This is a treat for anyone who is already convinced by the ideas of evolutionary biology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_biology) or wishes an introduction to them. Here is a question…Will people born in the 1990s in the developed world live as long as those born 60 years ago? The upward trend in life expectancy of the last century […]
Mismatch by Peter Gluckman Read More »
One of my favourite contemporary philosophers is Simon Blackburn (http://www2.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/). A lot of this is to do with his willingness to address his books to a popular audience. He is never less than lucid and informative. I feel a wry but honest smile behind much of his commentary. His is a cool, powerful, analytical mind.
Mirror, Mirror by Simon Blackburn Read More »
This book is a highly influential work in philosophy of science. More broadly, in intellectual history it has attracted attention far beyond its own field. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is written with a combination of depth and clarity that make it an almost unbroken series of aphorisms. Thomas Kuhn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn and http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/weinberg.html) does not permit
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn Read More »
Life is more unpredictable than we are prepared to accept. In this brilliant book Nassim Nicholas Taleb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_taleb and http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/) distils his idiosyncratic wisdom to demolish our illusions, contrasting the classical values of courage, elegance and erudition against modern philistinism and phoniness. Only by accepting what we don’t know, he shows, can we really see the world as
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Read More »
Noam Chomsky’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky) book Syntactic Structures (1957) was one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical or biological theory is understood by experts in those fields. It proved to be a seminal work in linguistics. It is
Syntactic Structures Noam Chomsky Read More »
‘The Proper Study of Mankind is Man’ appears as a line in the poem ‘An Essay on Man‘ by Alexander Pope in 1734. Isaiah Berlin chooses this as a title for a collection of his essentially humanistic writings. Berlin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin) was one of the leading thinkers of the last century and one of its finest writers.
The Proper Study of Mankind by Isaiah Berlin Read More »
Is there such a thing as human nature? Sartre denied it with his epithet that ‘existence precedes essence’. We are free to choose what we become, he argued. Indeed, in a memorable phrase ‘we are condemned to be free’. Of the opposite opinion are thinkers like Steven Pinker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker) (Cf. The Blank Slate: The Modern
On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson Read More »
This book (published 2013) about nothing sounds like a plain oxymoron. However, there are fascinating possibilities in the concepts of emptiness and non-existence. Scientists have suspected for centuries that ‘nothing’ may be the key to understanding absolutely everything, from why particles have mass to the expansion of the universe – so without nothing we’d be precisely nowhere. Absolute zero (the coldest
Nothing by Jeremy Webb Read More »
Barely two hundred and fifty years ago a man condemned of attempting to assassinate the King of France was drawn and quartered in a grisly spectacle that suggested an unmediated duel between the violence of the criminal and the violence of the state. This groundbreaking book by the most influential French philosopher since Sartre compels us
Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault Read More »
