Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) believed that in order to practice philosophy, you have to doubt everything.
His belief in thinking for oneself is noticed throughout his pseudonymous works. In writing under aliases, he lessened the sense that an authority wrote the books.

Doubt is necessary for philosophy

Søren Kierkegaard was influenced by Socrates, who thought that his task was not to discover the truth and then communicate it to his students, but to open the question to the pupils and ensure they stay open.
The last thing you should do is turn to an authority to tell you what you should think. You have to do that for yourself.

You  have to think for yourself

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Everything is stories: reviled and maligned

Want to think for yourself? Start with an agonising state of doubt, says Kierkegaard

Influenced by Socrates’ sense of irony, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) came to believe that a state of doubt – disorienting and horrifying as it could sometimes be – was the cornerstone of a sound philosophical practice. This scepticism of objective truth and ardent belief in thinking for oneself is omnipresent in his pseudonymous works, in which his assumed names sometimes even spar with one another. While amusing, the peculiar literary device also undercuts any sense that the works were written by a voice of authority. In this video from the London Review of Books , the British philosopher and historian Jonathan Rée traces the theme of doubt in Kierkegaard’s life and work using his unfinished, posthumously published novel Johannes Climacus: Or a Life of Doubt as a starting point.

Video by the <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk">London Review of Books </a>

A handful of executives control the ‘attention economy’. Time for attentive resistance

From fitness tracking devices to search engines, it’s easy to think of personalised technologies as convenient shortcuts and useful tools for working towards goals. But, argues James Williams, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute and a former Google employee, the primary aim of personalised tech is to keep users coming back by any means necessary – and often in a way that encourages empty distraction. In this brief animation featuring audio from a 2017 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxyRf3hfRXg">lecture </a>at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) in London, Williams makes the case that the consolidation of the ‘attention economy’ to just a handful of companies is an unprecedented and deeply fraught human experiment – and one that demands active, attentive resistance.

Video by <a href="https://www.thersa.org/">the RSA </a>

Director: <a href="http://olgamakarchuk.com/">Olga Makarchuk </a>

A guided tour of New York’s public art in 1973, in all its charms and contradictions

‘The streets and parks of Manhattan are really a great place to explore what happens to art, and what happens to us, when art steps out from behind the velvet rope … and stands each day in the public eye.’

As evidenced by the increasingly contentious <a href="/videos/the-american-museum-of-natural-history-grapples-with-its-most-controversial-piece">debate </a>over public art, those pieces that a society chooses to exhibit and celebrate in its shared spaces say a lot about its tastes, values and power structures. Released in 1973, the film Art in Public Places is at once a time capsule of its own and a rich window into centuries of New York’s history. Produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the film provides a meditative tour of Manhattan’s eclectic displays of public art, expertly guided by the US painter and writer Russell Connor. Spanning the works of artists famous and forgotten, and pieces both improvised and years-in-the-making, the US director Fred Barzyk captures New York’s public displays in all their eclecticism, charms and contradictions.

Website: <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/">The Metropolitan Museum of Art </a>

The perpetual motion of life and sand on the ‘walking islands’ of the North Sea

The Frisian Islands (or Wadden Islands) off the coast of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark form the planet’s largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and mudflats. The 300-mile archipelago in the North Sea is notable not only for its scale, but for its continuous eastward drift due to sand erosion. On a geological scale, the islands move at a sprinter’s pace, having forced many a human settlement into the sea over the centuries. In this short documentary, the Dutch filmmaker Paul Klaver chronicles the circle of life within the islands’ rich ecosystem, capturing their flora, fauna and perpetual drift via a combination of observational and time-lapse filmmaking. For more of Klaver’s dazzling nature filmmaking, watch <a href="/videos/after-migrating-thousands-of-miles-to-mate-chum-salmon-feed-alaska-s-ecosystem">Alaska: The Nutrient Cycle </a>and <a href="/videos/is-rewilding-the-future-of-nature">Winter </a>.

Director: <a href="http://www.pklaver.com">Paul Klaver </a>

Does everyone deserve a respectful burial? How a terrorist’s body divided a city

On 15 April 2013, a day of striving and celebration turned tragic in an instant, when two improvised pressure-cooker bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring more than 250 people. Amid a manhunt, one of the two brothers responsible for the attack, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, murdered a security guard before he was killed by police. The other brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was later apprehended alive.

Originally produced to accompany the podcast series <a href="http://www.eisradio.org/">Everything Is Stories </a>, this short film from the US filmmaker Daniel Navetta tracks a controversy that emerged in the wake of the tragedy. With many in the Boston area reeling with outrage, the undertaker Peter Stefan – owner of Graham Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlors in Worcester, Massachusetts – made what he believed to be the ethical choice of preparing Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body for a Muslim burial: a job refused by other nearby funeral homes. Detailing Stefan’s view of the controversy, Everything Is Stories: Reviled and Maligned explores how, amid public anger and protests, he resolved to perform what he believed to be his solemn moral and professional duty.

Director: <a href="http://www.danielnavetta.com/">Daniel </a><a href="http://www.danielnavetta.com/">Navetta </a>

Producers: Neil Kopp, Vincent Savino, Anish Savjani, Daniel Berger

Website: <a href="https://www.byt.nyc">Bryght Young Things </a>

Activists clash with police on 1 March 2020 in Kolkata during a protest against India’s new citizenship law and following sectarian riots in New Delhi. Photo by Indranil Aditya/NurPhoto via Getty

In an age thick with anger and fear, we might dream of a purely rational politics but it would be a denial of our humanity

Photo by Annie Spratt/Unsplash

Taylor Hackford and Isabella Rossellini get to the point. Photo by Eve Arnold/Magnum

Here’s the paradox of articulation: are you excavating existing ideas, or do your thoughts come into being as you speak?

Detail from the Dance with Death by Johann Rudolf Feyerabend. Courtesy the Basel Historical Museum, Switzerland/Wikipedia

Want to think for yourself? Start with an agonising state of doubt, says Kierkegaard

Doubt is necessary for philosophy

You have to think for yourself

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