We normally take it for granted that other people will live on after we ourselves have died. Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a ‘collective afterlife’ in which humanity survives long after we are gone. Samuel Scheffler (http://as.nyu.edu/faculty/samuel-scheffler.html) maintains […]
Death and the Afterlife by Samuel Scheffler Read More »
Our subjective experience of time is that the future advances towards us into the present moment and then recedes into the past. It is a kind of ‘flow’, ‘the river of time’. Many people are troubled by questions about the relation between past, present and future. Is time travel possible? If so could you kill your own
Real Time II by David Mellor Read More »
This is the best short introduction to Humanism I’ve read. Part of the ‘Thinking in Action’ series from Routledge, it is systematic, clear and cool headed. People often ask me ‘What is Humanism?’ The best boiled down answer I’ve got is ‘An ethical life without superstition’ Richard Norman (Professor of Philosophy at Kent, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Norman) covers
On Humanism by Richard Norman Read More »
Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Protagoras (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protagoras) declares in the dialogue of the same name by Plato that ‘Man is the Measure of all Things’. If there is an objective reality ‘out there’ how can we know it except through our human point of view? David E. Cooper, (Professor of Philosophy at Durham, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Cooper) takes up this challenge.
The Measure of Things by David E. Cooper Read More »
MANY people have argued that humans are naturally cooperative. Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, the Dalai Lama, Russian zoologist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin, neurobiologist James Rilling and psychologist Dacher Keltner, among many others have all made the case that our animal nature is characterised as much by kindness and collaboration as it is by
The Age of Empathy Read More »
Physics and Cosmology are moving forward with unprecedented speed. It’s therefore difficult to recommend any one volume which can summarize our latest understanding of the Universe. This is as good as any, published in 2007. Gribbin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gribbin) attempts the complete sweep of the Universe from its beginning at the Big Bang to its possible ends,
The Universe: A Biography Read More »
Donald E. Brown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_E._Brown) offered this thesis in 1991. His own summary of human universals is that they “comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception.” We are all tiresomely familiar with the banal falsity that ‘everything is relative’. In the field of anthropology at least, Brown
Human Universals by David E. Brown Read More »
In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques declares: “All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players.” This is a celebrated use of metaphor, a figure of speech in which one thing is used to describe another. As one of the central structural elements in human thought it is the habit,
Metaphors We Live By- by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Read More »
George Steiner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Steiner) has enjoyed a spectacular academic career, teaching in many prestigious institutions and writing voluminously. He is a comparative literary critic and polymath. This is an anthology of his writings between 1978-1996. Topics covered are the Hebrew Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, tragedy, Simone Weil, Saint-Simone, Peguy, Husserl, dreams, Kafka, Kierkegaard, tautology, the two suppers
No Passion Spent by George Steiner Read More »
