Public intellectual life in 2026 is mostly performance. Three-minute clips. Heated panel rounds. Twitter threads engineered for screenshot. The arguments are almost always made for the benefit of the audience already on the same side, with the interlocutor functioning as a prop. There are exceptions, but the exceptions are rare and most of them happen on the long-form podcast circuit, where the format is bad for highlight reels and good for actual thinking.

Alex O'Connor is one of the people working that exception seriously. He started making YouTube videos as a teenager, under the handle CosmicSkeptic, and over the last ten years has built a public-philosophy practice that is unusual in three particular ways. He goes long. He talks to people he disagrees with. And he is willing to lose the argument, in real time, in front of his audience.

That last quality is the rarest. I want to spend most of this piece on what it does and why it matters.

Who he is

Alex O'Connor, born 1999, English, read Philosophy and Theology at St John's College, Oxford. The CosmicSkeptic YouTube channel began in 2016 when he was around sixteen and was originally focused on the new-atheist questions that were dominant in that period of internet philosophy: the existence of God, the cosmological and teleological arguments, the moral arguments for theism, the various anti-theistic positions of figures like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens.

What set him apart from most of the other young content creators in that scene was that he engaged seriously with the strongest versions of the positions he opposed. He read William Lane Craig carefully and represented Craig's arguments accurately. He read the Catholic philosophical tradition (Aquinas, Edward Feser, Brian Davies) and engaged with it on its own terms. He treated the religious thinkers he was disagreeing with as people whose arguments deserved engagement rather than as targets for dunking. This was not common in the YouTube atheism culture of the late 2010s. Most of his peers in that space have since either burned out, drifted into right-wing reaction, or stayed in increasingly stale anti-religious content. O'Connor has continued to develop.

The development has involved expanding well beyond philosophy of religion. The Within Reason podcast, his current main project, has long-form interviews with serious figures across philosophy, ethics, and political thought: Peter Singer, Slavoj Žižek, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, William Lane Craig multiple times. He has also developed a substantive body of work on ethics, particularly vegan ethics and consequentialism, and has begun to engage with political philosophy in ways that suggest where the trajectory is heading.

He has not yet produced a major written work. The body of public philosophy he has built is video-and-audio rather than text. This is a real limitation if one is judging by traditional academic metrics. It is also, in 2026, the medium in which most young people actually encounter philosophical argument, and the question of whether someone working in that medium can do serious philosophy at all is a more interesting question than the academic version.

The method that makes the work different

O'Connor's interview style has a recognisable shape. He prepares carefully. He represents the interlocutor's position before pressing on it. He follows the argument where it goes rather than steering back to predetermined points. He concedes when an objection lands and asks for more time when he is unsure. He is comfortable saying "I do not have a good answer to that" in conversations that are watched by hundreds of thousands of people.

This is not a small thing. The dominant interview format in 21st-century public discourse is adversarial, with both participants playing for the audience and the substance functioning as the medium of conflict rather than the object of the conversation. O'Connor's interviews are recognisably different. The interviewee can tell that the interviewer is genuinely listening. The audience can tell that the interviewer is willing to be wrong. Both produce a quality of conversation that is difficult to sustain and rare to find.

The most striking examples are his repeated long-form conversations with Christian apologists, particularly William Lane Craig. O'Connor and Craig disagree about almost every substantive philosophical and religious question. The conversations are courteous, sustained, technically engaged, and have produced moments where each visibly updates in response to the other. This is what philosophical dialogue is supposed to look like and almost never does in the public domain.

The same method has produced productive conversations with figures across the political and philosophical spectrum. The recent conversation with Slavoj Žižek is one of the better introductions to Žižek's actual arguments that exists, partly because O'Connor was willing to slow Žižek down and ask for clarification on points that interviewers usually let fly past. The Peter Singer conversations are technically strong because both interlocutors are working in the same broadly consequentialist tradition and the disagreements are genuinely productive. The Jordan Peterson conversations have been less unanimous, partly because Peterson's interview style is less amenable to the dialogue O'Connor wants to have, but even those have produced substance that the standard Peterson interviews do not.

The model is, in summary, that you can do public philosophy seriously if you are willing to take your interlocutor seriously, to prepare, to follow the argument, and to concede when concession is warranted. That this needs to be said as a discovery in 2026 is itself a comment on the state of public discourse.

Where he is right

Three places where the work earns its reputation.

The method is correct. Public discourse functions better when participants treat each other as capable of being right, when they engage with the strongest version of opposing arguments, and when they are willing to update in real time. The fact that this practice has become unusual is a problem of the surrounding culture, not of the practice itself. O'Connor is one of a small number of public figures who continue to demonstrate that the practice is possible and valuable. That demonstration is itself worth something.

His vegan-ethics work is the most substantively developed area of his philosophical writing. The argument, broadly Singerite, is that the moral relevance of suffering does not depend on the species of the sufferer, that the industrial production of animals for food causes enormous suffering, that the pleasure humans derive from eating animal products is not sufficient to outweigh that suffering, and that therefore the standard practice of eating animal products is morally defective. He makes this argument carefully, engages seriously with counter-arguments, and is willing to acknowledge the points where the argument is uncertain or where reasonable people may disagree. The position is consistent with mainstream consequentialist ethics and is more rigorously defended in his work than in most popular vegan-ethics material.

His engagement with religion has been substantially more productive than most contemporary atheist commentary because he treats the religious tradition as a serious intellectual object rather than as a target. The new-atheist culture of the 2010s mostly engaged with religion at the level of fundamentalism and missed almost everything that the actual philosophical and theological traditions had been doing for two thousand years. O'Connor's engagement with Aquinas, Plantinga, Craig, Feser, and the broader serious religious-philosophical tradition is one of the more useful examples of how this conversation can be conducted by someone who is not himself religious.

Where he is vulnerable

Worth being honest about.

He has not yet produced a major written work. This matters because the medium of long-form video and audio is excellent for live thinking and bad for the kind of careful written exposition that allows arguments to be tested, cited, and built on. Until O'Connor publishes something book-length and substantive, the body of work is harder to engage with at the level of professional philosophy than it would otherwise be. He is young enough that this is a question of when rather than whether, but the question is real.

The fairness can occasionally read as ducking commitment. The willingness to consider opposing positions seriously is a virtue. There are moments where it shades into something less defensible, a reluctance to land on a clear position even when the evidence supports one. This is more visible in his political and ethical work than in his philosophy of religion. Whether the trajectory continues to develop in the direction of clearer commitment, or whether it stays in the more dialogic register, is one of the things to watch.

The audience overlap is a real constraint. The CosmicSkeptic origin of the channel, and the YouTube atheism context in which it grew up, gave O'Connor an audience that is in some respects ideal for his work and in others limiting. The ideal part is the willingness to engage with long-form philosophical content. The limiting part is the cultural overhang of the 2010s atheism scene, which has produced a public association between O'Connor and a particular kind of demographic and ideological niche that he has, by his own account, mostly grown out of. The transition from CosmicSkeptic to Within Reason has been partly an attempt to rebrand around the broader work he is now doing. Whether the rebrand fully takes is still being decided by the audience.

There is, finally, the question of trajectory. O'Connor is 26 at the time of writing. The work he produces between now and 40 will be substantially more important than the work he has produced so far. Where the trajectory ends up is unknown. The question is open in the direction of him becoming a major figure, and equally open in the direction of him plateauing as a youth-philosopher who never quite made the transition to senior thinker. Both are possible. Neither is guaranteed.

How it lands in Ireland

Ireland is in an unusual cultural moment for the kind of public philosophy O'Connor practices.

The collapse of institutional Catholic authority across the last forty years has left an ethical vacuum that has not been adequately filled. Most Irish public ethical discussion is now conducted in the language of legal-procedural-administrative rights, which is genuinely necessary but does not do everything that older ethical traditions used to do. The space for substantive non-religious ethical argument in Irish public life is currently larger than the supply of people doing it well. O'Connor's body of work is a useful resource for this audience, particularly his engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition, which is more sympathetic and more rigorous than most secular Irish engagement with the same material.

The vegan-ethics work has obvious bearing on Irish farming and livestock policy debate. Ireland is one of the most beef-and-dairy-heavy economies in Europe. The agricultural sector's economic and political importance is large, the climate and biodiversity costs of the sector are substantial, and the public conversation about whether the sector should be transformed is heavily mediated by lobbying that mostly avoids the underlying ethical and ecological questions. O'Connor's work is one of the more accessible articulations of the case that the underlying questions cannot be avoided.

The dialogic method itself is the part that translates most usefully. Irish public intellectual culture has a chronic tendency to avoid serious disagreement, partly out of small-country social etiquette, partly out of historical sectarian-and-civil-war wariness, partly out of the deference to established institutional figures that is still common in Irish media. The result is that most Irish public conversation about contentious questions is conducted through procedural framing, ironic distance, or polite circumlocution rather than through direct engagement. O'Connor's practice of substantive long-form dialogue with people he disagrees with is, whatever else it does, a useful template for what the alternative would look like.

There are Irish public figures doing recognisably similar work. Joe Humphreys at the Irish Times on philosophy. Some of the work coming out of UCD's school of philosophy. The serious-podcast end of Irish discourse, which is small but real. None of them have built the audience scale O'Connor has. The combination of long-form engagement and substantial reach is rare and is one of the things worth learning from.

A note on age

It is worth noting that O'Connor is 26 and has been in the public domain for ten years. He started doing this work at sixteen. By any reasonable standard, the rate of improvement and the willingness to update positions across that period is substantial. Anyone reviewing the early CosmicSkeptic videos and the recent Within Reason episodes will see two different practitioners. The willingness to publicly outgrow one's earlier positions is itself a discipline. Most public figures, having committed to a position once, find it strategically and emotionally difficult to abandon. O'Connor has done so repeatedly across his public career and has, in each case, been clearer afterwards than before.

This matters because the public reception of the work has not always kept pace with the work itself. The CosmicSkeptic association still sometimes shapes how O'Connor is received in conversations that are about quite different material. A reader encountering him for the first time in 2026 should know that the body of work to engage with is the recent material, not the early stuff. The early stuff was good for its time and for his age. The recent material is better.

Where to start

If you have an evening: pick one of the recent Within Reason episodes that interests you. The Peter Singer ones, the Slavoj Žižek conversation, the Daniel Dennett conversations from before Dennett's death, or the William Lane Craig dialogues are all good entry points depending on your existing philosophical interests.

If you have a week: work through Within Reason selectively, perhaps four or five episodes, picking interlocutors whose positions you find most uncomfortable. The point of O'Connor's work is partly to model how to engage seriously with positions one disagrees with, and the model lands harder when one is using it on actual disagreements rather than on positions one already accepts.

If you have a month: extend the above with the early CosmicSkeptic videos on the philosophy of religion, including the Craig dialogues from earlier in his career. The development across the body of work is itself instructive, particularly for readers who have followed the same intellectual ground in their own lives.

For the supporting reading: Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (1979, third edition 2011), which is the canonical statement of the consequentialist tradition O'Connor mostly works inside. William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (third edition 2008), for the strongest version of the philosophical-theistic position O'Connor most consistently engages with. Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (2006), for the broader naturalist-philosophical project that O'Connor's work substantively continues.

The thing O'Connor demonstrates, in a public discourse mostly given up on it, is that long-form rigorous dialogue between people who disagree is still possible and still useful. That is most of the work. The rest is taking the practice and applying it to the conversations that actually need to happen, which in Ireland is most of the conversations that have not been happening for decades.

Related in the Political Literacy series

  • Iain McGilchrist — the deeper philosophical work on attention and meaning that O'Connor's dialogues circle around
  • Mark Manson — practical-philosophy translator working a different audience with similar Stoic-existentialist source material
  • Sir Roger Penrose — the consciousness-and-philosophy questions O'Connor's dialogues engage with technically
  • What Is Christian Democracy? — the political tradition closest to the personalist ethical framework O'Connor mostly engages with

Plus the framing piece, What Do Ireland's Parties Actually Stand For?, and the full Political Literacy archive.