Aesthetics is often linked to museums, concert halls, and famous architecture, but beauty and meaning can also be found in the textures of daily life.

We trust our sense of what we think and feel. We also assume we can recognise signs of thought and feeling in others. Philosophy asks how firm that trust is, and what it really means to know a mind, our own or someone else’s.

The mind feels unlike anything else we encounter. Thoughts have no shape, no weight, no place on a map. Yet they are bound to the brain, a physical organ. Whether that bond is identity or something looser remains one of philosophy’s most persistent puzzles.

Consciousness is the felt quality of being alive and aware. We can describe brain processes in detail, yet the fact of subjective experience, the “what it is like” to be, remains difficult to explain.

The world we see feels immediate and certain. Yet appearances shift with light, angle, and mood. If the senses can be fooled so easily, can they be trusted to show reality as it truly is?