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.