Camus’s embrace of sober political reality, of moral humility, of limits and fallible humanity, remains a message well-heeded today. Albert Camus by Cecil Beaton for Vogue in 1946 | photo| Getty They were an odd pair. Albert Camus was French Algerian, a [...]
Panpsychism offers no distinctive predictions or explanations. Consciousness is indeed a hard nut to crack, but I think we should exhaust the other options before we take a metaphysical sledgehammer to it. Is consciousness everywhere? Is it a basic feature [...]
Most Japanese reject religious belief while embracing multiple forms of ritual practice. Are they religious or secular? Since the dawn of anthropology, sociology and psychology, religion has been an object of fascination. Founding figures such as Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim [...]
At a time of religious zealotry, Spinoza’s fearless defence of intellectual freedom is more timely than ever In July 1656, the 23-year-old Bento de Spinoza was excommunicated from the Portuguese-Jewish congregation of Amsterdam. It was the harshest punishment ofherem (ban) [...]
Ancient Greeks of the fifth century BCE had no word for ‘please’, that is, no polite expression that they regularly attached to requests. ‘What’s the magic word?’ Any English-speaking toddler knows the answer to this question: ‘please’. And any student [...]
The way time travel was used to reboot the Star Trek series is quite sophisticated...markedly different from many other movies. Lloyd Strickland, Manchester Metropolitan University Star Trek Beyond may not have received a stellar critical response, but it can be said that [...]
In case you’ve forgotten the section on the food web from high school biology, here’s a quick refresher. Andrew Smith, Drexel University Plants make up the base of every food chain of the food web (also called the food cycle). [...]