‘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. […]
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Now revised, The Story of English (1986) by Robert McCrum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McCrum) was the first book to tell the whole story of the English language for a popular audience. It presents a stimulating and comprehensive record of spoken and written English, from its Anglo-Saxon origins some two thousand years ago to the present day, when English is
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The idea of emergent properties (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence) is a fascinating defence against reductionism. The notion is that genuinely novel features and patterns can arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions at a ‘lower’ level. E.g. psychology can be understood as an emergent property of neurobiological dynamics. Crucially, psychological behaviour cannot be fully understood, accounted for,
Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has become a classic of moral and political philosophy. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original work. Rawls (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls) aims to express an essential part of the common core
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The Appalachian Trail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_trail) trail stretches from Georgia to Maine and covers some of the most breathtaking terrain in America: majestic mountains, silent forests, sparking lakes. If you’re going to take a hike other than in Yosemite National Park, it’s probably the place to go. Bill Bryson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Bryson and http://www.billbryson.co.uk/) proves to be the most entertaining guide
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Primo Levi’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_levi) account of his time in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man , (first published in 1947 in Italian as ‘Se questo è un uomo’ ), made him one of the first writers to document the Holocaust and it established his name around the world. But Levi was not just a writer. He
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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
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The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is an influential and pivotal work of English social history, written by New Left historian E. P. Thompson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._P._Thompson). It concentrates on English artisan and working class society in its formative years 1780 to 1832. Its tone is captured by the oft-quoted line from the preface: ‘I
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The Liberal Imagination (1950) by Lionel Trilling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Trilling and http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4079615/index.html) is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published at one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays
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