Some of you may have seen GG33 (‘Gary the Numbers Guy’) on your timeline recently. He’s a numerologist that claims to be able to predict the future based on numbers (such as one’s birthdate). In the clip below, he explains what drew him to numerology: While I disagree with…

In the first verse of Eminem’s ‘The Real Slim Shady’, Eminem prefigured a thought experiment posed by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind. Consider, he says, if this is morally wrong: A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But…

Virginia Woolf believed that a woman needs money and ‘a room of one’s own’ in order to write. Creative work, she says, does not just happen. It depends upon material things, like ‘health, money and the houses we live in’. We need time to be idle, and space for privacy…

Temptation is, as Jean Baudrillard says in Seduction, the preserve of the Devil. He whispers, ‘at the ear of Eve’, lies and deceits — anything — to get what he wants. But it’s a mistake to assume from this that all he does is lie. This would leave us vulnerable…

The Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) used the German word umwelt (meaning environment) to refer not just to an animal’s surroundings, but to its experience of those surroundings; its ‘perceptual world’ — or, as it is sometimes translated, its ‘self-centered world’. …

Paul Ricoeur was the first to refer to Marx, Nietzsche and Freud as the Masters of Suspicion. By this, he did not mean that they were more suspicious than others, but rather, that the object of their suspicion has changed the way we relate to one another. While Descartes doubted…

Is there really a benefit to talking things through? Or, have we been taught to expect benefits, making it as effective as a placebo? …

Nietzsche often spoke of nobility, of knightly values, or, more specifically, ‘knightly-aristocratic values’. He saw in it the origin of the concept ‘good’, which he equated with strength, beauty and happiness: ‘good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God’. …

There are two schools of thought when it comes to la petite mort; those who believe that sex weakens, and those who believe that it “frees up”. Germaine Greer, in her acerbic style, dismantles both positions, exposing them as self-fulfilling prophecies: sex religion, like all others, relies upon self-fulfilling prophecies…