Institute of Art and Ideas


The Institute of Art and Ideas is an arts organisation founded in 2008 in London. Its programming includes the world's largest philosophy and music festival, HowTheLightGetsIn and the online channel , where talks, debates and articles by leading thinkers can be accessed, under the slogan "Changing How The World Thinks."
The IAI's festival HowTheLightGetsIn is held in Hay-on-Wye in May and in London at Kenwood House, Hampstead Heath, in September. The IAI is led by its founding director, the British post-realist philosopher and former broadcaster Hilary Lawson.

IAI TV

IAI.TV is an online platform publishing articles, videos and courses by world leading thinkers on big ideas in philosophy, science, politics and art.

IAI Player

IAI Player is an online channel where the debates and talks curated by the IAI are released and made available online. Speakers include Nobel Prize winners like economist Paul Krugman, physicist Gerard 't Hooft, public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Steven Pinker, and political figures and journalists like Owen Jones, Helen Lewis, Diane Abbott, Liz Truss.
In September 2016 the videos had received in excess of 670,000 views, reaching over 1,000,000 people each year. Hilary Lawson in an interview in 2014:
"One of the things we're up to is breaking down the idea of philosophy as being the sort of thing that is undertaken only by a specialist and is impenetrable. Not to say laughable, frankly. And I think when we started – I founded the Institute of Art and Ideas seven years ago, two years before the first HowTheLightGetsIn – that was indeed the only way people thought about philosophy. But every human being, in a way, is a philosopher. Because that's what it is to be human. You wonder about life. You wonder about what you're doing. You wonder about where you're going. You wonder: "What the hell's going on"'.

IAI News

IAI News is an online magazine of ideas. It publishes accessible philosophy articles and aims to make cutting edge ideas widely available. Contributors have included Martha Nussbaum, Homi Bhabha, Massimo Pigliucci and others.

IAI Academy

IAI Academy is an educational platform of online courses in philosophy, politics, art and science. Since September 2016, new courses have been published on a monthly basis. Open Culture cited it for helping foster "a progressive and vibrant intellectual culture".

''Philosophy for Our Times''

Beginning in September 2016, the IAI has been publishing its weekly podcast, Philosophy for our Times, featuring the debates and talks from HowTheLightGetsIn.