Richard Popkin’s revised and expanded History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Pierre Bayle is due from Oxford this year. His piece was written with the assistance of Stephanie Chasin.
The dramatic story of the rise and fall of the self-proclaimed messiah Sabbatai Sevi has usually been presented as a weird anomaly in Jewish history, with no redeeming merit as a lesson. However, as more and more becomes known about it, the case becomes of greater, and more general interest.
Sabbatai Sevi was born in 1626, the son of a Jewish assistant to the Dutch, English and French...
Shortly after the end of World War Two, a young American professor submitted an article to a leading philosophical journal, explaining a difficult point in one of Spinoza’s arguments. In short order he received his manuscript back with the news, written on it by hand, that ‘we are not now and never will be interested in Spinoza.’ Spinoza had been dropped from the Anglo-American canon.‘
By listening for the next tick as a tock, as the end of something that preceded it rather than the next in a meaningless and interminable succession, we invest time with shape and significance. And if...
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