One of the most intriguing and in some ways bewildering aspects of the Hebrew language is that it has managed to stay in continuous literary use for over three thousand years; roughly the same...
The applause which greeted the conclusion of Annette Baier’s presidential address to a 1990 meeting of the American Philosophical Association masked a faint susurrus, caused by a thousand...
In all the stultifying discussion of Prince Charles’s fitness to grasp the orb and sceptre of kingship, there is one qualification that is almost never canvassed. I refer to his ability to...
All rationality as a thinker, all unreasonableness as a man: this ancient non sequitur was never more vividly realised than in C.S. Peirce, first and foremost of the American Pragmatists. Peirce...
Robert Nozick has a unique place in the annals of rational choice theory: he refuted it. Or so say I in my role as the last of the true Popperians. That was back in 1969. But now the mature...
In his distinguished career as an intellectual historian, Isaiah Berlin has established himself as our foremost collector of stray philosophical puppies. Vico, Herder, Maistre, and now Hamann:...
Televised images of horror in the former Yugoslavia have been confronting us for nearly two years now, and the term ‘atrocity’ has been widely used. Are the ‘atrocities’...
In the Seventies, I had a colleague who joined the cult of the Bhagwan Rajneesh. Returning to New Jersey in orange garments after a summer in India, David announced that he wanted to change his...
In a neglected passage in The Problems of Philosophy Bertrand Russell unapologetically writes: A priori knowledge is not all of the logical kind we have been hitherto considering. Perhaps the...
Philosophy is alive and well – at least in Australia. Don’t listen to the windy voices who tell the public that metaphysics is dead, its foundational role exposed as an illusion, and...
When prisoners write to me, as they do all the time, protesting their innocence, I always start with the question: ‘Why were you arrested?’ The answer usually gives some sort of clue...
In AD 362 – only fifty years after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity – the pagan Emperor Julian, hoping to undermine the privileged position of this new religion, banned...
Recent events have cast into sharp relief the crisis in our criminal justice system. First there was the abandonment of the trial of three West Midland police officers on charges of perjury and...
The current fascination with Vico in the English-speaking world owes almost everything to the attention he has received from Isaiah Berlin. Before Berlin, Vico was the obscure Neapolitan...
On 29 June 1989, a security manager for the US telephone company Indiana Bell received an anonymous telephone call. In a menacing tone a young man’s voice informed him that he had planted...
A Swiss Reformation woodcut shows a mill being brought back into use under the eye of God the Father. Christ is emptying St John’s eagle out of a sack into a hopper to join St...
The casual visitor to Japan does not have to wander very far from the beaten tourist track to discover two distinctive but contrasting phenomena of the country’s material culture. The first...
The Modern era, as analytic philosophers reckon, started with Descartes. By contrast, the Recent era started when philosophy, in Richard Rorty’s phrase, took the ‘linguistic...