the ‘Unthinkable’ philosophy column
What if Vladimir Putin was assassinated? ‘What would replace him might be worse.’ Photograph: Nick Bradshaw
Is assassination ever morally justifiable?

Unthinkable: The logic of taking one life to save many seems to have a fatal flaw

The randomness of passenger life ‘masks a rigidly stratified order’, says philosopher Michael Marder. Photograph: Getty images
If I pay to skip the queue, what does that say about me?

Unthinkable: ‘Tell me what you do as a passenger, and I’ll tell you who you are’

Scott Hershovitz, author of Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with Kids: ‘Parental authority is part of a kind of package deal of parentage.’
A logical approach to parenting: Don’t endlessly negotiate

Unthinkable: Scott Hershovitz advocates raising children who ‘eventually we can resent’

Noga Arikha, author of The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind: ‘My mother wasn’t aware what was happening to her. So she was actually very happy, blissfully happy, living in the present.’
Can someone with dementia access a deeper kind of wisdom?

Unthinkable: Philosopher Noga Arikha seeks to make sense of dementia

Intellectual heavyweights: Donegal-born John Toland (left) and Kilkenny native George Berkeley
Be thankful for intellectual rivals, they can sharpen your mind

Unthinkable: Historical clash between two Irish philosophers shows an upside to irritation

Michelangelo’s fresco The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. Photograph: EPA
If you feel like the world is ending, you are not alone

Unthinkable: Predictions of the end of the world have all been wrong – so far

Peter Sarsgaard, as hotshot intellectual Professor Hardy, with Jessie Buckley, playing Leda, in The Lost Daughter. Photograph: Yannis Drakoulidis/Netflix
The meaning of facial hair, from ‘patriarchal’ beards to commitment-phobic stubble

Unthinkable: Is it time to lose the lockdown beard? To shave that noncommital stubble?

Russian police detain protesters at a rally in St Petersburg against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Photograph: Anotoly Maltsev/EPA
Why free speech should be the most highly valued human right

Unthinkable: A book by Eric Heinze cuts through muddled thinking around rights

We need to find the online equivalent of cafes or ‘tables for people to sit around’. Photograph: Getty Images
How to change the world? Have more private conversations

Unthinkable: Social media can give the illusion that progress comes from making noise

Will Smith and Denis Diderot: Each has a lesson for the other. Photographs: Getty Images
Is Will Smith experiencing ‘staircase wit’ after slapping Chris Rock?

Unthinkable: Oscars incident provides teachable moment on ‘l’esprit de l’escalier’

Linda Zagzebski: ‘The virtues are the qualities that persons need in order to live harmoniously in well-functioning communities; they are not public demands.’
Do politicians have a moral duty to take refugees into their homes?

Unthinkable: It is easy to fall prey to a category error when making ethical calculations

‘People have to begin to take personal responsibility as we move from mask mandates to manners,’ says philosopher and therapist Stephen J Costello. Photographer: Cheney Orr/Bloomberg
Stop looking to holidays as the source of ultimate happiness

Unthinkable: If the pandemic is over why do we not feel free?, asks Joe Humphreys

Russian president Vladimir Putin, at 5ft 7in, is roughly the same height as his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Photograph: Sputnik/Sergey Guneev/Kremlin via Reuters
Putin is an evil little man, but why bring his height into it?

Unthinkable: Is ‘Napoleon syndrome’ real or just heightist stereotyping?

Armed military police talk to gendarmes at the Romanian-Ukrainian border. Nato should begin ‘rearming itself dramatically’ and stationing large numbers of troops in the front-line states, says academic James G Murphy SJ. Photograph: AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru
Should Ireland support Ukraine militarily? Try answering ‘No’

Unthinkable: ‘Just war theory’ is not a licence for standing on the sidelines and hoping for peace

Philosophers Mary Midgley (wearing glasses in front row, sixth from right) and Iris Murdoch (second row, fourth from right) at Somerville College, Oxford in 1938. Photograph: Somerville College
Feeling out of step with everything? You’re in good company

Unthinkable: Lessons in logic from four celebrated women philosophers

Michelangelo’s fresco The Creation of Adam. For most of human history, people understood themselves as products or playthings of the gods. Photograph: Getty Images/Science Photo Library
Humans now control nature and can undo creation. So are we gods?

Unthinkable: The idea of a human self cut off from wider creation is a relatively new concept

Owen Flanagan’s curiosity about other traditions stretches back to his upbringing in an Irish-Catholic family in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. Photograph: Gabriella Clare Marino/Wikimedia Commons
Have you no shame? Because it could help you be a better person

Unthinkable: Philosopher Owen Flanagan believes shame can have positive effects

George Berkeley, who asked in The Querist (1735-1737): ‘Whether the true idea of money, as such, be not altogether that of a ticket or counter?’
Would Ireland’s most celebrated philosopher invest in bitcoin?

Unthinkable: George Berkeley championed the idea of publicly owned banks for the common good

Eleanor (Kristen Bell), Chidi (William Jackson Harper) and Michael (Ted Danson). The Good Place explored complex ethical dilemmas including The Trolley Problem, arguably the most famous thought experiment in modern philosophy. Photograph: NBC
‘The term cancel culture is reductive and stupid’: The Good Place creator on modern morals

Michael Schur explains the relevance of great philosophical theories to everyday life

Gamers in an online realm can operate under an internal moral code but, should this become our main form of existence, the value to humanity becomes more obscure. Photograph: Getty images
Virtual reality promises a guilt-free life: All the more reason to be wary of it

Unthinkable: Philosopher David Chalmers believes ‘nonvirtual life’ has met its match but does his argument stack up?

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer ‘believes pessimism to be true. When he cites the tragic poets, it is because he believes they were right in describing a world of suffering.’ Photograph: Getty images
I think ‘hopeful pessimists’ have better lives than optimists – but I’m not positive

Unthinkable: It’s nice if your glass is always half full, but are you deluding yourself?

Protesters from the Occupy Wall Street campaign. ‘One of the things that makes us human,’ says David Wengrow, ‘is that we can make moral choices between competitive and altruistic kinds of society.’ Photograph: Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Humans aren’t naturally egalitarian. We’re better than that

Unthinkable: David Graeber and David Wengrow bring fresh thinking to human history

Online sessions of the Philosopher’s Hat Club ‘provided a haven for human connection’ during the lockdown, says organiser Lukasz Krzywon. Photograph: Getty images
How to think better: Join a community philosophy club

Unthinkable: Community philosophers aim to overcome the subject’s ‘aristocratic’ image

Iris Murdoch ‘called the fact-value dichotomy into question’. Photograph: Getty
Values are not ‘just opinions’: How our moral teaching has gone wrong

Unthinkable: A remarkable quartet of philosophers foresaw the risk of rejecting ‘moral facts’

South African archbishop Desmond Tutu ‘used the word ubuntu - a certain African trait of being willing to forgive’. Photograph: Ginluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images
South Africa still has a lesson for North, says academic behind ‘peace safari’

State papers: Padraig O’Malley’s 1997 trust-building trip was dubbed ‘rubbish’ by then taoiseach

The founder of Sinn Féin Arthur Griffith has been ‘squeezed out’ of centenary commemorations: his pragmatism and willingness to put peace-building ahead of ideology meant he was airbrushed from the history of political parties. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty
If someone can be cancelled, someone can be uncancelled. Let’s start with Arthur Griffith

Unthinkable: Are we losing the ability to judge historical figures fairly?

Placards prepared by participants in a New York protest against vaccine mandates. It is ‘not possible to make sense of vaccine hesitancy’ if you don’t try to understand people’s reasoning, says political philosopher Quassim Cassam. Photograph: EPA/Justin Lane
The Unthinkable philosophical concept of the year is ... vice-charging

Unthinkable: Labelling people with unscientific views as stupid or immoral is not very wise

Erwin Schrödinger: “He kept a record of his conquests in personal diaries . . . and explained his predilection for teenage girls on the grounds that their innocence was the ideal match for his natural genius.” Photograph: Getty
How Erwin Schrödinger indulged his ‘Lolita complex’ in Ireland

Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who spent 17 years in Ireland, was a serial groomer of girls

French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, who described technology as a pharmakon, something that is both a cure and a poison. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
Do not like or share this article: Fighting back against technological ‘interruption’

Unthinkable: Philosopher Bernard Stiegler explores how apps alter how you relate to yourself

How good can a God be? Stephen Fry and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz have opposing views. Photograph: PA/Getty
Is there a God? Why is there something instead of nothing? This article explains it all

Unthinkable: No of course it doesn't, but it does try to address life’s ultimate questions

While many of us welcome the decline of the church, there is a nagging sense that our connection to fundamental questions about human existence is being severed. Photograph: Getty images
Is your mind open enough to contemplate belief in God?

Unthinkable: It’s not clear we have either the language or patience in Ireland for metaphysics

Author John Boyne: ‘Through my experiences, the people who tweet the most . . . go a bit mad’. Photograph Nick Bradshaw
What is Twitter doing to your brain?

Unthinkable: New technology may give the impression your mind is no longer your own

Is ‘male thinking’ part of the problem? World leaders pose for a group photo at the Cop26 conference last week. Photograph: Alberto Pezzali/AFP via Getty Images
What should any one of us be expected to do to avert climate catastrophe?

Unthinkable: Plus four other questions philosophers are asking as we face a global emergency

The death of Seneca - ‘master writer’ of the Greco-Roman age. Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Has Stoicism become a new religion?

Unthinkable: Stoicism is all the rage in Silicon Valley but its roots are often overlooked

Albert Camus said man today would be summed up in just these terms: ‘He fornicated and read the papers.’ Photograph: Loomis Dean/Time & Life Pictures/Getty
What Albert Camus can teach us about friendship

Unthinkable: Can you be friends with someone whose politics you oppose?

Francesca Stavrakopoulou: ‘The God of the New Testament is just as violent as the God of the Old Testament’.
Finding different ways to see and understand God

Unthinkable: Descriptions of the biblical deity come from ‘men, writing for men’

Hannah Arendt: Thinking ‘is a profitless enterprise as far as results are concerned’. Photograph: Getty Images
Stop to think, and think to be happy: Hannah Arendt’s credo for life

Unthinkable: Philosopher born this day 115 years ago believed that politics should be joyous

Dollymount Beach in Dublin. Ireland may gain from inbound tourism as the Mediterranean becomes uncomfortably hot. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times.
Should sectors that ‘win’ from climate change be taxed?

Unthinkable: Philosophers are trying to broaden the debate by asking awkward questions

Participants in public debate tend to jump straight from condemning an argument to condemning its speaker, as though poor reasoning was a sin. Photograph: Akindo/Getty
How to win at arguments: Six philosophical tips

Unthinkable: Do you need to crush others with your intellect or is sowing doubt victory enough?

‘If you look at the AI system Tesla uses for their self-driving cars, it’s pretty much inscrutable even to the people who built it.’ Photograph: Getty
Who is responsible if a self-driving car kills a pedestrian to save the driver?

Unthinkable: Governments put their trust in big tech as they lack expertise

Erwin Schrödinger with Mgr Paddy Browne, who was a close friend despite the physicist’s unusual family life
Schrödinger’s Dublin: Cycling in the trail of exiled physicist

Cultural commute takes in sites associated with his 17-year stay in Ireland

Anil Seth: ‘Things exist. The world is real. It is the way it appears to us in our experience that’s a construction.’
Is your sense of reality in fact a hallucination?

Unthinkable: We don’t know how consciousness works, but some theories are better than others

‘Smell is almost like touching the invisible world.’ Photograph: Getty
How well do you understand your sense of smell? Try these three experiments

Unthinkable: Covid may have given us a fresh appreciation of smell, ‘the Cinderella of the senses’

Brooklyn-based author Oliver Burkeman’s thesis will simultaneously annoy new-age spiritualists and contemporary moral philosophers
Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It – Or, how to be good to yourself

Oliver Burkeman thinks we should ease up on ‘to-do lists’ and let go of our urge for control

British prime minister Boris Johnson: “It is not possible for politicians to make reliable decisions about the present and future without knowing, understanding and telling the truth about the past.” Photograph: Jessica Taylor/UK parliament/Getty
Can a bad historian be a good politician?

Unthinkable: Polybius is not the most feted Greek thinker but he has much to teach us

John Moriarty’s stomping ground: Gleann na gCappel, the Horses’ Glen, in the Mangerton massif, Co Kerry.
Short of staycation ideas? Try a pilgrimage to Irish philosophy sites

Unthinkable: Ireland has a rich philosophical heritage – some more plaques would be nice

Irish philosopher George Berkeley believed ‘participation in social order was really central to being human’. Image: Hulton Archive
Was Ireland’s greatest philosopher a hero, villain or ‘man of his time’?

Unthinkable: A new biography of George Berkeley brings out the complexity of his character

England’s coach Gareth Southgate embraces England’s forward Raheem Sterling after the Uefa Euro 2020 final at Wembley stadium in London. Photograph: Paul Ellis/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
Euro 2020: How Irish people should feel – philosophically speaking – about England’s loss

Feeling gleeful? Schopenhauer wouldn’t approve, but Nietzsche would understand

Ray Griffin (left) and Tom Boland (right), authors of The Reformation of Welfare: The New Faith of the Labour Market.
Work is Ireland’s new religion, unemployment its new sin

Unthinkable: Our religious devotion to work stigmatises those who are less productive

Seeing human life as part of a cosmological grand plan is not the most far-fetched idea. Photograph: Getty Images
Searching for the ultimate meaning of life? Join the club

Unthinkable: Men may be more susceptible to imagining there’s an instruction manual to be found

Statue of the 18th-century philosopher David Hume on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh: ‘Hume . . . is probably not much more implicated in the slave trade than many of us are today,’ says his latest biographer Julian Baggini. Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA
Before toppling any statues, ask yourself: Am I on the right side of history?

Unthinkable: Don’t criticise philosopher David Hume for racism until you look in the mirror

Posters from last year’s general election campaign. What slogan would Immanuel Kant approve of? Photograph: Alan Betson / The Irish Times
Would you vote for a philosopher to become taoiseach?

Unthinkable: Covid-19 has exposed societal injustices. Persuading people to address them remains a challenge

Rob Grant, academic, musician and author of The Philosophy Resistance Squad.
Are you capable of listening without ‘waiting for your chance to talk’?

Unthinkable: Philosopher Rob Grant has written a children’s book with a message for adults

TCD academic Dr Roja Fazaeli says when researchers are penalised for highlighting issues it signals ‘there are doctrinal lines of inquiry that are to be crossed at a researcher’s own peril’. Photograph: Laura Hutton
Speak out at your peril: Self-censorship and the smothering of academia

Unthinkable: Commercial interests and social-media outrage are curtailing free speech

John Moriarty: ‘every inch the travelling bard’. Photograph: Don MacMonagle
A Hut at the Edge of the Village: never preachy, deeply moral

Book review: John Moriarty’s musings on life real and imagined skilfully edited by Martin Shaw

Research in behavioural psychology suggests sharing and collaboration are instinctive from an early age. Photograph: Getty
If people are naturally kind, why is there so much cruelty?

Unthinkable: Evolutionary biology suggests our natural instinct is to be nice

Elke Wiss advises us as follows: “Don’t agree or disagree.” Photograph: Elke Verbruggen
Five (and a bit) steps to a better life: What philosophy tells us

Unthinkable: Do we need more books promoting self-mystification? Yes, we do

Actor and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda in Hamilton – a musical celebration of modern restlessness. Photograph: Theo Wargo/Wireimage
The secret of career happiness? Stop being ‘pointlessly busy’

Unthinkable: Four great philosophers have life advice that’s still relevant today

What ‘shows itself’ when you consider a cup of coffee, the phenomenologist asks. Photograph: Getty images
Can you suspend belief in everything? An intellectual challenge

Unthinkable: Phenomenology may make your head hurt but it’s trying ‘to teach us to see again’

Fr Sean McDonagh: ‘I am 77 on my next birthday and I ask myself will I end up in some care home where I am being taken up out of bed by a robot each morning?’ Photograph: Dara Mac Donaill
‘Should we be buying from Amazon rather than working to keep a place like Nenagh alive?’

Unthinkable: Fr Sean McDonagh is increasingly worried about the power of big tech

Suki Finn, philosopher and editor of Women of Ideas: “The metaphysics of pregnancy is of great importance, not only to pregnant metaphysicians, but to all of us, given that we are all the result of a pregnancy.”
Should we cancel Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche?

Unthinkable: Famous philosophers are being reappraised in light of their prejudices

‘We evolved to signal our moral credentials to other people.’ Photograph: Getty images
Do we really care about right and wrong, or are we just virtue signalling?

Unthinkable: Morality has got humans this far, but do we need to outgrow it?

Clinical psychologist and author Frank Tallis believes there are some practical therapy tools people could learn from a young age
Telling men to open up is not enough – teach them how

Unthinkable: We can all learn from psychotherapy, perhaps the best place to start is school

Wouter Kusters, author of A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking
What’s it like to go mad? Meet the man who found out

Unthinkable: Psychosis gave Dutch linguist Wouter Kusters an insight into mental illness

Algorithmic selection has created a new and unaccountable type of expert: a piece of code that may not even be understood by its programmers. Photograph: Getty Images/Photo Researchers RM
The problem today is we trust too much, not too little

Unthinkable: Is our faith in algorithms creating the basis for a counter-Enlightenment?

Lipika Pelham: “A queer person assumed to be straight or a light-skinned bi-racial person assumed to be white will go along with his mislabelling, to gain social freedom . . . while internalising a deep sense of indignity and self-loathing.”
Why are people so sensitive about cultural appropriation?

Unthinkable: Tolü Makay can sing Saw Doctors. A rich playboy should not perform Amanda Gorman

‘Think about our Western lifeworld and how visible people would have been if they wore masks in public two years ago.’ Photograph: Nick Bradshaw
Is your Covid pandemic the same as my Covid pandemic?

Unthinkable: Phenomenologists are trying to make us see the current crisis in a new light

A tourist bus passes the unfinished basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. ‘I think we need to build the ecological cathedrals of the future, not the old-fashioned medieval kind,’ says writer Roman Krznaric. Photograph: Albert Llop/Anadolu Agency/Getty
Your ‘marshmallow brain’ vs your ‘acorn brain’: Breaking the short-term thinking habit

Unthinkable: Acorn brain worries about pensions. Marshmallow brain thinks short-term

‘I think recognizing the wider role luck plays in society is very important,’ says TCD political scientist Peter Stone. Photograph: Joel Saget/AFP Creative/Getty
The Leaving Cert is not fair. Why not just replace it with a lottery?

Unthinkable: We can no longer plead ignorance of the inner workings of our State exams

‘It’s sobering to consider that in a parallel history the world might have looked more like a planet of the apes.’ File image: Sebastian Willnow/AFP/Getty
You’re a large-brained scheming dreamer with a sense of justice: What it means to be human

Unthinkable: Speciesism, which puts humans above nature, may be the last acceptable prejudice

The best way of teaching philosophy is to present children ‘with a stimulus or a question’ rather than a history lesson, says Worley. Photograph: Jens Buettner/AP
Teaching children to respect all opinions can be problematic

Unthinkable: A ‘questioning mindset’ is needed rather than an attitude of ‘anything goes’

Participants at an anti-lockdown protest in Dublin last August. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times
Why Covid dissidents need to be understood, not demonised

Unthinkable: Lack of access to democratic processes can fuel distrust, says Dr Katherine Furman

Richard Kearney: ‘I think the problem of touch has been a real issue in Irish culture.’
‘We have learned from Covid how much we miss touch’

Unthinkable: Philosopher Richard Kearney argues that sight began displacing other senses even before the pandemic

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has been railing against state-led ‘health terror’ and ‘techno-medical despotism’. Photograph: European Graduate School
The left’s lockdown critique: Right on, or dangerous prattle?

Unthinkable: Philosopher Giorgio Agamben carries the flame for anti-capitalism through the crisis

Wollstonecraft, painted by John Opie, was disgusted at how intelligent “society” women were groomed for submission under marriage. Photograph: The Print Collector/Getty Images
Never mind the Bridgertons, meet England’s first feminist

Unthinkable: Mary Wollstonecraft’s time in Ireland seemed to influence her world view

An air guitarist, or is it a philosopher? Photograph: Bryan O’Brien
Is philosophy becoming ‘air guitar to the music of science’?

Unthinkable: Philosophers are being lured to ‘a dead end’, says historian of ideas Stephen Gaukroger

‘Why in the world is the president of the United States using Twitter at all – a platform that depends on quick and mindless impressions?’ asks philosopher Steven Nadler. Photograph: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
Enough of the ‘hot takes’ already: A philosophical wish for 2021

Unthinkable: Spinoza tells us that if you want to be free then get your mind in order

Angels walk to a nativity play in Glenties, Co Donegal. Photograph: Brenda Fitzsimons
Would Jesus approve of Christmas?

Unthinkable: ‘Infantilising’ nativity story does Jesus no favours, says philosopher Julian Baggini

Reinhold Niebuhr said ‘man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary’. Photograph: Bachrach/Getty Images
In defence of realism: Idealists excite us but at what cost?

Unthinkable: Reinhold Niebuhr, Obama’s favourite philosopher, has an important message for today

Political theorist and author Hannah Arendt pictured in 1949. Photograph: Fred Stein Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images
Hannah Arendt and the meaning of evil

Unthinkable: Calling something evil is not a licence to shut down debate

People don’t have to be ‘going on the lash’ to celebrate Christmas meaningfully, the Taoiseach says. Photograph: Kirsty O’Connor/PA Wire
Micheál Martin wants us to have ‘a meaningful Christmas’ – but what does that mean?

Unthinkable: Perhaps existentialism can help us navigate the Taoiseach’s suggestion

Abeba Birhane: ‘You do find a lot of people adhering to this illusion of objectivity – this illusion that they are doing science from “the view from nowhere”.’
Who is more racist, sexist and biased: You or your computer?

Unthinkable: Algorithms embed prejudice with ‘no accountability’, says Abeba Birhane

Mind the mind: According to panpsychists, consciousness is not exclusive to humans; it’s in rocks, carrots, molecules and anywhere else you can mention. Photograph: Getty Images
Carrots with minds of their own? The weird theory of panpsychism

Unthinkable: A speculative hypothesis about the nature of consciousness has academics riled up

Ludwig Wittgenstein was the ‘philosophical hero’ of the Vienna Circle and laid the foundations of analytic philosophy, the dominant Anglo-American school of thought of the past century. Photogragh: Hulton Archive
Who really understands Wittgenstein’s ‘bible’ of modern philosophy?

Unthinkable: A short book, the Tractatus has had a big impact, says author David Edmonds

Stoic standard-bearer Marcus Aurelius used to go to a quiet place at daybreak to meditate upon the stars and rising sun. Photograph: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Five lessons of Stoicism: What I learned from living for a week as a Stoic

Unthinkable: Stoicism is primarily about throwing off the chains of irrational thought

James Suzman: ‘My solution is to say, look, recognise we are incredibly adaptable species... We have got to experiment.’
Why work more than 15 hours a week?

Unthinkable: It was good enough for your ancestors, says anthropologist James Suzman

The US president may have lots followers but ‘you get diminishing returns’ on his tweets, philosopher and author Ian Olasov remarks. Photograph: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Ask yourself before reading: Is this newsworthy?

Unthinkable: Philosopher Ian Olasov believes we should focus on things of ‘practical significance’

Zena Hitz has particular concerns about the quality of teaching, an issue that goes beyond the coronavirus crisis. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty
Researched to death? How universities have sidelined teaching

Unthinkable: Academia has its priorities backwards, says author Zena Hitz

A view of St Peter’s Square and Basilica at the Vatican. Photograph: AP Photo/Massimo Sambucetti
Has Christianity been good for us? It depends on your history book

Unthinkable: Author Charles Freeman believes we shouldn’t forget the sectarian legacy of Christian churches

Anti-racism campaigners taking part in a rally last year outside Google headquarters on Barrow Street in Dublin. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times
Cancel culture: can you defend people who say unpopular things?

Unthinkable: Rival political philosophers can bring perspective to our current debates

Illustrations from The Philosopher Queens: Diotima, Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Warnock and Anita L Allen. Images: Emmy Smith/The Philosopher Queens
The forgotten women in philosophy: time to set the record straight

Unthinkable: The Philosopher Queens originated from ‘a disheartening trip to the local bookshop’

Members of the Khomani San community strike traditional poses in the Southern Kalahari desert in South Africa. Non-western societies put greater emphasis on familial relationships and inherited social roles rather than personal achievement. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Are you Weird? Answer this question to find out

Unthinkable: ‘Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic’ mindset is relatively new to society

US president Donald Trump pictured playing golf this summer. Men ‘feel entitled to far more by way of leisure’, says philosopher and author Kate Manne. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
How do you stop male entitlement?

Unthinkable: Kate Manne’s study of gender inequality makes uncomfortable reading but has a hopeful message

Michael Sandel. “I think there is a hopeful possibility that we can use this moment, this glimpse of who really is an essential worker, to revalue work and the rewards of work.” Photograph: Harvard University
Why admission to college should be decided by lottery, not points

Philosopher Michael Sandel wants to eradicate elitism, starting with education

Slavoj Žižek: He’s been called the Elvis of cultural theory and the Borat of philosophy. Photograph: Ulrich Baumgarten/Getty Images
Slavoj Žižek: ‘Joe Biden is long-term the same catastrophe as Trump’

The Slovenian philosopher divides opinion over his often-contradictory viewpoints

Philosopher Mary Midgley, as illustrated for the Notes from a Biscuit Tin project
What are words worth: do poets and philosophers speak the same language?

Unthinkable: Research project and poetry prize explore overlap between perceived rival disciplines

The word according to Father Ted. ‘Humour is a large part of Irish life so a truly Irish church should be conversant with such humour and able to laugh at itself,’ says Christian pastor Fraser Hosford.
Does religion deserve to be treated as a joke?

Unthinkable: Some ridicule may help the Irish church to recover, says pastor Fraser Hosford

Philosopher Édouard Glissant defended one’s right ‘to be opaque’, or to lack transparency and avoid categorisation by oppressors. Photograph: Jean-Marc Zaorski/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Why does philosophy have a problem with race?

Unthinkable: Racist views must be confronted honestly, says philosopher Aislinn O’Donnell

Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald. Voters for her party are ‘entitled to a fair hearing. But no one is entitled to fractional legislative victories’, says political scientist Arthur Isak Applbaum. Photograph: Gareth Chaney/Collins
How do you identify a legitimate government?

Unthinkable: A government’s character is more important than its composition, author Arthur Applbaum says

Volunteer Greg Kelly loads food parcels for delivery within the community back in April. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw
Covid-19 shows kindness can be enough to get us through

Acts of neighbourliness, solidarity and self-sacrifice portray people to be mainly good

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