Descartes

What exactly do we mean by the mind?

6 August 2022 9:00 am

Given the ingenuity of machine-makers, said Descartes in the 17th century, machines might well be constructed that exactly resemble humans.…

Mysticism and metamorphosis

2 September 2017 9:00 am

‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following…

Flamboyant intellectuals: René Descartes (main picture) and Bernard-Henri Lévy (below), in 1978

Liberty, philosophy and 246 types of cheese

20 June 2015 9:00 am

The French have always favoured grand, elegant abstractions about the human condition, says Ruth Scurr. It’s part of their national identity

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1946

Jean-Paul Sartre was perhaps the 20th century’s most famous thinker - if you can get beyond the verbiage

7 March 2015 9:00 am

Thomas R. Flynn has written an avowedly ‘intellectual biography’ of Jean-Paul Sartre, which might seem fitting. Sartre was nothing if…

The surer we are that machines can think, the less sure we'll be about people

23 August 2014 9:00 am

Having written (for a Times diary) a few sentences about consciousness in robots, I settled back to study readers’ responses…