If, as most of us assume, we pass part of each night in dreamless sleep, what is it, apart from the human being, that loses consciousness late at night and regains it in the morning? How can there be a...
Mary’s bishops wanted recantations more than they wanted executions. There was always the possibility of a last-minute change of heart; this would not free the condemned person from the stake, but it...
In May 2001, the French National Assembly passed a law, the Loi Taubira (named after Christiane Taubira, the Socialist deputy who sponsored the bill), recognising the Atlantic slave trade as a...
‘Codex’ is a fancy word for ‘book’, but useful because it distinguishes the physical form from the text it contains. Thus a codex, a set of bound pages, is distinct from a...
Shortly before Holy Week in 1391, a crowd of armed Christians gathered outside the Jewish quarter of Seville. They were dispersed by hired guards and government officials, but encouraged by a...
A lot of modern political philosophy – at least in the English-speaking world, and in its dominant version, liberalism – sets about applying morality to politics. In what future...
When I first met Ronald Hutton, at a conference in Montana ten years ago, he remarked that if you looked at a modern book on druids, what you were likely to find was a number of chapters about...
The events and beliefs of the Middle Ages that have appeared unusual to later centuries have always attracted attention of two rather different sorts. One tendency has been to explain them away....
Last month, the Knesset voted 47 to 34 to pass the preliminary reading of a bill that threatens imprisonment for anyone who questions Israel’s claim to be a Jewish and democratic state. The...
A tyrant, imagine, spares an innocent man from torture, but solely in order to reap good publicity. He does what morality demands, but not for the reasons that demand it. T.M. Scanlon’s new...
The first part of Jeremy Harding’s piece on Sharia finance can be read here.The rules that govern Islamic banking and finance are non-negotiable, cast in tradition, as good as stone. A...
Last September, as dust and debris from the tellers’ floors began raining onto the empty vaults below, a note of satisfaction was sounded by bankers in the Arab world. Financial institutions...
In my Catholic girlhood she was everywhere, perched up on ledges and in niches like a CCTV camera, with her painted mouth and her painted eyes of policeman blue. She was, her litany stated,...
The practice of recent American presidents, in absolving criminal defendants and suspects from the penal consequences of their offending and remitting sentences, has been viewed by many British...
Ernst Cassirer began his eclectic, productive and distinguished career as a philosopher of science, but turned to the study of culture apparently after discovering the Warburg Library in Hamburg,...
When the Archbishop of Canterbury suggested in a lecture last February that there was room within national legal systems for some degree of religious law for members of particular faiths, the...
Brian McGuinness has edited and compiled many collections of writings by Wittgenstein and about him, and his 1988 biography, reissued a few years ago as Young Ludwig, as well as being a...
Like making jokes or copulating without regard to season, torturing is one of those activities that distinguish human beings from other animals. Inflicted both on our congeners and on other...