Social scientist and writer Malcom Galdwell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Gladwell) put forward this thesis in 2008 about what leads to success. He examines the case of The Beatles, Bill Gates and J. Robert Oppenheimer. He draws on cultural and social factors to show that it’s not all a complete mystery. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he points to sheer hard work, practice […]

This volume allows Bryan Magee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Magee) the length to set out the arguments of the great German pessimist. He is largely sympathetic to Schopenhauer. Firstly he takes over 100 pages to explain how Schopenhauer’s starting point is very much the ‘transcendental idealism’ of Immanuel Kant. Briefly put this is a stance that Kant arrived at

Nicholas Carr’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_G._Carr) contention is that the internet is rewiring our brains to negative effect. He is not merely talking about ‘dumbing down’. What he posits is more significant: that human culture has been built steadily over our literate history by deep and meditative reading, and the internet threatens to undo this process. Millions of people are

Jonathan Dollimore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Dollimore) tackles a huge theme here. It is the tangled topics of death, desire and loss in Western culture. His aim is to investigate the central paradox that desire is the bedfellow, so to speak, of loss and death. As he puts it ‘what connects death with desire is mutability–the sense that all being

Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson) argues for the position that there must be a fundamental unity to all truth across the sciences and humanities. This is a noble vision. Wilson sees its origin in the Ionian Greek belief that the cosmos is an orderly whole running by laws discoverable in thought. His own inspiration is