From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2009 Nietzsche famously said that there are no such things as facts, only interpretations. Be that as it may, every writer knows that there are certainly such things as factual mistakes. Errors are common in ...
IT'S always gratifying to hear a new twist on an old joke. In the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup," Rufus T. Firefly, played by Groucho, is handed the Freedonia cabinet's treasury report: "Why, a child of four could understand this report. Run out and find ...
The family of Karl Wittgenstein, who was one of Austria’s richest men when he died, in 1913, may deserve some gloomy sort of prize, the Palm of Atreus, perhaps. His youngest child, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, once asked a pupil if he had ever ...
Not content with writing a book about nothingness, Anthony Gottlieb has been teaching a seminar about it to students in New York ... From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2009 There is a priceless exchange in the 20th episode of “The Sopranos”—the ...
How far back can the history of art go? The Lascaux cave paintings in southwestern France are thought to be some 16,000 years old. The Venus of Willendorf, a plump and bosomy statuette from lower Austria, may be about 9,000 years older. A few coarse ...
How far back can the history of art go? The Lascaux cave paintings in southwestern France are thought to be some 16,000 years old. The Venus of Willendorf, a plump and bosomy statuette from lower Austria, may be about 9,000 years older. A few coarse ...
It has become an overused word, but Giordano Bruno may justly be described as a maverick. Burned at the stake in Rome on Ash Wednesday in 1600, he seems to have been an unclassifiable mixture of foul-mouthed Neapolitan mountebank, loquacious poet, ...
According to Pliny’s “Natural History,” a raven who hailed the emperor Tiberius every morning became such a local hero that he was granted a funeral procession through the streets of Rome. In September 2007, an African gray parrot named Alex went out ...
THE Sci Fi Channel’s “Battlestar Galactica” is a fantasy about a race of hokily spiritual robots in search of their destiny and the harassed humans who are trying to escape them. Torture, religious extremism, the precariousness of democracy in times of ...
Where is a hedonist to look for his heroes? Not to the religious traditions of the East, to be sure: they lack enthusiasm for the illusory pleasures of this world. The Buddha may have rejected the stony path of asceticism, but he was keener on ...
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