Continental Philosophy refers to a diverse and dynamic tradition of thought that developed across mainland Europe from the 19th century into the 21st. It brings together a constellation of thinkers, from Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche to Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Despite their disagreements, these thinkers share a concern with the conditions of experience, the formation of meaning and the structures that shape human life.

This short essay examines Michel Foucault’s critique of the history of ideas, which we will pursue further in our online course on Foucault in the age of AI in January 2027. What do we mean when we say that an idea has a history? We can trace how the idea of “freedom” changes from one philosopher to another, how “progress” becomes a political ideal, or how a medical theory enters everyday language. The history of ideas examines these movements through books, institutions and

When we remove an unwanted person from a photograph or replace an awkward expression, we bring the image closer to what we intended to capture. But photographs often become important for reasons their makers could never have anticipated, through details that seemed irrelevant at the time. What do we lose when our images conform to what we already consider worth remembering? In Little History of Photography, published in 1931, Walter Benjamin explores how the camera changes bo

This short essay examines the connections between Foucault’s thought and AI, questions we will pursue further in our online course on Foucault in the age of AI in January 2027. It seems that the world Michel Foucault described throughout his work is still unmistakably ours. We speak of power relations, discourse and normalisation - often without realising how much this vocabulary owes to him. These terms have traveled far beyond philosophy because the forces they describe pe

There is a familiar way of thinking about the past. Something happened, and afterwards we may remember it badly, distort it, forget parts of it, or disagree about what it meant. However uncertain our knowledge becomes, the event itself is assumed to remain fixed. Behind the competing memories and interpretations, there is still supposed to be one past that actually took place. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, one of the most ambitious philosophical works ever written on cinema,

Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus begins with a provocation: philosophy has never really thought technology. This is not because philosophers ignored machines or tools. The problem is that technics was usually placed outside thought itself, as something secondary, practical, and material, while philosophy reserved for itself the supposedly higher domain of reason, truth, and spirit. The division between technics and thought goes back to Ancient

The last manuscript Immanuel Kant worked on between 1796 and the final years of his life is known today as the Opus Postumum. Kant believed this work would provide the Schlußstein - the keystone - that would finally complete his philosophical system. But something unexpected happened while he was writing it. Instead of closing the system, the manuscript began to push it in a new direction. Kant had originally asked a famous question: how is knowledge of the world possible?

This short essay explores the aftermath of Foucault's thought. We will be running an online course on Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge in January 2027. Michel Foucault is arguably the most important political philosopher of the 20th century. But what happened in philosophy after him? In the decades following Foucault’s death, thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Slavoj Žižek developed new forms of political philosophy shaped by, and of

Modern political thought is often a theater of submission - a "new conformism" where we judge the world based on established values. But what if the task of the future isn't to defend existing values, but to question the value of values themselves? To ask: what kind of life produced this value? Does this value serve to expand our capacity for action, or does it exist to justify our exhaustion? Nietzsche identified this stagnation as Ressentiment and Bad Conscience: the corr

The genesis of cinema was accompanied by a radical philosophical hypothesis: that the industrial automation of the image could achieve what the traditional arts could only simulate. When we consider the essence of the cinematographic image, we find it is defined by automatic movement. Unlike painting, where the mind must "clothe" an immobile figure with motion, or the theater, where movement remains tethered to the physical displacement of a human body, cinema provides moveme

When we speak about technology today, we usually ask the wrong kind of question. We ask what technology is : what kind of object it is, what it does to us, whether it is good or bad, human or inhuman. We look for answers in devices, platforms, machines, or systems, as if technics were simply a collection of things that surround us and act upon us. For philosopher Gilbert Simondon, this framing misses the point. Technics is not primarily an object at all. It is a way of makin

The arrival of artificial intelligence has revived an old philosophical anxiety: how much thinking can happen in language without anyone fully controlling it? Long before machines could produce prose, psychoanalysis had already disturbed the comforting idea that our words simply express thoughts we possess. Freud discovered that speech can say more than the speaker intends. Lacan pushed the point further with his famous claim that "the unconscious is structured like a languag

We live in a world made of words, and yet we rarely stop to ask what it means for something to “make sense.” We assume meaning is simply there, tucked inside our sentences like objects in a box, ready to be passed from one mind to another. Gilles Deleuze’s 1969 book The Logic of Sense asks us to look again. Sense, he argues, is not a thing we possess but something that happens. It is an event that occurs at the surface where language and the world meet, fragile and fleeting,

We often talk about life as if it were a fixed and recognizable biological fact. A cell, a genome, an organism, a species. We picture inheritance as a clean line, evolution as a slow march of bodies and traits, and development as the unfolding of an internal program. But what if none of this is quite right? What if life is less a machine following instructions, and more a shifting mesh of relationships, exchanges, and borrowed organs? What if our bodies are not where life beg

In his famous 1954 text The Question Concerning Technology Martin Heidegger famously insisted that “the essence of technology is nothing technological,” meaning that modern technology is not just about tools or machines, but about a mode of revealing, a way in which reality is made to appear. French philosopher Gilbert Simondon went in the opposite direction: machines are technical; that is their essence. They evolve, change, and individuate. In the late 1950s, Simondon wrot

We often imagine science as the art of order: equations on a board, graphs, predictions. But the world that science meets at the threshold is not orderly. It is chaos, not just mess or confusion, but a zone of infinite speed where forms flicker into existence and vanish before they can be named. The question is: how does science ever gain a grip on such a world? The answer proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their 1991 book What is Philosophy? is striking. Scien

This short essay touches on the problem of information and control, which we’ll explore further in our upcoming course, The Rise of the Machines: Thinking In The Age of AI . We live in a world that runs on messages. They flash across our screens, pulse through cables under oceans, ripple through our cells, and shape our relationships, economies, and decisions. But what do we really mean when we say information ? Nearly a century ago, Norbert Wiener - the mathematician who fou

Politics is easiest to recognise when it has a name and an address: Parliament, a political party, a court, a trade union, a demonstration. Deleuze and Guattari do not deny the importance of any of these, but their concept of micropolitics begins with a different question. What is already happening before political positions become clearly organised? What desires, fears and attachments make those positions possible, and what passes between people beneath the language of offic

Traditionally, “style” has meant individuality. From classical rhetoric to modern aesthetics, we are taught to recognize an artist’s signature as a deviation from a norm: the brushstroke that resists the conventions of composition, the musical phrasing that bends harmony, the sculptural form that unsettles proportion, the cinematic cut that breaks narrative flow. Style, in this sense, is what makes a work distinct - its surplus, its residue of personality or genius that remai

This short essay revisits Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” and Foucault’s response to it - a glimpse into our upcoming Foucault course . In 1784, Immanuel Kant was asked a deceptively simple question: What is Enlightenment? His answer, compressed into a few pages, became one of the founding texts of modern thought. But rather than describing a historical event or a period in European history, Kant proposed something far more radical: Enlightenment, he wrote, is man’s exit fr