What’s so impressive about Anaximander is that he was willing to ‘redesign the universe’ – to hypothesise an extra hemisphere of reality – on the basis of evidence that would have been easy to...
Other people aren’t hell, Lauren Berlant writes, just bothersome, ‘which is to say that they have to be dealt with’. Why is it so hard to live with other people? And why do we seek to ease the friction...
The populists had emerged out of the nihilist milieu as its most committed revolutionaries, embracing an austere code of ethics. Like Kropotkin, they were motivated by modern science rather than Hegelian...
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.
It would be naive to ignore the vulnerability of an organic constitution such as the UK’s to capture or erosion from within, when government contempt for both constitutional propriety and legality is...
Why is there no ‘natural rate’ of profit, poverty or inequality beyond which we shouldn’t go? To say that economics is political isn’t to say it is conniving or ill-willed, but merely that, like...
Philosophers of science had long accepted their role in justifying science, making the case that scientific knowledge is – take your pick – true, objective, rational, reliable, progressive, powerful....
For Bois, not only is form responsive to history, and historical situations inscribed in artistic transformations, but any such transformation is accountable to its present, and it is only thus that it...
Kate Forbes’s evangelical supporters appeal to plurality of thought, to liberty of conscience, even to protected characteristics, though they are not always known for extending these considerations within...
If you have enough money, even being sanctioned by the British government is no impediment to using London’s courts to silence your critics. The Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 explicitly...
What might it mean for the way we think about abortion if we take seriously the problem of what fictional narrative – novels and stories and films – says about it, or doesn’t say, what it makes...
Medieval Christians understood themselves to be interconnected to an extent that would surprise many people today, at least in Western cultures. Their minds and hearts were legible to other people as well...
When Deng Xiaoping visited in 1979, images of everyday life in the US were broadcast on state television. Everyone had a car, a refrigerator, a TV. A society capable of producing so much for so many must...
Vivekananda might have styled himself as an avatar of timeless Eastern wisdom, but he was a creature of steam trains and ocean liners. In the years between his appearance at the World’s Parliament of...
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Mali was the poster child of democratisation in Africa. It is now seen as the West’s biggest disappointment on the continent. It has experienced three coups in a decade...
The government recognises the possibility of persecution by a foreign state, organised criminal groups or people traffickers. But for the many people let down and mistreated by institutions of the British...
Jacopo’s San Pier Maggiore altarpiece was too large and cumbersome to fit onto a single wall in its original, three-tier configuration. For almost thirty years, the panels were arranged across two walls,...
Official Chinese publications emphasise the multiethnic and multicultural character of Xinjiang, but no one who spends time there can be in any doubt that Islam dominates Uyghur society. At the root of...