In this post, Shannon Gadd, who took the ‘Philosophical Britain‘ module at Queen Mary in 2015, writes about ‘Surrealism’ as a philosophical keyword.

Stereotypical views of life tend to focus on the negative, adopting words such as dull, logical and ordinary. There does however seem to be an alternative to this routine monotony which is found in the philosophy of surrealism. Rejecting the rational, contradicting the conscious and negating the normal, surrealists adopt a view of life that seeks to liberate […]
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In this post, Lauren Macmillan, who took the ‘Philosophical Britain‘ module at Queen Mary in 2015, writes about ‘Feminism’ as a philosophical keyword.

The Rise of the F Word: Feminism

In the build up to the 2015 general election, I can’t tell you how many times I was reminded ‘Your Vote Matters.’ As a woman, there’s no escaping the often vicious reminder that our foremothers died for our right to vote, and that any woman who abstains from voting is a disgrace to […]
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This post by Thomas Dixon is the first in a series on Philosophical Keywords, exploring the changing historical uses, meanings and impacts of philosophical terms which have taken on broader cultural resonance. 

A couple of years ago, travelling on the Central Line to Mile End on the London underground, I started to notice a series of posters and images like the one below – using the familiar imagery of the London tube map to suggest connections being made between people – […]
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Some years ago I wrote a book devoted to the history of a single philosophical keyword, ‘altruism’, coined by the French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte in 1851. It was my first foray into the cultural history of philosophy.

Partly inspired by this previous project, I decided to include a series of posts on the Cultural History of Philosophy blog on ‘Philosophical Keywords’ – short essays on the histories, meanings, and significance of words that have crossed over from philosophy into […]
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