This Vietnamese school girl is growing up in a new era: by the time she is middle-aged, 60% of the world’s children will be living in a tropical region.
UN Photo/Mark Garten
Our Tropical Future: A new report on the State of the Tropics has revealed rapid changes in human and environmental health in the Earth’s tropical regions. This is the first in a four-part series about…
Three in four Australians see aid to help the world’s most vulnerable poor as a simple human priority. Their government has a different view of the aid program.
Julien Harneis/Flickr
Major changes have been made recently to Australia’s official aid program. Funding has been cut sharply. Australia’s aid agency AusAID has been absorbed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and…
The idea may seem ‘old-fashioned’, says Pope Francis, ‘But look out because the devil is present! The devil is here … even in the 21st century!’
EPA/Maurizio Brambatti
Pope Francis’ discussion of the devil (or Satan) has been greeted with surprise by many. Why would a “progressive” Pope speak about an “old-school”, passé topic like the devil? Has not the Catholic Church…
Facing wicked problems, can Tony Abbott deliver leadership that is ‘about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, producing useful change’?
AAP/Lukas Coch
Samuel Wilson, Swinburne University of Technology e John Fien, Swinburne University of Technology
Despite our familiarity with – and craving for – leadership, its precise meaning is often elusive and resistant to consensual definition. Partly because of this, actions that are adjudged as exemplary…
The ancient philosophers knew the perils of expecting other people to complete us emotionally.
Candybox Images/Shutterstock
We take pills and potions for everything from a bad back to depression. Why shouldn’t we adopt the same approach to love and the miseries it may cause? Oxford ethicist Brian Earp has proposed that we should…
Plenty of extreme wrongs are performed by comparatively ordinary people.
Danny O'Connor
You would have to be naïve to believe that evil exists, right? If you were asked to come up with examples of evil villains, you might think of the Emperor from Star Wars, Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter…
The delivery of factual information is a necessary condition to change minds, but it is not always sufficient.
shutterstock
Whether discussing vaccination, climate science, the state of the budget or educational reform, it is common to hear calls for “the facts”. The appealing simplicity of the word “fact” is instrumental in…
Mad Men has jumped the shark, people! Mad Men has jumped the shark.
Tim Bradshaw
Tell us what you think about police brutality, organ donation, Obamacare, private schools, zoos, breast implants and stew. Tweet your instant reaction, share your perspective on anything on Formspring…
Believers in alien abduction do not have a right to be taken seriously, and nor do those who simply reject the evidence of climate change.
Photobank gallery/Shutterstock
In a recent interview, federal attorney-general George Brandis laments that deniers of climate science are being “excluded” from the debate. On the surface this seems a justifiable complaint, but the point…
‘To be, or not to be – and not to exist at all. Ever.’
Eddi van W./Flickr
When renowned scientists now talk seriously about millions of multiverses, the old question “are we alone?” gets a whole new meaning. Our ever-expanding universe is incomprehensibly large – and its rate…
‘An unexamined life is not worthy of a human being’: Socrates.
Shutterstock
This is a revised excerpt of a talk given to students at the Inaugural Australian Youth Humanities Forum, hosted at the University of Melbourne’s Parkville campus. After two days at this fine conference…
We rightly celebrate living in a society where law and order prevail. Being able to follow established rules allows for the smooth operation of the many necessary transactions of everyday life. Yet it…
Philosophy was always dangerous, as the life and death of Socrates taught us. He was, need I remind you, executed not by an authoritarian regime but by a caring democracy. Times have changed however, and…
Media studies? Another great idea!
Photo by Chris Boland / www.bolandactorheadshots.co.uk
On Wednesday evening, after an afternoon of lecture preparation to teach my Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies class “Doing Media Research”, I settled down to watch Newsnight. Alain de Botton, “philosopher…
The country Richard ruled was very different from the one that exists today.
University of Leicester
Richard III’s skeleton, dug up from a carpark in Leicester in 2012, is currently the subject of a legal dispute about where he should be buried. In one corner is the University of Leicester, whose archaeologists…
Rumours of an affair have raised Hollande’s dander.
AP Photo/Francois Mori
Liberté, égalité, infidélité. The three stout pillars of the French constitution. Mitterrand, Chirac, Sarkozy, and now François Hollande: it’s a grand tradition – and if you tot their conquests up they…
Russian forces detained all those aboard Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise after activists tried to hang a banner from an oil platform.
EPA/Igor Podgorny/Greenpeace
Should the Australian government require Colin Russell to repay at least some of its costs for acting on his behalf when the Russians imprisoned him and 29 other Greenpeace activists and journalists, known…
Tony Abbott argues his first duty is to advance the national interest, without telling us why acting in our own interests is always right or even permissible.
AAP/Daniel Munoz
Irish philosopher Richard Kearney visited Melbourne last year and, being the fine raconteur he is, told a great tale from his nation’s past. In 1492, Black James, nephew of the Earl of Ormond, and a group…
Any resemblance to actual people – living or dead – is coincidental.
Troy/jacqueline poggi
The Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates was condemned and put to death for “corrupting the youth” of Athens. The same fate is unlikely to meet contemporary philosophers. Indeed, it is much more likely for…
Who owns the 1,400 ‘degenerate’ works found in the Munich flat of Cornelius Gurlitt?
Marc Mueller/EPA
The large collection of paintings and drawings found in the Munich flat of the 80-year-old recluse, Cornelius Gurlitt, which came to wide public attention earlier this month, raises serious moral and legal…