Philosophy & Law

‘He draws his rents from rage and pain,’ Emerson once wrote of ‘the writer’, but more narrowly of himself.

In its first three centuries Reichenau Abbey was one of the leading educational centres in Europe. Its abbots produced fine manuscripts for their own use and on commission. They were involved in Carolingian...

Fanon’s world has a logic. His pages are full of identities, contradictions, Aufhebungen – master and slave, being and nothingness. Any biography, however, has to decide in the end which of the various...

At the trial in March of Michael Sparks, the first rioter to enter the Capitol illegally, the defence attorney argued that his client had merely been following orders: ‘He was there to do what his president...

Mediation is not a solution that seeks to resolve cases justly according to law; it tries to get parties to negotiate a compromise. As Hazel Genn put it, the outcome of mediation ‘is not about just settlement,...

Genesis, which narrates moral failure, theft, murder, rape, unremedied injustice and sorrow, is a strange place to find serenity. Its silences demand interpretation. ‘Few and evil have been the days...

Gaslighting is a helpful way of explaining what is happening when Donald Trump gives fake-news briefings and refuses to be held accountable for his actions while claiming – or allowing others to claim...

Many books include passages which, despite their authors’ best efforts, simply do not make sense. Wittgenstein may be involved in a mirror image of this: that is, the Tractatus may include many passages...

There is something of the handyman about Daniel Dennett’s approach to philosophy proper – a confidence that we can make progress on philosophical questions by getting a grip on the details, and an...

Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Ben Watson writes, ‘because he believed in exaggeration as a means of telling the truth.’ He is frequently, and rightly, upbraided...

The Troubles Legacy Act has been unilaterally imposed by the UK. Almost everyone hates it. Northern Ireland’s largest political parties all oppose it, though not for entirely the same reasons.

Historians argue that the Venetian ghetto was both an open-air prison and a bright spot in the darkness of early modern European antisemitism. The government confined Jews to a ghetto, but did not expel...

In an environment in which binary thinking prevailed, atheism was a potent ‘other’ against which devout Christianity defined itself. At its most extreme, this line of interpretation has led to the...

Whenever I read claims about ‘forgotten women’, I want to ask: ‘By whom?’ Feminists? Society? The ‘culture’? And why ‘forgotten’? Forgetting presupposes something once known, but the general...

Democracies implode when the authoritarian tendencies of the leaders of mainstream political parties are not reined in by constitutional mechanisms that are supposed to impose checks. 

Mrs Berkshire went swiftly upstairs and put a bold eye to the keyhole. When she did, she saw that Pratt and Smith’s trousers were down. Later, in court, she confirmed that she had seen both men’s private...

It wasn’t a belief in the supernatural that marked someone out as insane, but the judgment of the authorities that this belief was held with harmful vehemence. One inmate who proclaimed himself to be...

The higher courts have always acquiesced to government ministers’ views of national security, but in Shamima Begum’s case the court appears to have given Sajid Javid carte blanche to conclude that...