Library
A curated set of reading and video resources for those who want to delve deeper into each event
What are friends for?
Treasure your friends, the top of your love hierarchy
How stories of female friendship construct a sense of self
For Beauvoir, its friendship that lets us become truly ourselves
How to make new friends when you’re busy with adulthood
When a friend ghosted me, I faced my childhood abandonment
Too many men lack close friendships. What’s holding them back?
The limits of civility
- When the state is unjust, citizens may use justifiable violence
- Most protests fail. What are activists doing right when they win
- Restoring respect is the first step towards a better society
- Judgment is an exercise in discretion circumstances are everything
- We are witnessing just how fragile liberal democracy is
Free your attention
- Can meditation really make the world a better place?
- What is the self if not that which pays attention
- Mindfulness is loaded with (troubling) metaphysical assumptions
- How to find the mindfulness practice that works for you
- Meditation is like mountaineering: approach it with care
- Video: A Zen Buddhist priest voices the deep matters he usually ponders in silence
What’s wrong with death
- In a secular age what does it mean to die a good death?
- We might agree that death is bad – but why exactly?
- Altered states can help us face death with serenity and levity
- More radical and practical than stoicism – discover shugendo
- Video: Demystifying death – a palliative care specialist’s practical guide to life’s end
- Video: How an end of life doula found her vocation as a companion for the dying
The philosophy you already have
- What can we learn from John Rawls’s critique of capitalism?
- Reports of the demise of liberalism are greatly exaggerated
- Discovering Judith Shklars skeptical liberalism of fear
- Reciprocity not tolerance is the basis of healthy societies
- How should you choose the right right thing to do?
- Video: To build a fair society, we must first be able to envision it. John Rawls can help
Does play make us human?
- What was it like to grow up in the last ice age?
- Why have humans evolved to have a long journey to adulthood?
- Children today are suffering a severe deficit of play
- The art of ice age children offers a tactile sense of the past
- Imagination is such an ancient ability it might precede language
- Video: Children at play provide a rare glimpse into the imagination, ours and theirs
Sagas of the Icelanders
- Saga Land
- The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies
- Within and without family in the Icelandic sagas
- The inspired vengeance of mythic Icelandic women
- In Viking sagas, the ‘truth’ is a tangle of history and fiction
- Video: A Viking axe struck a Newfoundland tree in the year 1021. Here’s how scientists proved it
The meaning of time
- Is time a linear arrow or a loopy repeating circle?
- The C-theory of time asks if time really has a direction
- What Albert Einstein owes to David Hume’s notion of time
- Why doesn’t physics help us to understand the flow of time?
- Video: Time is fundamental, space is emergent – why physicists are rethinking reality
