Latest thinking

Will Self on Mortality

Video

23 Jun 2014

Will Self, Stephen Cave and Joanna Cook ask whether it might be a good thing to make an awareness of death a more important part of our lives.

Let’s Talk About Death

Video

23 Jun 2014

With Will Self, Joanna Cook and Stephen Cave

The Fourth Revolution

Video

05 Jun 2014

John Micklethwait is editor-in-chief of the Economist and Adrian Wooldridge is the Economist’s Management editor and ‘Schumpeter’ columnist.

The Self is Not an Illusion

Video

22 May 2014

Mary Midgley is a moral philosopher, Rob Newman is a writer

'Creative communities with a cause'

Blog

29 Apr 2014

Matthew Taylor

I have been trying to use my preferred way of thinking about human motivation and social power to develop the RSA’s emerging world-view, ‘The Power to Create’. In this regard I am grateful for an idea given to me by public intellectual and social innovator Charles Leadbeater (who will be speaking soon at the RSA about his new book ‘The frugal innovator’.

Devouring the future?

Blog

02 Apr 2014

Matthew Taylor

How should we carry the past into the future? This important question lies, often opaquely, behind personal, political and cultural dilemmas.  Without the past we have no identity, we are not human; but the past can also be an invading army colonising our future and mercilessly wiping out the people we might have chosen to become.

'But you really need to want to change...'

Blog

27 Mar 2014

Matthew Taylor

In a brilliant RSA lecture earlier this week, criminologist Shadd Maruna offers reasons why the idea of rehabilitation has gone in and out of fashion over the decades. He suggests, for example, that the sheer cost of incarceration makes alternatives to custody more attractive in times of austerity. But the Professor also makes a deeper philosophical point about evidence, values and public policy choices.

A simple idea to end political alienation and voter mistrust.

Blog

18 Mar 2014

I ended my previous post on a downer arguing that the political system would never embrace the deep change required to reduce popular alienation from parliamentary democracy.  But since then an idea[1] has occurred to me which might at least open up a possibility of transformation.

From Self to Selfie

Video

13 Mar 2014

Simon Blackburn is a philosopher and author