Category Archives: History
From Constantine to Justinian: the triumph of Christian ‘terrorism’
One book that has caused much stir in the past months is Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. I confess I approached the book with some skepticism, for ‘the classical world’, I thought, […]
The Enlightenment wars (& 3): but...what kind of humanism do we need?
In the two previous entries (1, 2) of this series I described the different diagnoses that Marina Garcés and Steven Pinker make of humanity’s current predicament, without concealing my sympathies for the latter’s: with up […]
Ordinary experience vs. quantum experience
We usually think of nature as existing completely independently of us and possessing a definite reality and behaviour even when we are not observing it. For instance, you assume that the world outside of the place where you are now […]
The Enlightenment wars (2): the details
Are we in the best of the times, as Steven Pinker asserts? Or do we live in a ‘posthumous’ society, to say it with the favourite image of Marina Garcés? As I told in the previous entry, it is […]
The Enlightenment wars (1): progress or decline?
Keep in mind the word Enlightenment, because it’s very likely that it will be one of the most fashionable concepts within the next months. At a global level, Steven Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment now, will probably carry the […]
Æther and Modernity. The recalcitrance of an agonising epistemic object.
Author: Jaume Navarro is an Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country
In 1951, the physicist Paul A.M. Dirac called for the re-introduction of the æther in an oft-quoted letter to Nature. His was an […]
Syphilis at Tuskegee
Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by a spirochete, a bacterium, Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum. The main route of infection is by sexual contact but is also transmitted from the mother to the newborn in what is […]
The best of both worlds: Henry D. Thoreau on science communication
Author: Antonio Casado da Rocha is Research Fellow, IAS-Research Center for Life, Mind and Society; Faculty of Education, Philosophy and Anthropology, UPV/EHU.
November 25, 1858, was a very cold day in Concord, Massachusetts. It was then that Henry David […]
Columbus and the shape of the Earth, a “Holywood” story
It is said that Washington Irving’s biography of Christopher Columbus, published in 1828, was the work that started the legend that the discoverer of America was the person that convinced the ‘nearly medieval’ Europeans of his time of the sphericity […]
Murcian trailblazers
A 1 million-year-old fire lit by human ancestors was discovered in 2012 in the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa. The soil of the cave yielded several dozen stone tools, microscopic plant ashes and burned bone bits. It is supposed that […]