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The Ages of Data…
It’s said that there’s a kind of hierarchy of knowing: data can be assembled into knowledge, which (with experience and empathy) can become understanding, then with grace, wisdom… but it all starts...
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Who’s Hume…
Simon Raper at Drunks & Lampposts extracted the information in the influenced by section for every philosopher on Wikipedia and used it to construct a network– a picture of whose thought formed...
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“Originality is nothing but judicious plagiarism”*…
click here for dynamic zoom Readers seemed to enjoy Simon Raper’s diagrammatic history of philosophy (see “Who’s Hume“), so may also appreciate Brendan Griffen‘s even more ambitious visual essay– a...
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“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of...
… or so it must seem to Patrick Andrews, who has, since 2006, been creating and posting (with a rhythm close to your correspondent’s heart, that’s to say, roughly daily) an “Invention of the Day.” His...
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“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution...
It is often observed that the French Revolution was a revolution of scientists. Nourished by airy abstractions and heartfelt cries to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, its leaders sought a society grounded, not...
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“We sometimes think, and even like to think, that the two greatest exertions...
Methodist Camp Meeting, early 19th century. Source: Library of Congress The contrast between the cold logic of science and the emotionality of religion is a seemingly unshakable binary today. But...
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“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my...
This is my summary of the history of (Western) philosophy showing the positive/negative connections between some of the key ideas/arguments of the philosophers. It’s a never-ending work-in-progress...
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“Economic theory is the art of pulling a rabbit out of a hat right after...
Many critics were disappointed the 2008 crisis did not lead to an intellectual revolution on the scale of the 1930s. But the image of stasis you’d get from looking at the top journals and textbooks...
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“Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”*…
Denis Diderot and the encyclopedists had a plan to catalog knowledge that seemed harmless enough; but what they intended was far more subversive– to restructure knowledge itself: Far more...
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“Progress is the attraction that moves humanity”*…
A 1770 engraving of a steam engine crushing a wall How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin? Many bookshelves are full of learned tomes by historians, economists,...
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“In wonder all philosophy began, in wonder it ends”*…
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) stands tall in the cultural pantheon for his poetry. It’s less well known that in his own lifetime, and in the decades following his death,...
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“As long as art lives never shall I accept that men are truly dead”*…
From a self-portrait by Giorgio Vasari [source] An appreciation of Giorgio Vasari’s seminal The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, the beginning of art history as we know...
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“In every grain of sand there is the story of the earth”*…
(Roughly) Daily has looked before (see here and here) at sand as a critical ingredient in the stuff of modern life. Today’s post features Steven Connor on the metaphorical power of sand… Sand belongs...
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“The merit of all things lies in their difficulty”*…
Francesco Libetta tackles the toughest… Critic Harold C. Schonberg called Leopold Godowsky’s Studies on Chopin’s Études “the most impossibly difficult things ever written for the piano”; Godowsky said...
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“Fortune sides with him who dares”*…
View of Genoa by Christoforo de Grassi (after a drawing of 1481) Understanding the origin of the modern concept of risk… Lately, we have all become risk assessment and risk management experts,...
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“A man will turn over half a library to make one book.”*…
Source: Takram Continuing yesterday’s focus on books… Marioka Shoten is a bookstore that sells only one book at a time (but sells multiple copies of it) for a week. The bookseller Yoshiyuki Morioka...
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“‘It’s magic,’ the chief cook concluded, in awe. ‘No, not magic,’ the ship’s...
Michael Wendl (and here) dissects some variants of the magic separation, a self-working card trick… Martin Gardner—one of history’s most prolific maths popularisers [see here]—frequently examined the...
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“H as in How in the World Are We Going to Escape?”*…
A treatise on the the letter “H,” on the occasion of its becoming an arbiter of class in the later 19th century… In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913), which inspired the musical My Fair Lady, a...
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“In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse”*…
The estimable Genevieve Bell looks back beyond Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash to the deeper-than-you-might-think history of “the metaverse”– and explains the importance of understanding it… …histories...
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“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our...
… and the interest rate on that loan is rising. There’s much discussion of what’s causing the sudden-feeling spike in prices that we’re experiencing: pandemic disruptions, nativist and protectionist...
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