December 2022

Hugh Hunter unpacks the sources of Berkeley’s idealism. You will be familiar, in these days of inelegant travel, with the exercise of trying to fit everything you might plausibly need into a very small suitcase. It sometimes happens that there is one thing which frustrates the process, an object with awkward contours that ensure it

Pleasure for the People! Katherine Power considers whether there should be more opiates for the masses (including opium?), but settles for nuts and seeds. Before anaesthesia, surgery used to be agony. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could have been anything but pleased when painless surgery was introduced in the mid-19th century. And yet, although

Rebecca Glass on the importance of fables of ‘the really real world’. John Dewey criticizes our desire for the transcendental and supernatural as inimical to growth and education. Yearning for an otherworldly reality is “vicious in the separation of desire and thought,” an “asylum from effort,” and thus also from development (Human Nature and Conduct).

Imadaldin Al-Jubouri considers how some Muslim fundamentalists justify their aggressiveness – by misreading the Qur’an, among other things. Since September 11 2001, the West has faced a series of attacks, from New York and Washington to Madrid and London. Why did this confrontation reach the big cities of the West? Who authorised al-Qaeda to act

Tim Madigan on the curmudgeon who preached compassion. “Poor Schopenhauer had this secret guilt, too, in his heart, the guilt of cherishing his philosophy more than his fellow men.” So wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in his incisive essay from Thoughts Out Of Season, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ (1874). Nietzsche goes on to say: “He often chose falsely