What would Montaigne have made of being deconstructed? Would that gentle ironist, that pricker of presumption and pedantry, have been amused, or saddened, to find himself the totem and target of...
The ancient Greeks, for all the changes that the industrial age has brought, would have been quick to understand what we now mean by pollution. The oil slick on the white sand beach, the exhaust...
In July 1519 the rackety Franconian knight, poet laureate and satirist Ulrich von Hutten received a long letter from Erasmus of Rotterdam, still at that time his friend. What sort of man, he had...
‘I couldn’t get in touch with my feelings,’ Marlene Olive remarked one day after it was all over. ‘Lots of times I thought my dad was still alive.’ This must be...
Cognition has become fashionable. Half a dozen academic disciplines are currently scrambling to establish ownership. The philosophers, who got there first, are being jostled by empiricists, but...
Jon Elster needs, as they say, no introduction to regular readers of the London Review, who will be familiar not only with his name but also with the cast of his mind and the breadth of his...
In the present embattled climate, with Thatcherite artillery trained on the crumbling ramparts of higher education, academics need to keep their powder dry and prepare for a prolonged siege....
One of the greatest ideological achievements of Nazism was the successful promotion of the image of the Jew who was simultaneously a heartless capitalist and a revolutionary communist. Certainly...
Entering Mexico at the start of The Lawless Roads, Graham Greene saw among the peasant women of Monterrey the signs of a real religious life about him – ‘the continuous traffic of...
Three autobiographical books by three Soviet dissidents who are as unlike one another in character, background and way of life as it is possible to be. The first of the authors is a solemn,...
The idea of development, either in the work of individual artists or in terms of ‘schools’, ‘movements’ or styles, is a dominant feature of our conception of European art....
If feminism is an ideology, it is so only in the blandest sense of that term. Most feminists argue their case as one component of a larger picture of human lives and social possibilities. John...
Ladakh, a mountain region under Kashmiri control which lies between India, Tibet and Pakistan, becomes the object of Andrew Harvey’s quest after he is told by a young Frenchman in Delhi...
Anyone confused by the goings-on in the Church of England in the last few years might turn with relief to the biography of a prelate born in 1863, who retired from his diocese of Durham in 1938...
Karl Popper is perhaps the only living philosopher of science who has had a substantial influence on the way scientists do what they do. I say ‘perhaps’ because the same claim might...
The human mind is a measure of nature and, like all such devices, ought to maintain constancy. But it is also part of nature and so it may be affected by the kind of inconstancy that it often...
‘It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness: poverty and wealth have both failed,’ says Kin Hubbard’s creation Abe Martin. Since the pursuit of ‘the greatest...
Richard Rorty has made us familiar with the distinction between two sorts of philosophy, which he calls ‘systematic’ and (I think infelicitously) ‘edifying’. The first...