Introducing the IAI
Our Vision
There is little that we can be certain about, but we can be confident that a time will come when our current beliefs and assumptions are seen as mistaken, our heroes - like the imperial adventurers of the past - are regarded as villains, and our morality is viewed as bigoted prejudice.
So the IAI seeks to challenge the notion that our present accepted wisdom is the truth. It aims to uncover the flaws and limitations in our current thinking in search of alternative and better ways to hold the world.
The IAI was founded in 2008 with the aim of rescuing philosophy from technical debates about the meaning of words and returning it to big ideas and putting them at the centre of culture. Not in aid of a more refined cultural life, but as an urgent call to rethink where we are.
That rethinking is urgent and necessary because the world of ideas is in crisis. The traditional modernist notion that we are gradually uncovering the one true account of reality has been undermined by a growing awareness that ideas are limited by culture, history and language. Yet in a relative world the paradoxes of postmodern culture has left us lost and confused. We do not know what to believe, nor do we know how to find the answers.
The IAI was founded to help address this intellectual crisis. Our research and editorial teams have worked around the clock to face up to this challenge and unearth fresh ways of thinking that might guide us in an uncertain world.
When, with the founding of the IAI, we declared that philosophy and big ideas should be at the heart of our culture, we did not do so out of reverence for ideas or an attachment to the academy and intellectual life. We did so because it is these core thoughts and ideas that determine the character of our world and our lives.
It is our vision that philosophy and big ideas are not a pleasant reflective addition to our everyday lives but an essential determinant of who and where we are and of what is possible. At the IAI we are committed to finding new and better ways to make sense of the world so that we can navigate a brighter future in an increasingly dangerous world.
History of the IAI
The IAI's first festival, Crunch, focused on the visual arts and was held in November 2008 in the wake of the financial crash.
In May 2009, the IAI held its first philosophy festival HowTheLightGetsIn in the book town of Hay-on-wye. In the following few years the festival grew rapidly and by 2011 included 360 events running over ten days. Since HowTheLightGetsIn began the IAI has put on more than 4000 events.
In October 2011, the IAI launched an online platform IAI.tv with videos of the debates and talks at its events. Its audience has grown steadily since it was launched first passing 10 million views in July 2020.
IAI News, an online philosophy magazine, was launched in 2014 with new articles published daily from 2020. Later in 2014, the IAI Academy offering courses from leading thinkers and academics was started, followed in 2016 with Philosophy for our Times, the IAI's weekly podcast series.
During the Covid pandemic the IAI was unable to stage physical events and in its place developed a virtual reality platform enabling visitors to the online festival to visit up to eleven virtual stages and meeting spaces with debates, music and comedy. On the return to physical festivals for HowTheLightGetsIn London 2021, the festival was also streamed live using the virtual reality platform to host the events from the festival.
Learn about our annual festival: https://howthelightgetsin.org
Listen to our podcast: https://iai.tv/iai-podcast
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