Almost no first-hand accounts of the experience of possession exist. The actions and utterances of possessed women – the most famous cases all involve women, though men and children suffer possession...
Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch all matriculated at Oxford in the late 1930s. When most of the men went off to war, they found themselves, as women philosophy students,...
Boris Johnson’s Brexit administration is in many ways an exercise in nostalgia, a search for a lost England, and the Supreme Court under Lord Reed is similarly backward-looking. It has reverted to an...
Because the social world is constructed, Malcolm Bull’s sceptical stance can be transformative. You can ‘make less’ of society, in the sense of questioning its apparently inexorable laws; and if...
If a whistle-blowing report on the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic was needed, I wish I’d written it myself. It would have highlighted the isolation of a group of conscientious...
Gradual changes have already started to act as counterforces to the follies of unbridled speculation, fears of uncontrolled immigration and contagions of civil war. For Stella Ghervas, balance of power...
Cassirer saw the history of philosophy, like the history of science, as a series of intellectual excursions which at first threw up a lot of dust, but then settled down to form an intellectual acquis communautaire,...
Thinking is what Arendt probably claimed to have been spending whole days doing: ‘the two in one’, ‘the soundless dialogue ... between me and myself’. She would be thinking, and she would be smoking;...
The judiciary, Alexander Hamilton wrote in ‘Federalist No. 78’, was ‘beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power’. Today, in the United States, that...
It has for many years been a crime in this country to cause an animal unnecessary suffering. Perhaps we need to turn our attention to the desire of human beings to be similarly spared, if that is their...
Dominic Raab is the eighth lord chancellor and secretary of state for justice since the Conservative Party entered government in 2010. The average tenure has been nineteen months, with a...
The Children of God called themselves several different things: the Family of Love, the Family, the Family International. These name changes suggest something of a branding problem. Indeed, by the time...
Warrants could be readily obtained (or sometimes just not obtained) to raid the premises of printers, arrest and interrogate writers, or confiscate and destroy equipment. Informal harassment was rife,...
As William Blake finds eternity in a grain of sand, so Walter Benjamin’s Surrealist gaze finds momentous meanings in the trifling and discarded. In the same way, he believes that every moment of time,...
The demand of Black Lives Matter and others to ‘defund the police’ follows the logic that addressing the causes of crime – by funding housing, drug rehabilitation, education and mental health services...
Law drops the missing person once his case is closed by return or death, but myth and literature can follow him in his absence. For Lévi-Strauss myth is a way for a culture to work over social contradictions...
Thomas Becket was not the first archbishop of Canterbury to meet a violent end – Archbishop Alphege was killed by Vikings in 1012 – but he was unique in other ways. Unlike his...
The modern relationship of the three principal elements of the constitution – legislature, courts and executive – doesn’t resemble the cogs of a working machine, or the delegation of adjudicative...