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Is travel the secret to a long life?
I was that old gringo. I was driving south in my own car in Mexican sunshine along the straight sloping road through the thinly populated valleys of the Sierra Madre…
We all know that we will die, so why do we struggle to believe it?
In the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Leo Tolstoy presents a man who is shocked by suddenly realising that his death is inevitable. While we can easily appreciate that…
Facing History – Why we love Camus?
The French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus was a terrifically good-looking guy whom women fell for helplessly—the Don Draper of existentialism. This may seem a trivial thing to harp on,…
Secular pilgrimage
Visiting Wittgenstein’s home evokes the philosopher’s serious, ascetic mind (no doubt he would disapprove its restoration) Westerners who see ancestor worship as something only other cultures do should look around:…
Secret Sorrow – Knut Hamsun
Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) was a major Norwegian writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsun’s work spans more than seventy years and shows variation with regard…
No absolute time
Two centuries before Einstein, Hume recognised that universal time, independent of an observer’s viewpoint, doesn’t exist In 1915, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the philosopher and physicist Moritz Schlick,…
The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture
Greek and Roman statues were often painted, but assumptions about race and aesthetics have suppressed this truth. Now scholars are making a color correction. Mark Abbe was ambushed by color…
Can you step in the same river twice? Wittgenstein v Heraclitus
“I am not a religious man,’ the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said to a friend, ‘but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.’ These problems…
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