EGGHEAD CHOICE – Crack open for a hard boiled think

Flim-Flam! explains that not one shard of evidence exists to prove that the Bermuda Triangle poses any special menace to ships and planes, that earth is being visited by alien spacecraft, that the unassisted power of mind can read closed books, predict our future or induce levitation. It shows that the ‘psychic surgeons’ of the Philippines have relieved their […]

Pablo Neruda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda) is greatly revered by aficionados of Spanish poetry. You may have enjoyed his work in the original language, or read a translation. But what is entailed in translating a poem? How much is lost, and what, if anything, is gained? Usually the process gets forgotten once a newly translated poem is published.

Anyone gripped by the thorny problems in philosophy of language will welcome this volume. The anthology of essays on the work of David Kaplan, a leading contemporary philosopher of language, sprang from a conference, ‘Themes from Kaplan’,  organized by the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. The book contains sixteen papers

I’d better declare – Isaiah Berlin (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/) is right up there for me as a penetrating intellect and champion of liberalism. The Proper Study of Mankind brings together his most celebrated writing. In this volume the reader will find Berlin’s famous essay on Tolstoy, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’; his insightful portraits of contemporaries from Pasternak and

Modern science proceeds on the basis that we live in a material world, and its methods of investigation have been spectacularly successful on this basis. It’s somewhat embarrassing, then, that the interior world of consciousness has so far eluded the categories of natural science. This is the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness, summarised here https://www.iep.utm.edu/hard-con/.

The whereabouts of snails under knee deep snow in Clydesdale in March 2018 is not known to me. One assumes there must be some survival strategy. Perhaps the little critters dream of a sun dappled terrace in Las Palmas Gran Canaria, having retreated within their shells and battened down the hatch for the winter. Confined

Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh argue that ancient Chinese wisdom has relevance for us today. They give us three chapters of Confucian thinkers and three chapters on the Taoist tradition. In each case, the authors explain how these ideas challenge our modern Western assumptions in ways that could have an impact on our everyday decisions.

There are a number of measurements of wealth among nations. One standard is ‘Gross Domestic Product’ (GDP) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product). Currently the UK lies 6th in a list of 191 nations (with the United States at the top and Tuvalu at the foot) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)). Scanning tables such as this convinces one what enormous disparities in material wealth

It’s been 20 years since the first publication of Virginia Postrel’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Postrel) influential book ‘The Future and it’s Enemies’ in 1998. Much of the author’s analysis of contemporary global culture has been borne out. Postrel argued that the old political labels of ‘left’  and ‘right’ no longer carry much meaning, and that it’s better to