Philosophy For Our Times

Nadine Dijkstra is a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Neurology at UCL. Her research in Imaging Neuroscience explores how the brain generates mental images and differentiates them from actual perception. Utilizing neuroimaging, psychophysics, machine learning, and computational modeling, Dijkstra addresses fundamental questions about the overlap between perception and imagery.

Recently, Dijkstra has been leading the Imagine Reality Lab at UCL's Department of Imaging Neuroscience, focusing on the intersection of imagination and reality. Dijkstra's 2023 paper in Nature Communications showed the brain evaluates images against a 'reality threshold' to distinguish between images and perception. Her work also investigates how changes in these neural processes could impact mental health.

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Is the brain actually productive? Or is it instead permissive, simply acting as a filter through which consciousness passes? Can near death experiences help us to get closer to understanding the true nature of the brain?

Neuroscientist and theoretical physicist Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that the brain may not produce consciousness, but instead filter or permit it. Tracing a provocative history from Galileo to modern consciousness science, he argues that scientific progress came by prioritising what can be measured, leaving inner experience behind. Using his own near-death experience and cases like terminal lucidity, he calls for a more open, rigorous “Science 2.0” that takes anomalous experiences seriously.

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Is evolutionary psychology merely a way of excusing outdated behaviours? Is it instead culture which really defines how we behave?

As with the animal kingdom, we see human behaviour as the product of elemental drives to survive and reproduce. Evolutionary psychology has taken this a stage further - seeing violence, social hierarchy, and sexual promiscuity as a product of evolutionary drives. But might this be a misleading and dangerous approach? Murder rates have fallen seventy-fold since the Middle Ages, and across the globe birth rates are a fraction of what they were a hundred years ago. Fathers are actively involved in child care and we've radically changed our outlook on social issues like gender identity - suggesting ideas and culture drive behaviour rather than evolution.

Should we conclude that evolutionary psychology is a blind alley with no predictive power? Are we capable of overcoming behavioural traits and therefore wholly responsible for our actions? Or is evolution an inescapable force and behavioural change a result of altered circumstances while our core nature remains identical?

Critic of evolutionary psychology Subrena E. Smith, philosopher of mind Keith Frankish, and clinical psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen debate the significance of evolutionary psychology. Hosted by Güneş Taylor.

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Does the past even exist anymore?

Quantum mechanics has long unsettled our understanding of matter and measurement. But what if its implications reach further — into history, politics, and the very structure of reality itself? If the present can retroactively reshape the past it emerged from, what does that mean for how we act, how we remember, and how we govern?

These are not merely theoretical puzzles. In a world where liberal democracy appears to be fracturing, where AI and climate change defy traditional political categories, and where new authoritarian currents are emerging from thinkers like Curtis Yarvin in the West and Wang Huning in the East, the question of whether reality offers any coherent ground for political action has never felt more urgent.

Few thinkers are willing to hold all of this together at once — to move from Niels Bohr to Stalinism, from Lacanian psychoanalysis to the collapse of the political centre, without flinching. Slavoj Žižek does precisely that. In his new book Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2025), Žižek argues that incompleteness is not a failure of knowledge but a feature of existence itself — and that this demands an entirely new way of thinking about history and politics.

Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and one of the most provocative intellectuals of our time. Hosted by Omari Edwards.

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Did analytic philosophy ruin the entire discipline?

For more than a century there has been a divide in Western philosophy between two distinct approaches, often described as analytic and continental philosophy. Analytic philosophy is predominantly based in the English-speaking world taking its name from Bertrand Russell’s philosophy of logical analysis that overthrew the grand Hegelian metaphysics of the 19th century. It did so in favour of a focus on logic and linguistic precision, with the assumption that science would do the serious work of uncovering the nature of reality. Continental philosophy, based primarily in France and Germany, has offered a broad range of outlooks on the nature of the human condition and the world. It has been defined by its critics simply in opposition to analytic philosophy.

Few thinkers have bridged the divide to be taken seriously by both camps. Yet both traditions now have deep challenges. The original focus of analytic philosophy has become increasingly blurred while in France English speaking philosophy is now in vogue.  

What is the future of European thought? Are we seeing the end of the analytic and continental divide? Or is the Enlightenment tradition itself under threat and with it the influence and identity of European philosophy?

Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London, Christoph Schuringa is known for his works on German philosophy and is Editor of the Hegel Bulletin. Genia Schönbaumsfeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton and the author of several books – most recently, Wittgenstein on Religious Belief. Babette Babich is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University and the editor of the journal New Nietzsche Studies. Hosted by Danielle Sands.

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