It’s easy enough to prove that the external world exists. Doors, rocks, other people, we keep running into them. But that’s not much of a proof. It doesn’t show that any...
Hallucinations provide privileged, if cryptic, glimpses into the deep structure of the brain.
Global inequality has become one of the forms of the statistical sublime. There is a strange pleasure to be had from discovering that the top 0.5 per cent of the world population owns 35.6 per...
On 11 January, François Hollande announced that France would send forces to its former colony to fight ‘terrorist elements coming from the north’.
Philosopher, lawyer, essayist, historian, theorist of experimental inquiry and prophet of organised scientific research, Francis Bacon combined soaring intellectual ambition with a relentless...
It would take at least two workaday philosophers to keep up with Hilary Putnam. Philosophy in an Age of Science is a case in point. It’s a collection of papers, most of them previously...
The universe has woken up. If the scientific picture we currently have is right, this was an accident, roughly speaking, and also something that happened very locally. At various places some...
No one can write about religion now without having in mind the new mockery that accompanies the new atheism. The new atheism’s ‘smug emissaries’ – as the blurb of Francis...
The states composing the Council of Europe, now 47 of them, have their own supreme court, the European Court of Human Rights, which – not unlike its US counterpart – has come under...
We were appointed to the Commission on a Bill of Rights in March 2011 by Nick Clegg. The circumstances were not auspicious, and we were concerned from the outset that our composition – all...
Four historians in a Cambridge bar, c.1998: one literary, a second legal, the third political, and the fourth a social historian. All specialise in the 16th and 17th centuries. The social...
‘Profonde Albertine’, the narrator writes close to the end of Proust’s novel. By ‘deep’ – profonde – he means ‘unreachable’. She was mostly...
‘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...
‘The tale of the apostle Thomas is a sea unspeakably vast.’ Thus the Syriac poet Jacob of Sarugh, who lived in upper Mesopotamia in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. The words...
As a child, I searched out lives of great women. Some of my heroines appeared on the back page of the comic I read then, called Girl: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale and...
The world hasn’t seen anything like it since Princess Diana’s butler went on trial for pocketing a few personal mementos of his late lamented mistress. Earlier this month, the...
The Alawites are one of several minorities in Syria, but they have always been seen as a special case.
In 1975 Benedict Anderson first visited the extensive monastery of Wat Phai Rong Wua, one of dozens in central Thailand; he returned in the 1990s and again a few years ago. Any wat is an imagined...