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“... Years ago, a colleague of limited intellectual powers accosted me with the charge that I had been telling students that the ‘mind was meat’. This was my colleague’s way of putting things. I then fell for the question which the charge led up to: ‘So you’re a materialist?’ ‘Yes,’ I answered. To which my normally witless interlocutor responded: ‘Pray tell, what is the nature of the material world?’ Witless was right ...”

“... According to the best estimates, Confucius lived from 551 to 479 BCE. The Analects is the name given to the short book of his wisdom, consisting of proverbs, maxims, memorable advice, short parables and keen observations about how best to live. The text is the result of an editing and compilation process involving two generations of Chinese disciples, and completed around 400 BCE, possibly in the same year that Socrates met his end in Athens ...”

“... we would do well to consider the benefits of continuing to live with the ‘problem’. For Owen Flanagan, belief in a soul means believing that a person is an immaterial mental essence attached to, but independent of, a body. Without such a conception, he thinks that religious belief must founder; but he also thinks that a version of the same ...”

“... opens with an avowal of ‘the new mysterianism’ – a term coined by the philosopher Owen Flanagan, who described it as ‘a postmodern position designed to drive a railroad spike through the heart of scientism’ by holding, as Bilgrami puts it, that ‘consciousness may never be completely explained’. Differentiating between ...”

“... it figures in literary history because it was taken over as a military hospital in 1916. Wilfred Owen was sent there, and so was Siegfried Sassoon. That their meeting, and the place itself, had a catalytic effect on Owen’s poetry has long been recognised. When, in her new novel, Pat Barker shows Sassoon and ...”

“... linguistic resurrectionists of the mid-20th century. As is eloquently symbolised by Thomas Flanagan in his brilliant and invaluable novel about the 1798 revolt, The Year of the French, it was the most hopeless victim of politics turned into warfare. What was left of it starved to death or emigrated in the great ...”