New Philosopher

Most people love to be praised as intelligent, generous, funny, or kind, but to called ‘courageous’, ‘daring’, or ‘brave’ eclipses the rest. When we reflect on the people we regard as courageous, we tend to be very narrow in our thinking. We immediat

“I know what is means to live a life that contradicts our inmost nature, and if possible I wish… to save you that misery,” wrote Johanna to her son, Arthur Schopenhauer. The young Schopenhauer was troubled by a nagging desire to study philosophy, whi

If Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard were alive today, and had his own social media account, he probably wouldn’t get many likes. The eccentric writer of books including Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, was often insulted and ridicu

On a train trip through country France one weekend, I got talking to a London couple who were taking a quick ‘weekender’ in Barcelona. “But it’s so far,” I said to them, referring to the 15-hour train ride from London to Barcelona, sandwiched between

A few years ago my family was invited to a wedding in a medieval winery in the French countryside. You don’t get more than one invite like that in a lifetime, so we jumped at the chance – literally, as it turned out. On arriving in Languedoc I learne

There is a remarkable photograph taken in Hamburg in 1936. It shows a crowd of shipyard workers gathered for the launch of a ship. All except one are enthusiastically raising their arms in the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute. Yet there is one man with his arms

On Monday morning on 13 July 2009, the Tower Bridge in London is shut to traffic. At 2:55 am, the bridge deck partially opens, creating two ramps 23 metres apart. On the north side of the bridge, 27-year-old Australian daredevil, Robbie Maddison, rev

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John Caple is a British painter who was raised in a rural community in the Mendip Hills in Somerset, England. Caple’s paintings are inspired by family stories and folk narratives of the Mendip community – generations of land workers who shared a clos

Kant’s philosophy is famously difficult, so it’s unfortunate that he chose to illustrate one of its central tenets with a scenario that seems, to many people, straight-forwardly ridiculous and immoral. If a someone knocks on your front door with the

noun: 1. The quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear; bravery; 2. [Obsolete] The heart as the source of emotion. Origin: 1250–1300; Middle English corage; Old French, equivalent to cuer, an

Cynthia Pury, Professor of Psychology at Clemson, trained as a clinical psychologist specialising in anxiety disorders. Pury’s major research interests involve courage, virtue, and positive psychology; her research began in the area of cognition and

On July 6, 1942, Anne Frank gave up life as she knew it and walked into hiding, entering a secret annex in a building in Amsterdam. The door was concealed by a bookcase. What followed was two years of living in a confined space, jowl to jowl with her

The Weasels and the Mice waged a perpetual war with each other, in which much blood was shed. The Weasels were always the victors. The Mice thought that the cause of their frequent defeats was that they had no leaders set apart from the general army

“Courage is found in unlikely places,” once wrote English writer J.R.R. Tolkien. And the same could be said of fear. As a child, French painter Philippe Charles Jacquet lived in a tiny apartment in Paris. But for a month each year, he vacationed with

When I was a child, my mother told me the story of her uncle who, during a WWII bombing raid, rushed into a burning house to rescue children trapped inside. He saved their lives by throwing them from a window down into the arms of others, however the

“There’s an Olympian athlete inside of you,” I tell my students early in the semester. They admit that holding this belief would change the way they approached the gym. They would sweat more than they ever had, determined to reshape the body they dra

All this weighs on my mind too, dear woman. But I would die of shame to face the men of Troy and the Trojan women trailing their long robes if I would shrink from battle now, a coward Andromache, dear one, why so desperate? Why so much grief for me?

“Until philosophers are Kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to

Stranded on a sheet of floating ice deep in the Antarctic seas, Frank Worsley was in what you’d call a bad spot. Civilisation was more than 1200 miles away, and the ship Worsley had been travelling on was submerged in ice. To make matters worse, Wors

Linda Rabieh, Professor of Philosophy at MIT, previously taught at Colorado College and Tufts University. She is the author of Plato and the Virtue of Courage, which won the Delba Winthrop Mansfield prize for excellence in political science, and of n

We must, however, not only describe virtue as a state of character, but also say what sort of state it is. We may remark, then, that every virtue or excellence both brings into good condition the thing of which it is the excellence and makes the work