Unthinkable | The Irish Times

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

3:48 ‘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

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