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News
News: December 2025 / January 2026
Plato translation unveiled • Prison TV drama takes philosophical turn • UNESCO creates ethics code for neurotech — News reports by Anja Steinbauer, Olivia Gill and Martin Cohen
New Complete Plato Translation
Translating from scratch the complete dialogues of Plato, probably the most influential philosopher of them all, is a truly monumental task. Yet a brand new translation has just been unveiled. The Dialogues of Plato, all 1,320 pages of them, are published in print by Gandon Editions and are also freely available online, courtesy of the Foundation for Platonic Studies, at platonicfoundation.org/translation .
The project’s total costs have been estimated at around one million euros, with no corporate backing. The translator, David Horan, of the Irish Centre for Platonic Studies, has been working flat out on it since 2010 – the year that Instagram was launched and the first iPad was released. But if that seems like ancient history, don’t forget that Plato actually wrote the dialogues 2,350 years ago. That they are still read and hotly discussed today reflects the fact that they represent not only Plato’s own ideas, but his reexamination of earlier debates stretching back to the dawn of Greek philosophy. As well as that, as David Horan said at the launch of the new edition, Plato also bequeathed something even more valuable – his teacher Socrates’ new method of debating and exploring ideas.
So what is the flavour of this new translation? In the venerable 1888 translation of the dialogue The Republic by Benjamin Jowett, a passage on the vital importance of geometry reads: “The knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal, and not of aught perishing and transient.”
By contrast, Horan crisply writes: “Geometrical knowledge is knowledge of what always is.”
Philosophy in Prison TV Series
It is rare for a TV drama series to be based on a nonfiction book about philosophy, but this is the case for a new six-part drama series with the working title ‘Waiting for the Out’. Multi-award winning scriptwriter Dennis Kelly has based the series on Andy West’s recent memoir The Life Inside, which is about his experience as a philosopher teaching a philosophy class in a prison.
The series is now in production and set to air on BBC iPlayer and BBC One. It stars BAFTA nominated Josh Finan as Dan the philosophy teacher, and the cast also includes Gerard Kearns, Samantha Spiro and Phil Daniels.
The drama will follow the prison philosophy class’s discussions on topics such as freedom, morality and love, and how those connect with the lives and concerns of those inside. Using West’s first-hand insights, the series aims to capture the complexity of prisoners’ perspectives on these themes. Dennis Kelly says: “His book is funny, insightful, beautiful, genuinely heartbreaking and nothing like what you’d expect it to be – we’ve tried to take that into the series” (BBC, 2025).
Women in the History of Philosophy
Germaine de Staël (1766-1817)
On the 26th and 27th of November the Centre for the History of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in Sydney, Australia, held a conference called ‘Women in the History of Philosophy: On Nature’. Over two days, which were accessible both in person and online, a total of eight speakers gave and discussed their papers. Caterina Pellò presented ‘Rediscovering Nature Through the Pythagorean Women’, exploring the ideas of nature that are attributed to the writings of the Pythagorean Women – the female intellectuals who followed Pythagoras, and whether these suggest a difference between male and female views on nature. Dalia Nassar discussed her paper; ‘Fanaticism and the Metaphysics Behind it: Germaine de Staël on the Moral and Political Implications of Reductive Natural Science’. Staël was a philosopher who lived through the French revolution, noted for her publications on individualism and romanticism, and for her opposition to Napoleon. In considering Staël’s critique of empiricism alongside her political philosophy, Nassar explained how some metaphysical views can lead to forms of political extremism.
Ethics Code for Neurotechnology
Deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease
UNESCO has just introduced the first global ethical standards for neurotechnology. This rapidly advancing field receives far less public attention than AI, despite surging investment. Neurotechnology includes tools that directly interact with the nervous system to measure or influence or be influenced by brain activity. While these technologies offer major medical benefits, such as deep-brain stimulation for depression and Parkinson’s disease, or brain-computer interfaces that help people with disabilities communicate or control prosthetics, their non-medical uses remain largely unregulated. Many widely used consumer devices, including headbands and headphones, now collect neural data to track stress, sleep, or heart rate, often without users realising it. Such data can expose intimate information about thoughts and emotions and could be shared with third parties. UNESCO’s new guidelines urge governments to safeguard privacy, ensure that neurotechnology remains accessible and inclusive, and protect vulnerable groups, especially children and adolescents, whose developing brains make them particularly susceptible to harm. The standards advise against non-therapeutic use in minors, warn about workplace monitoring that could profile employees, and emphasise that explicit consent and transparency are essential. They also call for stronger regulation of products that can shape behaviour or foster addiction, requiring clear, easy to understand information for consumers.
Moral Philosophy Can Help Explain Social Polarisation
Modern workplaces have become arenas for conflict over diversity, sustainability, health mandates, return-to-office policies, and corporate speech. Such disagreements are often attributed to clashes of political ideology. However, new research by Namrata Goyal, Lorenzo De Gregori, Yugi Liu and Krishna Savani suggests that different approaches to moral reasoning, such as absolutism versus relativism, are a stronger predictor of people’s positions on such controversies. Moral absolutists, regardless of whether they are liberals or conservatives, believe moral rules should apply universally and support banning practices they see as wrong, with no exceptions. Relativists, on the other hand, see morality as context-dependent and are more open to trade-offs or conditional allowances. Absolutism is distinct from extremism: it reflects consistency, not radicalism. Prior work shows that people who see their values as sacred resist compromise and react strongly to opposing views. Although liberals more often lean towards relativism and conservatives towards absolutism, both approaches appear right across the political spectrum. This explains why ideology and values alone cannot fully account for workplace conflicts.
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