New Philosopher #52
210 x 275 mm, 132 pages
Australia (UK edition)
Quarterly
Editor-in-chief: Zan Boag
Editor-at-large: Nigel Warburton
‘For curious people looking for solutions to the fundamental issues faced by humankind’
Written with the layperson in mind, New Philosopher examines and explains ideas from thinkers across history and the present day, always with the goal of helping its readers live happier, more liberated lives.
This latest edition, themed ‘Memory’, opens with an editorial from Zan Boag touching on memory as an unreliable narrator, the unsettling nature of forgetting, and various perspectives on memory from the likes of Plato, Locke, and Proust.
Inside, Tom Chatfield analyses the memory of machinery against our own blurred and biased human databases, and delves into how ‘the past is grist to algorithmic mills’ with AI looming large; Boag sits in conversation with writer and philosopher Mark Rowlands to discuss his recent non-fiction work, ‘The Book of Memory’, exploring how we reconstruct memories when we recall them, what makes a story we remember feel true, and how many of our foundational moments we forget; and Nigel Warburton ruminates on the relationship between memory and photography—how they help us both remember and misremember the past—exploring the notion that photographs have a direct connection to the past, as espoused by philosophers Kendall Walton and Patrick Maynard.