The bloom of Existentialism may have faded today – though its presence is still felt in literary work – but fifty years ago every fashionable person wanted to learn about it, the Establishment fretted about it, and almost every journalist…
Home computing and word processing are now so taken for granted that it’s hard to recreate how big a deal their first appearance was. One writer compared the cost of his device to his daughter’s school fees. Another had to…
The last book from the late German sociologist Ulrich Beck offers a grim prognosis for our future as a society, with traditional political institutions helpless before the power of capital and the reactions of right and left devoid of intellectual…
The musician John Beckett, cousin of the writer, comes across as a difficult character – some thought a crank. Stories abound of his rudeness, especially with drink taken. His musical tastes too were extreme: Handel was too commercial, Beethoven merely…
We may well, at bottom, be just ‘frail and vulnerable animals’, but we are more complex than other animals in our approaches to death. We must accept our physical mortality, but as humans we cannot rid ourselves of the desire…
A language, it has been said, is a dialect with an army, or at the least one with a regional assembly. A new study, which seeks to identify patterns of ecological constraints operating on the circulation of literary texts, suggests…
A raft of books from the US suggests that as a society we have made a Faustian pact with the tech giants and there is now no getting out of it. But have we really lost all freedom of action?…
In traditional accounts, Meister Eckhart has usually been presented as a mystical religious thinker. But a new study argues convincingly that this is a misinterpretation and that Eckhart is a ‘philosopher of Christianity’ who explains Christian beliefs through pure reason.
An initiative sponsored by President Higgins rightly locates ethics as not just a matter of personal behaviour or minimalist professional codes, but as forming the moral fabric of society through values and principles operating within its institutions and practices.
For John Berger, the truly great artists are those who struggle to break through to the other side. The struggle is against tradition and convention, which serve the interests of the powerful by restricting human possibility to the superficial, immediate…