What’s With All The Petitions?
The last clause of the First Amendment guarantees the right to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” This portion of the amendment tends to lag behind the preceding...
How Do We Know What Human Organs Do?
Apparently humans have a new internal organ. Well, the organ, named the mesentery, is not really new. It’s more that we have a new understanding that a group of small...
Historian Joyce Appleby Remembered
...people of other races here, but the optimism of his philosophy has inspired others expand the narrowness of his view. In an earlier article, Appleby claimed “history can help one...
How Early Feminist Writer Margaret Fuller’s Memoirs Were Rewritten
Margaret Fuller was one of the most-read Americans of the mid-nineteenth century. A suffragist with advanced views on marriage, male and female equality, and the social forces that kept women...
Is Audio Really the Future of the Book?
...pro-print agenda. Even as evidence mounts that consuming books in audio is highly beneficial to students, the shame remains. It is a feeling shared by philosophy professor William Irwin, who...
Suggested Readings: Gender at the Polls, Daylight Savings, Religion and Standing Rock
...Peter Adamson It’s well known that Arab Muslims helped preserve ancient Western philosophy during the Dark Ages. But a historian of philosophy points out that they did much more than...
The Surprising Historical Significance of Fortune-Telling
...a supposedly all-knowable world, one in which God pulls the strings. In The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius introduces a character called Lady Philosophy who explains that “chance” is “an empty...
Spiritualism, Science, and the Mysterious Madame Blavatsky
...co-founded the still-existing Theosophical Society in 1875, aiming for a “synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy.” Blavatsky was born to an aristocratic family in Russia in 1831. She arrived in...
Archiving the Inventor of the Archive
...in which neither one’s head nor one’s papers were safe. He was a prolific writer, yet he only published one book in his lifetime, Miscellanies, a collection of “hermetick philosophy,”...
How to Read the Bones Like a Scapulimancer
The earliest surviving Chinese texts are inscribed on the shoulder blades of cattle and turtle shells. These “oracle bones” date back more than 3,000 years, to the time of the...