Radical Enlightenment

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, PAST PRESENT - What's new in History

The way we see the world is radically different from our medieval forebears. How was this transition made? How did we exchange organised superstition for a science of the world based on evidence, experimentation, prediction and control? Jonathan Israel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Israel) here offers a magisterial study of what became known as ‘The Enlightenment’ (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/). Israel lauds […]

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The Long Life

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

Demographers have long predicted that our society is going to have to cope with an ageing population. In recent years the reality has hit home with The National Health Service and Social Care services under immense pressure. Along with this, dementia has risen to epidemic proportions (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25213162) Helen Small (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Small) takes as her topic here

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Rare Earth

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

This book argues that the universe is fundamentally hostile to complex life and that while microbial life may be common across the galaxies, complex intelligent life requires an exceptionally unlikely set of circumstances, and must be extremely rare. The book argues that among the essential criteria for life are a terrestrial planet with plate tectonics

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Power

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

Much of what’s going on in human life is the exercise of power. Individuals struggle to assert power over one another, and groups of individuals (up to the scale of nations) collaborate to do likewise. Fig leaf labels are pasted over the nasty business as camouflage such as ‘communism’, ‘christianity’, ‘islam’, ‘national socialism’, ‘the british

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