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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

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’

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