Interpreting the emotional lives of animals requires a subtler and more nuanced understanding of anthropomorphism ...

What does it mean to be Mexican? Meet the artist who forged Mexico’s identity in the brushstrokes of his landscape paintings ...

Is consciousness like jazz, something hard to pin down? Or is it more like the biology of dolphins, odd but natural?

Photos and journal entrees chronicle Michael C Rockefeller’s fateful 1961 journey to New Guinea in search of local art ...

Can a Tibetan singer make the leap from the slow pace of life on the Tibetan plateau to the fast rhythms of urban Beijing?

What’s so golden about the golden ratio? A myth-busting investigation tells the story of a misunderstood mathematical idea ...

Just as humans can use mobile phones or notebooks for memory storage and recall, slime moulds can use slime. Granted, numerical memory and navigational memory differ in kind, but the deeper point ...

Philosophers ponder the meaning of life. At least, that is the stereotype. When I risk admitting to a stranger that I teach philosophy for a living and face the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ...

Philosophers have a love-hate relationship with the imagination. René Descartes, for one, disparaged it as ‘more of a hindrance than a help’ in answering the most profound questions about the nature ...

Happiness is not the same as a sense of meaning. How do we go about finding a meaningful life, not just a happy one?

Long in retreat in the US, the welfare state found a haven in an unlikely place – the military, where it thrived for decades ...