Ibn Sina, known in the West as ‘Avicenna,’ and his contemporary Biruni set out to redefine law, medicine and philosophy in the 11th century The Genius of their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment; By S. Frederick Starr Reviewed by Maxwell Carter I never realized quite how idle and inadequate I was until reading… Read More Central Asia’s Big Thinkers
Bernard Williams argued that one’s ethics is shaped by culture and history. But that doesn’t mean that everyone is right Daniel Callcut Travel and history can both inspire a sense of moral relativism, as they did for the Greek historian and traveller Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. What should one make of the fact… Read More Wrestling with relativism
By Anthony Grafton Reading Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s encyclopedic study of magic is like stumbling into a vast cabinet of curiosities, where toad bones boil water, witches transmit misery through optical darts, and numbers, arranged correctly, can harness the planets’ powers. Anthony Grafton explores the Renaissance polymath’s occult insights into the structure of the universe, discovering a… Read More Marked by Stars: Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy
A Delhi Court has dismissed a plea moved by the Delhi Police against a magisterial court’s order which ordered the release of the electronic devices seized from editors of “The Wire” during searches conducted in October last year in relation to an FIR lodged against them by BJP leader Amit Malviya. The judge added that… Read More Delhi Court Upholds Release Of Electronics Devices Seized From Editors Of ‘The Wire’, Says Police Causing Undue Hardship To Them
In this presentation on ‘The Psychosocial Health of Palestinian Youth: Occupation and Resistance’, Professor Rita Giacaman addresses the impact on wellbeing on young Palestinians as a result of prolonged military occupation. In exploring this issue, Professor Giacaman also considers the positive steps Palestinian youth take to resist the oppressive conditions they face. Decades of studying… Read More Professor Rita Giacaman on The Psychosocial Health of Palestinian Youth: Occupation and Resistance (2018)
Rachel Cooke In the days since the attacks by Hamas in southern Israel, Nathan Thrall, an American journalist and former director of the Arab-Israeli project at the International Crisis Group, has found himself lodged anxiously between worry for his wife and daughters at home in Jerusalem, and awareness that, as the tour to promote his new… Read More ‘It’s lonely being a Jewish critic of Israel’ – Nathan Thrall on his book about a Palestinian father’s tragedy
At the time I was reimagining this scene, I spent much of my day on Twitter. It was early 2021, and everyone there was chronically angry. People communicated by jeering, trading insults, hectoring, flinging accusations… It was like being in an abusive relationship with everyone in the world. Sandra Newman A few years ago, I… Read More Orwellian nightmares: What I learned about today’s rage culture from rewriting 1984
First posted July 11, 2015 “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is… Read More Hannah Arendt: pariah and 21st-century cosmopolitan
First posted May 13, 2016 NB: Etel Adnan, writer, poet, artist and musician was born in 1925 and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother was a Greek from Smyrna, her father, a high ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus. This prose poem is the final chapter of her book In the Heart of the Heart of Another… Read More Etel Adnan: To Be In A Time Of War
NB: I post this as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi on his 154th birthday. DS First posted December 31, 2018 “There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth… Read More Against the Illusion of Separateness: Pablo Neruda’s Beautiful Nobel Acceptance Speech. By Maria Popova
After the truth-shower 