To truly explore alien languages, linguists must open themselves to the maximum conceivable degree of cosmic otherness ...

Can a Tibetan singer make the leap from the slow pace of life on the Tibetan plateau to the fast rhythms of urban Beijing?

Photos and journal entrees chronicle Michael C Rockefeller’s fateful 1961 journey to New Guinea in search of local art ...

Architectural copies of lost structures require reckoning with history and heritage. At what cost is the past rebuilt?

Is consciousness like jazz, something hard to pin down? Or is it more like the biology of dolphins, odd but natural?

Just as humans can use mobile phones or notebooks for memory storage and recall, slime moulds can use slime. Granted, ...

René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, was furiously condemned by his contemporaries. Why did they fear him?

Can societies exist without families? Can individuality thrive in them? Margaret Mead on the brave new world of 1959 ...

What’s so golden about the golden ratio? A myth-busting investigation tells the story of a misunderstood mathematical idea ...

Philosophers ponder the meaning of life. At least, that is the stereotype. When I risk admitting to a stranger that I teach philosophy for a living and face the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ...

I have sometimes heard arguments that assisted dying should be discouraged because it amounts to ‘choosing death’. That is inaccurate. We human beings have made remarkable progress in extending our ...

Philosophers have a love-hate relationship with the imagination. René Descartes, for one, disparaged it as ‘more of a hindrance than a help’ in answering the most profound questions about the nature ...