The Slow Unveiling: 100 Papers That Shaped Our Thinking

There is a pleasure, almost a private one, in watching an institution turn its gaze inward and ask what, across a hundred years, has actually mattered. The Royal Institute of Philosophy is doing precisely this in its centenary year: releasing, four at a time and once every four weeks, a list of 100 Papers That Shaped Our Thinking from a century of its own journals, curated by Royal Institute's President Professor Jo Wolff,. I confess I find something almost devotional in the pacing itself: this refusal to hand over the whole inheritance at once, insisting instead that thought, like translation, like the slow accretion of a play across drafts, cannot be rushed toward its final form. The papers so far range widely: mercy and punishment, machine and mind, the ethics of cloning, the ache of collective guilt — and reading through them, I am reminded, again, that philosophy and literature have never really been separate rooms in the same house I have spent my life wandering between. What follows below is the list as it stands today, incomplete by design, a text still becoming itself, which is, perhaps, the truest condition of any text worth reading. 

Here's a one-line summary for each of the 52 papers released so far:You're right — here's the list again with publication years included:

1. Alexander (1926), Art and Science — Treats artistic creation and scientific inquiry as parallel, equally valid modes of engaging with reality. This essay is my top favourite. 
2. Swinburne (1968), The Argument from Design — Defends a version of the teleological argument for God from the order observed in nature.
3. Smart (1968), Mercy — Asks whether showing mercy in punishment is compatible with justice, or undermines it. 
   
4. Nagel (1998), Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem — Argues our current concepts may simply be too limited to ever solve the mind-body problem.
5. Buxton (2019), Reparative Justice for Climate Refugees — Argues wealthy, high-emitting nations owe reparative obligations to people displaced by climate change.
6. Diamond (1978), Eating Meat and Eating People — Challenges utilitarian animal-rights arguments, grounding our treatment of animals in relationships rather than abstract rights.
7. Lucas (1961), Minds, Machines, and Gödel — Uses Gödel's incompleteness theorem to argue the human mind can't be fully captured by any mechanical system.
8. Wilkes (1980), More Brain Lesions — Uses split-brain and lesion cases to press on assumptions about the unity of consciousness and personal identity.
9. Chadwick (1982), Cloning — Surveys the ethical issues raised by the then-emerging prospect of human cloning.
10. Williams (2000), Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline — Argues philosophy is properly understood as a humanistic inquiry, not a science-like pursuit of absolute truth.
11. Putnam (2001), Reply to Bernard Williams — Pushes back on Williams, defending philosophy's claim to genuine knowledge alongside science.
12. Singer, M. (2004), The Concept of Evil — Analyzes what, if anything, distinguishes "evil" from ordinary wrongdoing.
13. Primoratz (1989), Punishment as Language — Proposes that punishment works as society's symbolic communication of condemnation.
14. Quinton (1962), Spaces and Times — Explores whether there could coherently be multiple, disconnected spaces or times.
15. Coady (1985), The Morality of Terrorism — Examines how terrorism should be defined and morally distinguished from other forms of violence.
16. Ross (1929), The Ethics of Punishment — Weighs retributive against consequentialist justifications for punishing wrongdoers.
17. Geach (1973), Omnipotence — Argues divine omnipotence should mean maximal power within logical limits, addressing puzzles like the "stone" paradox.
18. Russell (1927), Substance — Critiques the traditional metaphysical idea of substance as an underlying bearer of properties.
19. Bodunrin (1981), The Question of African Philosophy — Critically examines debates over whether, and how, a distinctly "African philosophy" can be defined. This is something that will challenge your settled belief. 
20. Skinner (1966), The Limits of Historical Explanations — Argues historians must recover past agents' own intentions and language rather than impose present-day categories.
21. Dunn (1968), The Identity of the History of Ideas — Questions the methodology of intellectual history, favoring contextualist over "timeless idea" approaches.
22. Sorabji (1974), Body and Soul in Aristotle — Explores Aristotle's account of the soul as the form (not substance separate from) the body.
23. Hill (1930), The Philosophy of a Biologist — A working scientist reflects on the philosophical implications of biological research.
24. North (1987), Wrongdoing and Forgiveness — Examines what forgiveness actually is and when it's a fitting response to wrongdoing.
25. Lewis, D. (1969), Lucas against Mechanism — Rebuts Lucas's Gödel-based argument that minds can't be machines.
26. Litwinski (1974), The Psychology of "Mine" — Explores the psychological roots and significance of our sense of ownership.
27. Harris (1975), The Survival Lottery — Proposes a thought experiment where people could be randomly chosen for organ donation to save others, testing utilitarian intuitions.
28. Singer, P. (1977), "Utility" and the Survival Lottery — Responds to Harris, probing the utilitarian assumptions behind the lottery scenario.
29. Taylor (1939), The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes — Offers an influential reading of Hobbes as having a genuine moral (not merely egoistic) ethical theory.
30. Habermas (2004), Religious Tolerance—The Pacemaker for Cultural Rights — Argues the historical emergence of religious tolerance offers a model for accommodating today's cultural pluralism.
31. Austin (1968), Pleasure and Happiness — Distinguishes pleasure from happiness and examines their different roles in a good life.
32. Mays (1952), Can Machines Think? — Examines the philosophical criteria for attributing genuine thought to machines.
33. Polanyi (1966), The Logic of Tacit Inference — Argues much human knowledge is tacit and unarticulated, underlying all explicit knowledge.
34. Strawson (1961), Social Morality and Individual Ideal — Distinguishes the minimal demands of shared social morality from personal ideals of how to live.
35. Collingwood (1928), The Limits of Historical Knowledge — Examines the inherent constraints on what historical inquiry can actually establish about the past.
36. Lowe (2000), Causal Closure Principles and Emergentism — Asks whether physical causal closure really rules out genuine mental causation, defending emergentism.
37. Prior (1959), Thank Goodness That's Over — Uses the experience of tensed relief to argue against theories that reduce time to a tenseless "B-series."
38. Lewis, H.D. (1948), Collective Responsibility — Challenges whether groups, rather than individuals, can coherently bear moral responsibility.
39. Cooper (1968), Collective Responsibility — Revisits the same debate on group moral responsibility.
40. Anscombe (1958), Modern Moral Philosophy — Famously argues moral philosophy should drop "ought"-language tied to a defunct divine-law framework and return to virtue ethics.
41. Annas (1976), Plato's Republic and Feminism — Asks whether Plato's proposal of women guardians genuinely counts as a feminist position.
42. Stebbing (1927), Abstraction and Science — Examines the legitimate role of abstraction in constructing scientific theories.
43. Rorty (1982), From Passions to Emotions and Sentiments — Traces the historical shift in how philosophers have classified and theorized the affective states.
44. Vice (2003), Literature and the Narrative Self — Explores how literary narrative shapes and constitutes our sense of personal identity.
45. Mackie (1978), The Law of the Jungle — Questions whether evolutionary theory really supports crude "might is right" readings of morality.
46. Midgley (1979), Gene-juggling — Critiques reductive sociobiological accounts that treat genes as the true agents behind behavior and morality.
47. Dawkins (1981), In Defence of Selfish Genes — Responds to Midgley, defending the "selfish gene" as a legitimate explanatory metaphor.
48. 
    Kristjánsson (2008), An Aristotelian Critique of Situationism — Defends Aristotelian virtue ethics against psychological claims that character traits don't predict behavior.
49. Ewing (1953), What Would Happen if Everybody Acted like Me? — Examines universalizability as a test for whether an action is morally acceptable.
50. Hacker (2002), Is There Anything it is Like to be a Bat? — Critiques Nagel's famous claim about the irreducibility of subjective experience.
51. Broad (1949), The Relevance of Psychical Research to Philosophy — Asks what, if anything, parapsychological findings might mean for philosophy of mind.
52. Kolnai (1976), Dignity — Examines what human dignity consists in and its place in ethical thought.

Meeting Half-a-dozen

Tanvir - Sadat - Shafayet

Today I sat down with six friends of Naqvi — Rayeed, Waysal, Faraz, Tanvir, Sadat, and Shafayet — for a long, wide-ranging conversation about how they should begin preparing themselves for their futures. It was the kind of meeting I have come to treasure over the years: young people at the threshold of their careers, full of questions they are only beginning to know how to ask. Rayeed, who comes from a business studies background, was particularly engaged, already thinking seriously and enthusiastically about how to move his profession forward. Shafayet, too, brought a real energy to the room, though his is the kind that comes tangled with worry. Since he will be leaving for the United States on the 4th of August, we agreed to meet again before he goes, and hopefully once more after — a tradition I hope continues with this group the way it has with so many others who have sat in this room before them. 

Much of what I offered them came from years of watching students find their way, often by paths no one could have predicted. I told them about a student who once struggled to write even a single coherent page, weak in reading, writing, and interaction, who went on to become a faculty member at a university. I told them about others who moved from one discipline entirely into another after their undergraduate years and thrived precisely because of that shift — one now pursuing doctoral work at Brown 9moving from mechanical engineering to oceanic research), another at Sheffield (moving from CSE to machine learning) and yet another who moved from economics to corporate financing and now want to pursue a career in architecture. These stories matter to me not as inspiration for its own sake but as evidence: the undergraduate years are not meant to lock a person into a single specialization forever. They are meant to build a foundation broad enough to stand on, whatever direction a person eventually chooses to walk in.

Rayeed - Waysal - Faraz

This became the heart of my conversation with Shafayet in particular. He is currently studying engineering, but his real passion has always been finance and business — he has been investing in the share market for some time now, with real success, enough to have bought his own car through it. And yet he carries a quiet fear that turning toward business or entrepreneurship would somehow betray his father's trust, and the investment his father has made in his engineering education. I told him plainly that this fear is misplaced. An undergraduate degree is not a life sentence to a single profession; it is a way of learning to think rigorously. If he carries strong engineering instincts into a business or entrepreneurial career, that is not a betrayal — it is an advantage few of his peers will have. He has been considering an MBA, and I told him I believe this is exactly the right next step for someone in his position. 

To all six of them, I tried to return again and again to a single idea: the most important thing a young person can do right now is find the sector they want to work in, and then build both their academics and their skills deliberately toward it. One of the best ways to do this is to begin writing — a research paper if they are ready for it, but even something smaller and more accessible is a start. I encouraged them to write short, plain-language essays on platforms like Medium, or to start a blog of their own, the way I have kept mine alive for the past thirteen or fourteen years now. I told them to keep something on GitHub, however modest, because a visible record of work speaks louder than a claim of interest ever will. And I was direct about LinkedIn: it matters, but only if the writing is genuinely their own. Platforms are increasingly able to detect AI-generated posts and flag them quietly to page owners, even if readers never see the flag — so the only real strategy is to write honestly, in their own voice, and to engage with people sincerely rather than performing engagement.

I also urged them toward mathematics and toward the newer technological tools reshaping every field they might enter, regardless of discipline. There are excellent free courses available now — from Google, from Andrew Ng, and from other serious educators — and there is no longer any real excuse for a curious student not to explore them. I asked them, too, to read this blog, not because I think it holds any special wisdom, but because thirteen years of writing about books, teaching, and the questions students bring me is itself a kind of case study in staying curious for the long haul. I look forward to sitting with this bunch again soon, and to watching where each of their particular paths leads.

There is so plenty much to work on that can NOT be done in just one sitting. So, let’s meet with clear agenda and get it done before your current semester is over.

Everyone is requested to bring a laptop - I can arrange one additional laptop if necessary. Prior to our meeting it would be great to have a CV including a plan for profession and a description of interests (academic, technical skill, hobbies both creative and recreational)