Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy at Columbia, is the author of Science, Truth and Democracy, among other books.
It’s difficult to argue that something is valuable in itself. But I’m not alone in finding the questions of pure philosophy both maddening and mesmerising.
The double centenary in 2012 of the publication of Kafka’s The Judgment and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was marked only, to my knowledge, by a single conference, in California....
‘These English psychologists,’ Nietzsche wrote in 1887, ‘just what do they want?’ You always find them at the same task, whether they want to or not, pushing the partie...
Wagner’s operas in general, and the Ring cycle in particular, have been goading the criticising classes into print for a century and a half, with still no end in sight, but the sacrifice of...
Scientists would sometimes like us to believe that science is just too difficult for the comprehension of ordinary mortals. Given the increasing diversity of specialities, moreover, there is no...
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