When I was growing up in the 1980s, my family and I sometimes played a board game called ‘The Game of Life’. Rather than throwing dice, you spun a central wheel to determine your move, yielding a number between one and ten. The playing pieces were co

There’s much in life we’d prefer to forget, but the human mind tends to remember the bad and forget the good, which partly explains why negative thoughts are so hard to quash. We’ll keenly remember a heated argument with a friend, but struggle to rec

Why struggle to recall a fact or event when our devices easily offer terabytes of data? Neatly captured and then easily accessed: docile information is becoming the ideal. Yet crucial meaning making takes place not only when we encode memories but al

Michael Cholbi is Professor and Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely in ethical theory, practical ethics, and the philosophy of death and dying. His books include Suicide: The Philosophical Dimensions,

noun: 1. the state of no longer having something or as much of something; the process that leads to this;2. money that has been lost by a business or an organization;3. the death of a person;4. the disadvantage that is caused when somebody leaves, or

We often speak of arguments in competitive terms. We win arguments and lose them, score points and concede defeat. Adversarial legal systems, such as exist in places like the United States, Britain, and Australia, are built on the idea that argument

There is a tradition in philosophy that makes our memories the core of our personal being, essential to what we are, and the basis of our personal identity over time. This stems from John Locke’s discussion in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

I was recently discussing the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe’s strong objection to Oxford University’s decision to award US President Harry Truman with an Honorary Doctorate. Anscombe, appalled at Truman’s decision to drop two atomic bombs on

Simone De Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age is as shocking to read today as it was half a century ago in surfacing our latent disgust with the aged. Prompted by a visceral antipathy, writes Beauvoir, we invigilate ‘the old’, deeming any show of love or je

Accompanying the words with the lyre, Orpheus sung, “O deities of the underworld, to whom all we who live must come, hear my words, for they are true! I come not to spy out the secrets of Tartarus, nor to try my strength against the three-headed dog

When they seek to determine someone’s cause of death, doctors often speak of “organ failure” – the failure of an essential system in the body (cardiovascular, renal, etc.) – or even of “multiple organ failure” – the loss of function of two or more su

While on holiday in Vienna in 1833, the English poet Arthur Henry Hallam died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged just twenty-two. Over the next seventeen years, one of his close friends and fellow poets worked on an elegy in his honour. “In Mem

We humans don’t like to lose, and that’s not just in sport or other games. We suffer when we lose almost anything – money from a poor investment, possessions from a break-in, or a partner from divorce. Economists have a name for it, “loss aversion”,

Mary-Frances O’Connor is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry and Director of Clinical Training at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on the physiological correlates of emotion, in particular the wide range of phy

A certain rich man, lord of a great estate, had an only son, of whom he was dotingly fond. The Young Man delighted in hunting, and went every day into the forest, in chase of wild beasts. His father believed firmly in dreams, omens, prognostics, and

My best of mothers, I have often felt eager to console you, and have as often checked that impulse. Many things urged me to make the attempt: in the first place, I thought that if, though I might not be able to restrain your tears, yet that if I coul

Tell us a little about your background as an artist. What prompted you to start a career as an artist, and what has kept you there over the years? I grew up in a typical working-class family in East London. My grandad was a bricklayer, my uncle a p

Students are told to remember their high school and college years as the best in their life. Supermodels and influencers have become power brands, with tens of millions of followers and the ability to move entire markets. There is always the next ‘ho

All around the world, young people in their twenties and thirties are losing faith in democracy. According to one mega survey of surveys, comprising some five million respondents, 55 per cent of millennials in their mid-thirties are dissatisfied with

In the late 19th century, Boston photographer William H. Mumler posed his subjects by a window in his studio – grieving fathers, distraught lovers, even Mary Todd Lincoln, the widow of Abraham Lincoln. Mumler’s customers paid good money ($10, or arou