About Us
Big Ideas was set up with a simple aim: to create a forum for intelligent, thoughtful discussion of interesting subjects. Although usually called “philosophical”, our interests are far too broad to fit any traditional academic discipline and we’ve covered topics including public policy, the arts, computer science, anthropology, history and the media as well as traditional philosophical fields such as ethics, identity and epistemology.
Our aim has never been to foster oppositional debate. We find the usual point-scoring Tae-Kwon-Do that passes for so much intellectual discussion tedious. We want conversations. We know that the kinds of topics we cover have no known solutions, and we’d like to leave at the end of the night with new and different ideas from the ones we walked in with.
Not long after we started running these events, we wrote a sort of manifesto, which was published in the newsletter of Sapere (with whom we’re not affiliated). Much of it still applies to what we’re doing now.