http://www.factsandideas.com Facts, Ideas and Logic en Americans watched investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street. This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired ... http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1017 2009-01-04 07:01:57 It isn’t a love story; it’s a tale about koi — a term used in Japan for a sexual relationship free of the melodramatic trappings of love, founded on camaraderie rather than romance. As the narrator explains lve is serious and intense, but koi is funny .. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1016 2009-01-04 07:01:41 Tyndale was not a charming sophisticate. He seems to have lacked social grace,and was rather bad at reading the minds of people around him. The modern term for that is autistic; he would probably have found some neater way to describe a personality that i http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1015 2008-12-20 11:12:18 In an orginal piece written for New York Review of Books, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk appears to believe that 1955 Istanbul pogrom is instigated not just by Turkish secret service but also by Britain. That's very weird. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1014 2008-12-17 03:12:44 Wallace wrote big, brainy novels that were encyclopedically packed with information and animated by arcane ideas. In nonfiction essays, he tackled a daunting range of highbrow topics, including ethics and epistemology of lobster pain. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1013 2008-12-16 03:12:50 For your own physical, psychological, and financial well-being it is crucial that you know how to identify the psychopath. Among the professions likely to attract psychopaths are law enforcement, the military, politics, and medicine. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1012 2008-12-09 07:12:33 Zizek is all bark and no bite. Robert Boynton, writing in Lingua Franca in 1998, found Zizek "bearded, disheveled, and loud ... like central casting's pick for the role of Eastern European Intellectual."Boynton was amused to see the manic, ranting ... http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1011 2008-12-07 14:12:44 There are two classic theories about the origin of jokes. One is that they come from stockbrokers, who have time on their hands between sales and a communications network to send jokes around.The other theory is that they are made up by prisoners. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1010 2008-12-07 13:12:00 Since her book “The Shock Doctrine” was published last year, Klein, now thirty-eight, has become the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago. She speaks every few days, all over. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1009 2008-12-07 05:12:27 The centrality of teasing in our social evolution is suggested by just how pervasive teasing is in the animal world. Younger monkeys pull the tails of older monkeys. African hunting dogs jump all over one another, much like pad-slapping, joking football. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1008 2008-12-07 03:12:11 One implication of a paper about to be published in Intelligence is that brainy people are intrinsically healthier than those less intellectually endowed. This result results has emerged from an unrelated study of the quality of men’s sperm. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1007 2008-12-07 03:12:24 The Republicans lost the battle of ideas marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantánamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1006 2008-12-07 03:12:25 Conservatives tend to be happier than liberals in general. A conservative outlook rationalizes social inequality, accepting the world as it is, and making it less of a threat to one’s well-being, whereas a liberal outlook leads to dissatisfaction. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1005 2008-11-04 07:11:41 In "Descartes's Bones", Shorto makes deft use of the centuries-­long to-and-fro over Descartes’s remains, a tale that involves three different burials, events in six countries and lingering questions, partly resolved by the author himself. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1004 2008-11-02 16:11:49 ThE evidence suggests that homosexual behaviour is partly genetic. This raises a worrying evolutionary question: how could a trait so at odds with reproductive success survive the ruthless imperatives of natural selection? http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1003 2008-10-26 06:10:03 Much of Mr Obama’s rhetoric is strikingly conservative, even Reaganesque. He preaches the virtues of personal responsibility and family values, and practises them too. He talks in uplifting terms about the promise of American life. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1002 2008-10-26 01:10:08 Traders at the Mercantile Exchange buy and sell oil for future delivery, and the price serves as the reference price for oil shipments around the world. When a refinery contracts to buy crude oil,it generally agrees to pay the price on the Merc http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1001 2008-10-26 13:10:31 Prodigies like Picasso rarely engage in an of open-ended exploration. They tend to be “conceptual” in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go. But late bloomers follow an experimental approach. Their goals are imprecise. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1000 2008-10-22 04:10:55 Having a significant Starbucks presence is a pretty significant indicator of the degree of connectedness to the form of highly caffeinated, free-spending capitalism that got us into this mess. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=999 2008-10-22 02:10:45 Celebrities may serve an important social function. In industrial society, celebrities may be the only “friends” we have in common with our new neighbors and co-workers. They provide a common topic conversation between people who otherwise might nothing http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=998 2008-10-19 07:10:14 People are physically healthier in times of recession. Death rates fall, people smoke less, drink less and exercise more. Traffic fatalities go way down.Heart attacks go down. Back problems go down. People have more time to prepare healthier meals at home http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=997 2008-10-20 03:10:04 Tipping began as an aristocratic practice, a sprinkle of change for social inferiors, and it quickly spread among the upper classes of Europe. Yet even at its outset, tipping engendered feelings of anxiety and resentment. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=996 2008-10-11 08:10:30 Sex and money are now topics for documentaries, even after-dinner conversation. The last taboo, surely, is shit. The byproducts of digestion are so hard to mention that symptoms of bowel cancer are often ignored until it is too late. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=995 2008-10-11 08:10:31 Houellebecq, the novelist and ageing enfant terrible, and BHL, the leftwing philosopher, epitomise France's love-hate relationship with its bestselling literary exports. In a surprise joint venture, they have produced a book of confessions of letters. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=994 2008-10-08 06:10:57 By the last years of the 20th century, Richard Rorty was probably the best-known university-based philosopher in the United States. In recent years he has been surpassed in notoriety by the utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=993 2008-10-06 05:10:38 "Naked Airpor is an impressively illustrated, comprehensive "cultural history" of airports as buildings, from the earliest days of makeshift sheds and hangars to the vast, glassy terminals designed by architectural multinationals such as Foster + Partners http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=992 2008-10-05 14:10:51 The British betting shop, ladbrokes.com, has as the frontrunner, at 3 to 1 odds, the Italian essayist and novelist Claudio Magris, followed, at 4-1, by the Syrian poet Adonis. All of whom caused Americans to scratch their heads and say “Huh?” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=991 2008-10-05 12:10:23 The actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi’s career forms the narrative thread of Ian Buruma’s evocative novel which spans roughly 50 years of Japan’s tumultuous modern history.Buruma uses Yamaguchi’s bizarre story as a metaphor for Japan’s own shifting identity. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=990 2008-10-04 06:10:16 David Brooks tried to refine the concept, coining the term BoBo to describe an allegedly more enlightened consumer who combined the self-interest of the 80's with the liberal idealism of an earlier era, using the Y-word to denote a less enlightened group. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=989 2008-10-02 04:10:38 Murdoch’s sudden appearance reinforced the local sense that New York was falling to pieces,and being sold off for parts.Murdoch’s Post—manic,loud,prurient,shameless, unrespectable,finding entertainment in the hideous—was an appalling funhouse mirror. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=988 2008-10-01 14:10:04 Facundo Bacardi, who founded the eponymous rum company in 1862, came to Cuba from Spain as a teen-ager. By the turn of the century the distilling operation that Facundo had begun in a shed was among the brands most closely identified with Cuba. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=987 2008-10-01 05:10:10 Certainly no one has ever been so right about so many things so much of the time as John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century English philosopher, politician, and know-it-all nonpareil who is the subject of a fine new biography. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=986 2008-09-30 09:09:14 Galileo did not get into trouble solely because he was expressing views contrary to scripture, but because he was doing so independently, rather than as a theologian acting within the Church. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=984 2008-09-29 03:09:04 For public consumption, CUP proclaimed a ‘civic’ nationalism, open to any citizen of the state, no matter what their creed or descent. In secret conclave, on the other hand, it prepared for a more confessional or ethnic nationalism, restricted to Muslims. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=983 2008-09-28 16:09:26 During WW2,Inönü had steered Turkey in much the way Franco had done Spain, tempering political affinity and assistance to the Nazi regime with a prudent attentisme allowing for better relations with the West once it looked as if Germany would be defeated. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=982 2008-09-28 16:09:56 Google's online encyclopedia Knol diminishes community involvement, giving authors complete control over their postings. Second, it rewards authors with advertising lucre, creating a huge incentive for people to post as much content as possible. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=981 2008-09-27 02:09:20 Sushi, for instance, is everything [White People] want: foreign culture, expensive, healthy, and hated by the ‘uneducated.’ Christianity and Sarah Palin are “a little trashy” The aversion for christianity is rooted not in religious enmity but in taste. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=980 2008-09-22 11:09:29 In a talk he gives in TED, philosopher and scientist Dan Dennett draws on a similarity in the works of Jared Diamond (the author of 'Guns, Germs and Steel') and Sayyid Qutb. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=979 2008-09-22 06:09:21 Bernard-Henri Lewis takes a stand against the mindless anti-Americanism that is so prevalent among the lumpen intellectuals of Europe. In his view, the phenomenon has two highly unpleasant subtexts to it. The first is ingratitude. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=978 2008-09-22 09:09:29 M.I.T. had a head start with its software, but in short order other universities began clamoring to broadcast their lectures free. Duke, Yale and Stanford now serve as “providers” on iTunes U, which appeared in Mat to make lectures available online. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=977 2008-09-21 05:09:19 Professors are more ambivalent, and they happily share theories that what students are really evaluating is less pedagogy than whether a professor is funny, handsome or an easy grader. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=976 2008-09-20 14:09:23 The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem. It is not a real country or nation but an acronym. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. The stan suffix merely means "land." The resulting acronym means "land of the pure." http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=975 2008-09-17 04:09:06 When mathematicians and physicists are left alone in a room, one of the games they’ll play is called a Fermi problem, in which they try to figure out the approximate answer to an arbitrary problem,” said Rebecca Saxe, a cognitive neuroscientist. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=974 2008-09-16 02:09:48 The Muslim intellectual class has a tendency to fall prey to nearly every bad idea that comes its way, from fascism to socialism to third-worldism. Partly as a result of this, the Muslim world soured on liberalism before it ever really tasted it. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=973 2008-09-14 05:09:29 At 43 Machiavelli desperately needed a job. Poor and unemployed he retreated from the city to live on the family farm. He was sadly out of his element, catching birds and playing cards; his worldly friends sent mocking regards to the chickens. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=972 2008-09-10 14:09:57 Social scientists have a name for incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does out of the corner of the eye. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=971 2008-09-08 10:09:33 As a general rule,the more unequal a place is,the more Democratic;the more equal,the more Republican.The gap between rich and poor in DC is nearly twice as great as in strongly Republican Charlotte.But this isn't a case of shanties against the mansions. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=970 2008-09-06 16:09:19 McCain projects the blokeish persona of a man who used to drink too much, crash planes and chase women. He has a stock of awful jokes, which he repeats so often that his staff have the punchlines printed on T-shirts. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=969 2008-09-02 12:09:18 While some people on their deathbeds dutifully rage against the dying of the light, Barnes prefers those who simply remain true to themselves, who depart this life with, say, a gesture of quiet courtliness. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=968 2008-09-02 11:09:11 Brits are the ones who are carousing, brawling and getting violently sick. They are the ones crowding into health clinics seeking morning-after pills and help for sexually transmitted diseases.They are the ones who seem to have one vacation plan:drinking. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=967 2008-08-27 01:08:23 Mamma Mia is more like a theatrical kebab, onto which she skewered as many Abba songs as humanly possible: a clever move, given that half the people in the Western world have the Abba sound stuck itchily in their ears, whether they like it or not. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=966 2008-08-12 04:08:27 Researchers argue about why certain cultures have become more individualistic than others.Some say that Western cultures draw their values from ancient Greece,with its emphasis on individual heroism,while other cultures draw on more on tribal philosophies http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=965 2008-08-12 04:08:45 Obama is strikingly self-obsessed even by the standards of politicians. He has already written two autobiographies. But there are worrying signs, for the Democrats, that Obama fatigue is beginning to set in. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=964 2008-08-11 05:08:56 One explanation is that the defecting spouses of high earners are getting out before the crunch reduces the potential for lucrative settlements. As the City boom turns to bust, redundancies are becoming commonplace and hefty bonuses a distant dream. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=963 2008-07-26 10:07:04 Many people who knew Obama then remember him for his cockiness. He had good reason to be self-assured. A number of his accomplishments had been accompanied by adoring press coverage. He was the president of the Harvard Law Review. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=962 2008-07-26 04:07:39 Obama speeches almost always have the same narrative arc. Some problem threatens. The odds are against the forces of righteousness. But then people of good faith unite and walls come tumbling down. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=961 2008-07-25 05:07:40 Two psychologists from Berkeley California argue that whether a woman smiles in her photo can predict "favorable outcomes in marriage and personal well-being up to 30 years later." http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=960 2008-07-23 03:07:23 The article cites McCain working close with Democrats. He calls his own party's leaders corrupt. He jokingly refers to his younger political self "freshman right-wing Nazi." Conservatives, as a rule, do not liken conservatism to national socialism. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=959 2008-07-26 04:07:40 The Shock Doctrine has a single, uncomplicated explanation for everything that ails us. It identifies the fundamental driving force of the last three decades to be the worldwide spread of free-market absolutism as it was formulated by Milton Friedman. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=958 2008-07-23 01:07:29 On the 4th of July, a dog named Dixie was sitting in the backyard of her owners. Around dusk, the sky above her exploded with the flashes and percussive booms of fireworks. Whatever happened, Dixie hasn’t been the same since. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=957 2008-07-22 12:07:38 The cliché is that AKP represents the "real Turks" fighting off the "secular elites"; the pious, popular masses versus an irreligious intelligentsia. But this is hardly the case. Both Turkeys in this power struggle are religious, both are wealthy. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=956 2008-07-20 03:07:40 See that girl! Watch that scene! If you change your mind,I’m the first in line. Mamma Mia,here I go again. You may have spent the last 30 years struggling to get lines like those out of your head and wondering what they were doing there in the first place http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=955 2008-07-19 00:07:22 In a recent paper in Evolution and Human Behavior Christopher Wilson, a neurobiologist at Cornell University, suggests that male-genital mutilations are actually intended to prevent younger men from fathering children with older men’s wives. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=954 2008-06-30 10:06:13 The idea of the West as a malign force is not some Eastern or Middle Eastern idea, but has deep roots in European soil. Defining it in historical terms is not a simple matter. Occidentalism was part of the counter-Enlightenment, to be sure. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=953 2008-06-29 09:06:30 Bolívar led military campaigns to free large parts of South America from Spanish rule, and in 1819 he helped create a vast nation called Gran Colombia, which encompassed the present-day republics of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=952 2008-06-22 11:06:25 To this end, he fakes his own death in a confrontation with his Palestinian nemesis, the Phantom (John Turturro), and smuggles himself to New York in a dog carrier, taking his co-travelers' names as his own, "Scrappy Coco." http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=951 2008-06-08 06:06:10 On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated 2-hour discussion. Video-stream or download the video of their conversation http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=950 2008-06-07 17:06:27 The philosophy that appealed to Jimmy Wales--founder of Wikipedia--was Objectivism, a strand of thinking associated with the author Ayn Rand. “It colours everything I do and think,” he says. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=949 2008-06-07 15:06:38 For string theory to make mathematical sense the world must have nine spatial dimensions. Why don’t we notice the six extra dimensions? Because, according to string theory, they are curled up into some microgeometry that makes them invisible. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=948 2008-06-06 06:06:26 Scott Soames describes the development of the analytic tradition of philosophy in the United States. His essay appears in "The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy" edited by Cheryl Misak. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=947 2008-06-06 05:06:48 Erdogan's disdain for press independence rivals the Kremlin's. He has sued more journalists than any predecessor, and has leaned on the owners of media outlets to rein in editors. Those who do not abide the prime minister's wishes face consequences. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=946 2008-06-06 12:06:07 The McCain myth, as we know, is built on the foundation of his five and a half years of captivity in Hoa Lo Prison, aka the "Hanoi Hilton." He was flying a bombing raid in October 1967; his plane was shot down, he parachuted into the middle of a lake. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=945 2008-06-05 11:06:08 Democratic iterations’ are linguistic, legal, cultural and political repetitions-in-transformation, invocations which are also revocations. They not only change established understandings but also transform what passes as the valid. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=944 2008-06-05 11:06:51 Despite some eerie parallels between the position of the United States today and that of the British Empire a century ago, there are key differences. Britain's decline was driven by bad economics. The United States has the strength and dynamism to lead. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=943 2008-06-05 10:06:17 Creation almost begins with a curse, God’s determination that women will give birth in pain as a result of Eve’s disobedience.The earth is then quickly condemned to the Flood, because God is unhappy with his sinful creation, and wants to start over again. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=942 2008-06-02 14:06:02 If you can get your news from Google and your opinions from the latest, hottest, angriest blog? But Human Smoke might be a harbinger of what is to come in other spheres: Baker, after all, is the historians' equivalent of the smug bloggers. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=941 2008-05-22 10:05:50 Application of the hair of the dog may sound like nothing more than a way of getting yourself drunk enough so that you don’t notice you have a hangover, but the biochemistry is probably more complicated than that. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=940 2008-05-21 15:05:30 A free society disempowers the state from enforcing a conception of dignity on its citizens. Democratic governments allow satirists to poke fun at their social mores. This is very much in America's contributions to civilization. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=939 2008-05-16 16:05:46 As an executive with one of Istanbul's largest firms said, "Turkey's islamist party in power (AKP) is like a cancer. You feel fine, but then one day you start coughing blood. By the time you realize there's a problem, it's too far-gone." http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=938 2008-05-11 08:05:14 We catch up with Tony Stark (Iron Man) in dusty Afghanistan, where he is enjoying a Scotch on the rocks in the back of an armored American military vehicle. Tony is a media celebrity, a former M.I.T. whiz kid. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=937 2008-05-02 14:05:53 Like Rawls, Nozick sought to impose an abstract vision of justice on political life, relegating considerations of feasibility to be resolved by others, in the spirit of Kant’s dictum, “let justice triumph, even if the world perishes by it.” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=936 2008-05-01 18:05:44 Throughout his scholarly life, Benny Morris has explored the thorny question of whether or not Ben-Gurion and his colleagues explicitly endorsed a policy of “transferring”—exiling—the Arab population from Israel. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=935 2008-04-28 19:04:53 Iran is a rising diplomatic force with strengthening links in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. US attempts to isolate Iran have failed as Iran uses oil and gas, and divisions between neighbours, t o increase its influence. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=934 2008-04-28 10:04:55 Football is heavily rule-bound. There’s an elaborate rulebook that sharply limits what players can and can’t do (down to where they have to stand on the field), and its dictates are followed with great care. Soccer is a more priciples-based sport. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=933 2008-04-25 03:04:48 For all the detours and inaccurracies, the first half of the Histories lay a crucial foundation for the reader’s experience of the war between Persia and Greece. Herodotus’ real subject is not so much the improbable Greek victory as the Persian defeat. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=932 2008-04-24 17:04:18 The deeper cause of the growth of Islamism is the intellectual sclerosis of the Arab and Muslim world. The hostility of Islamic scholars to secular knowledge prevented progress and sent the Muslim world into a state of near-permanent civilization. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=931 2008-04-23 08:04:55 There are all sorts of costs associated with driving that the actual driver doesn’t pay. Such a condition is known to economists as a negative externality: the behavior of Person A damages the welfare of Person Z, but Z has no control over A’s actions. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=930 2008-04-22 17:04:45 Language affects some thinking as a special device added to an ancient mental skill set. Just as adding features to a cellphone or camera can backfire, language is not always helpful. For the most part, it enhances thinking. But it can trip us up, too. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=929 2008-04-22 17:04:44 Reading Kagan is like reading the work of a very clever Marxist: the logic is impeccable, even when the premise is wrong. Kagan holds that liberals are dreamers who believe that nations will behave decently once they are part of a rational world order. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=928 2008-04-16 14:04:50 Alexander Bird writes on the fundamental contributions of Saul Kripke with regard to metaphysics, semantics, philosophy of language, theory of reference, singular terms and names, rules and scepticism. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=927 2008-04-05 17:04:04 Making Globalization Work is the third of Joseph Stiglitz's popular, and populist, books. Like Jeffrey Sachs, Stiglitz is an economist turned preacher, one of a new breed of secular evangelists produced by the fall of communism. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=926 2008-04-01 16:04:40 Chic French women prefer to peel and polish rather than paint their faces. Too much makeup, they say, makes a woman seem older, or worse, “vulgaire.” “The most beautiful makeup is passion,” Yves Saint Laurent once said. “But cosmetics are easier to buy." http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=925 2008-04-01 06:04:28 Americans have a prejudice in favor of lone wolves. Moral superiority, we like to think, belongs to the person who stands alone. And that's a crap. Until recently, social science went along with this idea. Lab-based research furnished slam-dunk evidence. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=924 2008-04-01 06:04:29 Nature, the science journal, published a report suggesting that drink was, from a biological point of view, engrained among the British. There are historical reasons for that. Fermented drinks contained none of the bugs that could be found in water. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=923 2008-04-01 06:04:39 Seeming to view himself and the whole political process with a mix of amusement and bemusement, McCain is an ironist wooing a group of individuals who regard ironic detachment more highly than sincerity or seriousness. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=922 2008-03-26 18:03:44 Islamism is a modern philosophy, not just a heap of medieval prejudices. In its sundry versions, it draws on local and religious roots, just as it claims to do. But it also draws on totalitarian inspirations from 20th-century Europe. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=921 2008-03-23 05:03:11 Nussbaum tells the ancient Greek story in “Liberty of Conscience,” her grand and penetrating discourse on religion and American law, to illustrate how an unbending state can impose a “tragic burden” on a member of a religious minority. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=920 2008-03-23 04:03:19 The novelist Nicholson Baker’s customary style in books like “The Mezzanine” and “Room Temperature” is to observe the world in slow, painstaking detail, relishing the tiny moment, enjoying the aside for the sake of accuracy. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=919 2008-03-23 04:03:40 The categorical imperative means something different, but it does sound like the right term for the self-protective psychological urge that drove Peter Mark Roget creator of the Thesaurus, to classify and categorize all manner of things over his lifetime http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=918 2008-03-21 04:03:24 if London these days is marked by innovation, Paris favours preservation. While London seems to be stressing its desire for change with its new architectural projects, the City of Light appears more concerned with scrubbing up what it already has. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=917 2008-03-21 04:03:59 The indisputably gorgeous Naomi Watts spends a great deal of time in just bra and panties, the poster,featuring her beautiful, tear-stained face, recalls nothing so much as a '70s-era blood-and-boobs exploitation flick. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=916 2008-03-21 04:03:13 Steve Jobs has successfully revived Apple through Mac computers, iPod MP3 players and the iPhone. He has done so by breakþing all the rules of recent management theory and Silicon Valley Culture, both of which rest on transparency and participation. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=915 2008-03-19 14:03:17 Zangwill unifies sociological, cognitive and Kantian explanations of aesthetic experience. Kant regards taste as arising from the faculties of cognition, which can be integrated with theories of cognition and social theories of taste. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=914 2008-03-15 16:03:18 The most recent edition of Husserl2s great early work which has strong influenced European philosophy ever since,and which has been taken up by Analytic philosophers. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=913 2008-03-16 16:03:54 The bill Spitzer incurred-$4,300-is not an altogether alarming sum of money in the high-end sex market. Spitzer got a bargain—and that may have been his downfall. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=912 2008-03-13 13:03:29 In a recent commentary in the journal Nature, two Cambridge University researchers reported that about a dozen of their colleagues had admitted to regular use of prescription drugs like Adderall, a stimulant, and Provigil, which promotes wakefulness. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=911 2008-03-13 13:03:05 To measure a subject's worthiness for inclusion (or “notability”, in the jargon of Wikipedians), all kinds of rules have been devised. So an article in an international journal counts more than a mention in a local newspaper. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=910 2008-03-13 13:03:43 Soames the defends reality of propositions, the bears of truth, in relation to facts. It is propositions that can be true or false, that can be believed or not believed, not the facts. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=909 2008-03-08 14:03:14 Husserlreturns to Descartes in order to present his own transcendental Phenomenology. He explains this as the need to repeat Descartes' gesture of moving inwards in order to construct philosophy in a pure and systematc way, from nothing. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=908 2008-03-08 12:03:57 Homeownership impedes the economy’s readjustment by tying people down. From a social point of view, it’s beneficial that homeownership encourages commitment to a given town or city. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=907 2008-03-04 02:03:00 Wittgenstein once averred that “there can never be surprises in logic.” But Gödel’s incompleteness theorems did come as a surprise. What could it mean to say that a mathematical proposition was true if there was no possibility of proving it? http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=906 2008-03-02 10:03:28 Friedrich Engels declared that the potato was the equal of iron for its “historically revolutionary role”. Potato's history is well worth celebrating because it is intertwined with economic development, trade liberalisation and globalization. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=904 2008-03-01 15:03:22 In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, "Diogenes of Sinope," and you'll have knowledge you didn't have before. It's like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=903 2008-03-01 12:03:45 William Buckley rose to prominence with a generation of talented writers fascinated by political themes, people with names like Mailer, Capote, Vidal, Styron and Baldwin. Like the others, he was a magnet for controversy. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=902 2008-02-28 09:02:05 Vol 20issue 1 of Utilitas is available in free access for articles in Html and pdf formats. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=901 2008-02-27 11:02:13 Despite accusations of being light weight, Obama Barack has gathered a team of advisers committed to innovative approaches to public policy, using new behavioural approaches to the social sciences. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=900 2008-02-27 11:02:12 According to Stanislas Dehaene, humans have an inbuilt “number sense” capable of some basic calculations and estimates. The problems start when we learn mathematics and have to perform procedures that are anything but instinctive. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=899 2008-02-25 17:02:55 Obama is the candidate of the new--a "new generation," a "new leadership," a "new kind of politics," to borrow phrases he has used. But, in emphasizing newness, Obama is actually voicing a very old theme. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=898 2008-02-25 10:02:04 The status of art in the modern era, considers Hegel’s claim that art has exhausted its spiritual vocation, that it is no longer through art that Spirit principally comes to knowledge of itself, but not the death of art, rather art as self-annullment. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=897 2008-02-20 11:02:17 When a David Gelernter writes a book about the United States as a great religion or a Victor Davis Hanson states in an oddly Marxian vein that history has already proven that America has offered mankind its “last and greatest hope,” one may disagree. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=896 2008-02-19 21:02:19 Diab looks at the rights and wrongs of the integration of immigrants and minorities in Germany and Turkey following a speech by the Turkish Prime Minister to Turks in Germany http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=894 2008-02-19 09:02:26 The Coen brothers' form a conspiracy of industrious, secretive and amused. Early in their careers, they gave detailed interviews, but in recent years they have discussed only specific and relatively trivial matters concerning their movies. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=893 2008-02-18 10:02:22 Anton Chigurh is a peculiar hitman. He threatens to kill a man’s wife if the man doesn’t tell him what he needs to know – and then killing her even after the man is dead because he treats his threat as a kind of promise to himself. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=892 2008-02-19 19:02:17 “There Will Be Blood” exhibits much the same qualities as Mr. Anderson’s previous work — every shot seems exactly right — but its narrative form is more classical and less weighted down by the pressures of self-aware auteurism. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=891 2008-02-18 08:02:04 Scientists who study play, in animals and humans alike, are developing a consensus view that play is something more than a way for restless kids to work off steam; more than a way for chubby kids to burn off calories; more than a frivolous luxury. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=890 2008-02-17 12:02:36 Crank? Crackpot? Charlatan? Maybe all three. Yet the maharishi was generally benign. He did not use his money for sinister ends. He neither drank, nor smoked, nor took drugs. Indeed, he is credited with weaning the Beatles off dope (for a while). http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=889 2008-02-17 12:02:05 The A.K.P. has been kinder to the Kurds than any of the other major parties, but that isn’t saying much. The party’s commitment to minority rights in general has been spotty and varies significantly from one party leader to another. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=888 2008-02-17 12:02:13 The debate began with Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam, his 2006 book about the background and implications of the daylight butchery of Dutch filmmaker and provocateur Theo Van Gogh by an Islamic extremist named Mohammed Bouyeri. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=887 2008-02-17 12:02:57 The American system of higher education, long the envy of the world, is becoming an important export as more universities take their programs overseas. In a kind of educational gold rush, American universities are competing to set up outposts. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=886 2008-02-10 15:02:57 The ancient Jewish horror of barefacedness a merely cultural phenomenon; it was intimately connected with a religious commandment. “Do not cut the edges of your bear.,” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=885 2008-02-09 09:02:15 Argues that contemporary existence is marked by a denial of experience. Through explorations of the work of Kant, Hegel and Husserl, Agamben addresses the question of language and experience. His chapter on childhood and games looks at the pre-lingusitic. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=884 2008-02-08 13:02:42 In the hunt for a distinctive European identity, consider toy brands, such as Denmark's Lego or Germany's Playmobil. In their designs, business models and philosophies, they offer a striking snapshot of European aspirations, anxieties and foibles. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=883 2008-02-06 20:02:03 In this draft chapter Scanlon looks at what it is to blame someone. He defines blame as what happens when a relationship is impaired and criticises accounts of blame based on negative assessment of character, or on punishment. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=882 2008-01-25 06:01:58 Huntington had written that the Turks —rejecting Mecca, and rejected by Brussels—would head toward Tashkent, choosing a pan-Turkic world. My faith was invested in the official Westernizing creed of Kemalism that Ataturk had bequeathed his country. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=881 2008-01-24 10:01:15 When it comes to new waves, the critics who announce (or invent) them have more of an investment than artists, who understandably resist the notion that their individuality might be assimilated into some larger tendency. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=880 2008-01-23 19:01:33 In the opening shot of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” we see a table littered with crockery, a fishtank, and an ashtray. A hand reaches in from the left and taps the ash from a cigarette; only then do we pull back and discover to whom the hand belongs. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=879 2008-01-24 09:01:44 Sarkozy is so vehement about his love that something seems weird about it. He wants people to think about his sex life, in the way that Bill Clinton didn’t want people thinking about his. The Sarkozy moment is more like Tom Cruise pounding Oprah’s sofa http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=878 2008-01-23 09:01:25 Foucault looks at the development from desire as the expression of power in antiquity, to the ascetic denial of sexuality originally associated with the inferiority of the sexual object. The health of the soul is connected with asceticism. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=877 2008-01-25 15:01:37 Foucault looks at attitudes to sexuality in Antiquity with regard to how the self was created and understood. Ideas about sex were tied up with ideas of the power of mature men over social inferiors and the right kind of self to have power. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=876 2008-01-25 15:01:50 Foucault's investigation of sexuality since the Nineteenth Century. He looks at how the moralistic discourse of the time, and its apparent repressiveness, named the objects of psychoanalysis and other contemporary discourses of sexuality. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=875 2008-01-19 21:01:26 Foucault investigates changing ways of categorising madness. He identifies a period of confinement where madness is hidden in institutions in a triumph of Reason over non-Reason. This act impovrishes by assuming a differention which madness questions. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=874 2008-01-19 17:01:35 Foucault's lectures at the College de France 1977-1978. Foucault develops ideas about 'biopower' and 'governmentality' referring to Early Modern Europe. The time when the state is increasingly concerned with population as necessary to security. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=873 2008-01-19 17:01:18 The Boltzmann brain problem arises from a string of logical conclusions that all spring from another deep and old question, namely why time seems to go in only one direction. Why can’t you unscramble an egg? http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=872 2008-01-17 04:01:47 Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher from Berkeley, studies professional ethicists behavior in his research. His research examines the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=871 2008-01-16 10:01:09 Alfred Döblin's great novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929, is pretty much untranslatable. Much of it is written in the working-class argot of pre-war Berlin. A translator can ignore this, of course, and use plain English, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=870 2008-01-14 03:01:07 Gary Wolf discusses how a psychologist and philosopher tried to settle their arguments about the mind through experimenting on one woman. Salon.com reporting on Hulbert and Schwitzgebel's book 'Describing Inner Experience'(pictured) http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=869 2008-01-13 23:01:43 In The Guardian, Tom Hodgkinson attacks Facebook as the creation and instrument of hardcore rightwingers who call themselves Libertarians but who are creating a Neo-Conservative Big Brother society. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=868 2008-01-13 23:01:44 There’s no escaping the fact: this is a very grim film. But it’s also a serious, terrifically made one that couldn’t be more sensitive to the individual and political ramifications of its horrific theme: http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=867 2008-01-13 10:01:14 Elections demand that candidates differentiate themselves, yet various plausible front-runners’ positions on Iraq are not all that far apart. There are subtle differences regarding the completeness and timing of withdrawal: John Edwards, for instance, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=866 2008-01-13 10:01:45 The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=865 2008-01-13 10:01:05 In 'Foreign Policy', Stefan Theil (pictured)presents the results of research into economics education in Europe, and finds that particularly in France and Germany there is a strong bias against risk taking, entrepreneurs, and globalisation. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=864 2008-01-12 09:01:46 The New York Times has reported on the feud between former friends Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn. A very negative review by McGinn of a book by Honderich (pictured)has led to a battle between the two men extensively discussed by philosophers on the net. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=863 2008-01-12 09:01:42 Scientology, the religion that grew out of L. Ron Hubbard’s popular self-help manual “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health,” incorporates aspects of Eastern philosophy, management theory, and science fiction—a genre in which Hubbard was prolific http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=862 2008-01-10 06:01:35 In "Suicide of Reason", Harris argues that the Muslim world, since it is governed by the law of the jungle, makes group survival paramount. This explains in part the willingness of Muslims to become martyrs for the larger community, the umma- http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=861 2008-01-07 02:01:39 The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of a strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=860 2008-01-06 17:01:09 Arranged marriages can be a messy business. Designed principally as a means of accumulating wealth, circumventing undesirable flirtations or transcending clandestine love affairs, they often don’t work. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=859 2008-01-07 02:01:26 It is an irony of history that the country that Hitler wanted to make judenrein now has the fastest-growing Jewish community in western Europe. Before the Nazis came to power, about 600,000 Jews lived in Germany. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=858 2008-01-06 16:01:10 The legend cultivated by Pakistani politicians like Benazir Bhutto and her principal civilian rival, Nawaz Sharif, cast the generals as the main villains in stifling democracy, emerging from their barracks to grab power out of Napoleonic ambition http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=857 2008-01-06 16:01:59 Schrader likes his decadence ripe and toxic, seeping through the gold-trimmed furniture and into the water supply. Nothing in Schrader’s film “The Walker” can quite match its delicious opening scene of sniping repartee over canasta among three Washington http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=856 2008-01-04 06:01:58 South Asia expert William Dalrymple on the Pakistani Princess Benazir Bhutto. She was born to rule. She had an attractive personality,but in power she was part of the system of clientalism, corruption, authoritarianism which has ruined Pakistan democracy http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=855 2007-12-30 12:12:08 At the beginnings of their lives all pygmy populations follow the same growth curves as taller populations. This demonstrates that pygmyism is not a result of early malnutrition, as one would expect. At the age of about 12, however, pygmies stop growing. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=854 2007-12-29 07:12:22 The most striking element of the overall picture continues to be the extraordinary turnaround in nearly every area apart from the family and marriage rates.Culture itself exhibits an ebb and flow as surely as economies pass through cycles of ups and down. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=853 2007-12-25 16:12:35 Art Carden comments on economic and oral arguments in defense of Scrooge, on the website of the Mises Institute, from a libertarian perspective. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=852 2007-12-25 14:12:57 The “Ode to Joy” is more than just a universally popular piece of classical music that has become something of a cliché during the holiday season. It has also been, for more than a century, what literary theorists call an “empty signifier” — a symbol that http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=851 2007-12-25 16:12:13 Reading Ike's account of his life, you might suppose that things had come a little too easy. Sex, for example. At the age of 6, he was involved with Miss Boozie. “In those days they didn't call it abuse,” says Ike later, "they called it fun!” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=850 2007-12-23 07:12:35 How do we understand and engage with the purposeful, emotional and mental activities of other people and how does this knowledge develop? What can recent work on mirror neurons in monkeys and human beings teach us about how the brain supports social under http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=849 2007-12-25 16:12:49 Like René Descartes,an excerpt from whose Discourse on Method had served in lieu of a preface to the first edition of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, a book that is prototypical for truth Beyond Good and Evil and on the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=848 2007-12-25 15:12:16 This conference promises to be unusual for me. If we think of philosophers who emphasize reference, representation, fact, truth, truth-makers, and ontology as conservatives, and therefore on the Right, and we think of those who talk of expression, discour http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=847 2007-12-19 15:12:18 Body wash has taken over, perfuming the armpits of most men; if you use body wash in an apartment complex, women in the floors below you will want to sleep with you so much that they will pole-dance on your drainage pipes. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=846 2007-12-15 07:12:45 American commentators and politicians who think he is a French version of Reagan, are fooling themselves. He is a French politician, wholly French in experience and formation, brought up to believe in central state power and responsibility, who does thing http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=845 2007-12-12 08:12:36 Even before Sunday's stunning defeat of President Hugo Chavez's constitutional reform package in Venezuela, it was clear that his rule had reached a turning point. Win or lose, Venezuela's politics had already changed in fundamental ways. The tired narrat http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=844 2007-12-11 11:12:11 Clark’s hypothesis raises a troubling question about the future, albeit one he doesn’t mention. If the key to economic progress in the past was the survival of the richest, what is in store now that the richest no longer outbreed everyone else? As he http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=843 2007-12-11 12:12:19 Intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world,in every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=842 2007-12-10 16:12:16 The title of this book is rather misleading. “Birth of neoliberal governmentality”, or something like that, would have been more faithful to its contents. In Foucault’s vocabulary, “biopolitics” is the “rationalisation” of “governmentality” (p. 261): it http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=841 2007-12-10 12:12:16 Frank Lucas is a cool guy, always shrewd enough to put a coaster under the drinks and leave no marks behind. Grinning broadly between fits of rage, he takes the overt menace out of such lines as “I’m a busy man, I got no time to be going to anyone’s fune http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=840 2007-12-10 07:12:45 The philosophy of wine, all like Hume great champions of self-improvement, address themselves to questions of subjectivity and taste, quantifiability and pleasure, perception and its objects, the role of knowledge and judgement in perceptual discernment, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=839 2007-12-10 06:12:46 The book’s argument continues through issues of religion and dignity. It touches upon whether women have a right to abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy, whether the constitution should be read as requiring permission for physician-assisted su http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=838 2007-12-10 06:12:41 Researchers who study conflict say that people who are highly emotionally reactive, for instance, or rigid or driven by narcissism, are the most likely to feud without retreat. People who internalize resentment, holding onto it indefinitely, are also more http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=837 2007-12-10 06:12:10 Atonement ends with a devastating twist, a piece of information that changes our sense of everything we have just read. It is convincing enough, but its neatness seems like the reappearance of the old McEwan, unwilling to let the ropes fall from his hands http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=836 2007-12-09 17:12:54 The first piece of literature we hear is a play by Briony Tallis, a 13 year old girl—fair and blue-eyed, with a touch of the mad, bad fairy in her gaze. She is writing the play in an English country house in 1935, to be performed by her three unhappy cous http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=835 2007-12-09 16:12:39 A book written in two parallel columns. The first column is largely a commentary on Hegel, the second column is largely a commentary on Jean Genet. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=834 2007-12-08 10:12:31 In Aristotelian Society, said a few years ago, “If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can.” But now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problem by going out and gathering info http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=833 2007-12-08 06:12:15 Priest’s recent book is a homage to his deceased friend and collaborator Richard Sylvan (formerly Routley). Priest defends, with Sylvan, an ontological position derivative of Meinong’s they call noneism. Noneism, basically, is the view that there are no http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=832 2007-12-06 11:12:13 Google has, as they say, all the right enemies. Anytime the ALA, Microsoft, France, a trade guild, and a bunch of trial lawyers are lined up on one side of an argument, the other side is going to look extremely attractive. And there is a seductive appeal http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=831 2007-12-06 06:12:18 Why Dawkins refuses to take his ideas to its logical conclusion--to say that raising a child in a religious tradition, like other forms of child abuse, should be considered a crime punishable by the state--is a mystery, for it follows directly from http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=830 2007-12-25 16:12:14 They were the people who, three years ago, voted overwhelmingly for a peaceful resolution to the division of their island and were rewarded by being denied entry into the European Union. Now for the first time in years, thanks to a string of broken promis http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=829 2007-12-03 03:12:31 I am going to begin by saying something about the frame in which I want to place a conception of experience as taking in the world. Such an idea has obvious attractions from an epistemological point of view, and that is not irrelevant to my interest in http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=828 2007-11-24 07:11:54 Our perceptually based beliefs are intelligible as manifestations of rationality. We can make sense of them by putting them in an explanatory nexus with perceptual experience. If someone has a perceptually based belief, she believes something because h http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=827 2007-11-24 07:11:33 I have urged that our perceptual relation to the world is conceptual all the way out to the world’s impacts on our receptive capacities. The idea of the conceptual that I mean to be invoking is to be understood in close connection with the idea of ratio http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=826 2007-11-24 07:11:23 Back in 1950, while a physics major at Harvard, I wandered into C.I. Lewis’s epistemology course. There, Lewis was confidently expounding the need for an indubitable Given to ground knowledge, and he was explaining where that ground was to be found. I w http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=825 2007-11-24 07:11:25 The approach to generative grammar originating with Chomsky (1957) has been enormously successful within linguistics. Seeing such success, one wonders whether a similar approach might help us understand other human domains besides language. One such dom http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=824 2007-11-21 19:11:25 No one wants foreign states, especially those which are anti-Western, acquiring Western companies. But policymakers also believe that having governments play an active role in the stock market and in the global economy might make the whole system less eff http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=823 2007-11-21 11:11:51 Professors with tenure or who are on a tenure track are now a distinct minority on the country’s campuses, as the ranks of part-time instructors and professors hired on a contract have swelled, according to federal figures analyzed by the American Associa http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=822 2007-11-21 06:11:55 Male pregnancies are more likely to miscarry in response to stress than female pregnancies are, especially during the first three months. However, that is difficult to prove. More intriguing, though, is the ultimate cause, for he thinks it might be adapti http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=821 2007-11-20 19:11:44 Like other fathers and sons, Douglas Gentile and his father have spent many hours arguing about video games. What makes them different is that Douglas, an Iowa State University assistant professor of psychology, is one of the country's top researchers on http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=820 2007-11-14 13:11:31 We describe music in terms of emotion. How should we understand this? Some say that emotion descriptions should be understood literally. Let us call those views “literalist.” By contrast “nonliteralists” deny this and say that such descriptions are t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=819 2007-11-14 13:11:05 Hungarian composer György Kurtág remembers his lifelong friend, György Ligeti, a gesamtkunstwerk. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=818 2007-11-12 15:11:18 Hegel seeks to overturn Kant’s conclusion that our knowledge is restricted, or that we cannot have knowledge of things as they are in themselves. Understanding this Hegelian ambition requires distinguishing two Kantian characterizations of our epistemic l http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=817 2007-11-11 03:11:36 Hegel accords great philosophical importance to Kant’s discussions of teleology and biology in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and yet also disagrees with Kant’s central conclusions there. More specifically, Kant argues for a generally skeptical vi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=816 2007-11-11 03:11:58 In his Lectures on Russian Literature Vladimir Nabokov maintains that "the third, and worst, degree of turpitude" in literary translation, after "obvious errors" and skipping over awkward passages, is reached when a masterpiece is planished and pat http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=815 2007-11-11 02:11:50 On Simon Blackburn’s offbeat personal website, there are no buttons to click on, only paintings and portraits, including an animated one of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume with a winsome wink and a smile. At the top of the page is a phot http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=814 2007-11-15 20:11:57 He was a prolific Elizabethan playwright who wrote the biggest hit of Shakespeare’s day, but the name of Sir Thomas Middleton has been eclipsed for centuries by his contemporary. Now new computer-assisted research concludes that hundreds of lines in Sh http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=813 2007-11-10 06:11:23 Superbad--a horrifyingly foul-mouthed, shockingly hilarious, and surprisingly moving new teen comedy that will probably be the best-known and most fondly remembered Hollywood picture of 2007 a quarter-century from now--is set on a Friday two weeks before http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=812 2007-12-10 07:12:54 Steven Pinker takes on violence. We live in violent times, an era of heightened warfare, genocide and senseless crime. Or so we've come to believe. Pinker charts a history of violence from Biblical times through the present, and says modern society has a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=811 2007-11-08 13:11:31 The traditional detective story begins with the body and centers on the detective’s search for the culprit. Leads are pursued. A net is cast, widening to encompass a bewilderingly diverse pool of suspects: the butler, the spurned lover, the embittered nep http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=810 2007-11-07 14:11:19 This is a period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics. It is a romance, set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and Hong Kong; and there’s little left to the imagination other than the inspiration for Mr. Lee’s newfound flirtation with kink http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=809 2007-11-03 14:11:09 The British philosopher Antony Flew was one of the West’s most influential atheists. Then came news — from conservative Christians — that he had recanted. But his change of heart may not be what it seems. Is (His) Biography (Our) Destiny? http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=808 2007-11-03 14:11:33 The greatest of the ancient collections, the Library of Alexandria, had, in its ambitions and its methods, a good deal in common with Google’s book projects. Like Google, the library developed an efficient procedure for capturing and reproducing texts. Wh http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=807 2007-11-03 09:11:58 This essay seeks to give an overview of the development, central themes and methods, and main claims of Jürgen Habermas’s thought over the course of his career. Given its incredibly wide thematic range, its pervasive influence in both public and academ http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=806 2007-11-02 14:11:36 Michael Clayton is a film about ethics and American decency in which George Clooney, the ultimate playboy of the West, raises the sword in the name of truth and justice and good. Well, someone’s got to do it. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=805 2007-11-02 14:11:28 President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, not usually a reliable authority on current affairs, got it right in an open letter to George Bush: “Whether we like it or not,” he wrote, “the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty.” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=804 2007-11-02 14:11:37 In this view the truth of Islam was vindicated by actual events, through Islam's historical achievement in creating what would become a great world civilization.According to this argument, Islam overcame the enemies of truth by divinely assisted battles a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=803 2007-11-01 08:11:13 The best-selling French intellectual--Pierre Bayard--talks about why reading is like falling in love, why school makes you hate literature and why Proust was made to be skimmed. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=802 2007-10-29 07:10:32 Far from ‘unfilmable’, as some have described it, Ian McEwan’s book offers real opportunities for a filmmaker to thread the perils of storytelling into an epic narrative that bursts out of the attractive claustrophobia of a rarefied world and onto the rav http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=801 2007-10-29 03:10:48 The prospect of an attack on northern Iraq reveals a hollow global consensus on intervention - and a European identity crisis. Recent days have seen Dick Cheney and Tony Blair point belligerent fingers at Tehran, but both spoke in the slipstream of Berna http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=800 2007-10-23 10:10:29 Osama's crew are completely ridiculous figures--tin-legged zealots, amputeed mullahs, they’re all in bits. Osama is a very stupid man. But he did at least have the wit to stay in one piece.’ http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=799 2007-10-23 02:10:11 1. The 19th century is often thought – with justice – to be the age of individualism. Yet it was also the great age of projects to reintegrate the individual and society. In metaphysics and methodology various schools of philosophy claimed that the thou http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=798 2007-10-19 15:10:19 Things invariably appear more important on the Internet than they are in the real world. Classical music has experienced waves of technological euphoria in the past: the Edison cylinder, radio, the LP, and the CD were all hailed as redeeming godsends for http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=797 2007-10-16 12:10:43 The history of American economic innovation in the twentieth century is really a history of clusters—think of movies in Hollywood, cars in Detroit, and technology in Silicon Valley. The traditional explanation is that the costs of being near your competit http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=796 2007-10-16 11:10:50 Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings Jerry Fodor. Die Meistersinger is, by Wagner’s standards, quite a cheerful opera. The action turns on comedy’s staple, the marriage plot: get the hero and the heroine safely and truly wed with at least a presumption of happine http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=794 2007-10-14 13:10:07 The theory is based on the idea that in evolutionary terms it benefits women to disguise when they are fertile so that their menfolk will stick around all the time. Otherwise, the theory goes, a man might go hunting for alternative mating opportunities at http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=792 2007-10-14 05:10:15 The public radio gig, the references to Emily Dickinson, the directing credit for Neil Jordan, all of this produces a patina of refinement and seriousness. But don’t be fooled. “The Brave One,” is just as crude and ugly as you want it http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=790 2007-10-10 03:10:15 Roth has sometimes resembled a man standing on a corner wearing a huge sandwich board bearing the words, in irritatingly hectoring capitals, “WE ARE ONLY HUMAN". The danger in Roth’s work has always been a slightly sentimental didacticism; an example is http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=789 2007-10-08 10:10:23 In Saul Bellow’s first post-Nobel novel, “The Dean’s December,” mortal fear centered on the colon. In Roth’s “Exit Ghost,” it centers on the prostate, or anyway on where the prostate used to be. The bearer of the wound can reach no accommodation with his http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=788 2007-10-08 10:10:07 The historical root of swearing in English and many other languages is, oddly enough, religion. We see this in the Third Commandment, in the popularity of hell, damn, God, and Jesus Christ as expletives, and in many of the terms for taboo language itself: http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=787 2007-10-08 09:10:47 What would Lacan have said! What wouldn't he have said? This is not a question, it is an exclamation: to get my voice right, to find the appropriate tone,before beginning to try out this idiomatic conjunction of negation, denial http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=786 2007-10-07 19:10:34 The heart of the English objection to Ameican squirrels comes down to this: they outcompete the native squirrels. They are simply better at the job of being squirrels. Britain’s taste for unfettered competition has always been fitful, and how much it tipp http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=785 2007-10-06 12:10:38 Kasparov speaks frequently to two sorts of audiences in the West: business groups, which seem to see him as another variety of an American crop—the executive coach—and conservative political groups. He is John Naisbitt with a queen’s-gambit twist. His con http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=784 2007-10-04 08:10:15 It is not usual to think of Fichte as a logician, nor indeed to think of him as leaving a legacy that shaped the subsequent history of symbolic logic. But I argue here that there is such a legacy, and that Fichte formulated an agenda in formal logic tha http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=783 2007-09-26 12:09:27 The reason why primates are intelligent, according to Dr Humphrey, is that they generally live in groups. And, just as group living promotes intelligence, so intelligence allows larger groups to function, providing a spur for the evolution of yet more int http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=782 2007-09-23 05:09:51 “Funny Games” occupies a unique place in Haneke’s body of work, not least because of his decision to shoot it twice. The director Ron Howard recently acquired the rights to Haneke’s “Caché” — but Haneke’s decision to remake his own film surprised fans an http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=781 2007-09-22 11:09:29 The costliest place in the world to get high is Japan, according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime's annual World Drug Report. The street price of a gram of cannabis weed was $58.30 in 2005, over twice as much as in the next most expensive n http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=780 2007-09-22 11:09:46 If you are a religious apologist invited to debate with Hitchens, decline. His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed words, beautifully spoken in that formidable Richard http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=779 2007-09-21 03:09:22 As a Slovene, I have always been attentive to those few places in his writings and letters in which Freud mentions a Slovene or Slovenia; since Slovenia was part of the Austrian Empire in his time, it is surprising that these mentions are so rare. Apart f http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=778 2007-09-20 16:09:41 The key to Podhoretz's politics seems to me to lie right there: the longing for power, for toughness, for the Shtarker who doesn't give a damn about anyone or anything, and hatred of the contemptible, cowardly liberals with their pandering ways and their http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=777 2007-09-17 17:09:49 Can there be something in life that has power over us which little by little causes us to forget all that is good? And can this ever happen to anyone who has heard the call of eternity quite clearly and strongly? If this can ever be, then one must look http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=776 2007-09-09 08:09:47 Joseph Epstein, in his new biography of Tocqueville, wryly asks what the great Frenchman himself would have made of "le phénomène de Tocqueville." For as Epstein points out, it is impossible nowadays to think "about America, about democracy, about liberty http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=775 2007-09-05 12:09:46 WHEN Slavoj Žižek’s work first struck the outer crust of the Anglo-American academy, it made a significant dent. As the debris was cleared, it became apparent that something wholly unexpected had been going on in Slovenian for quite a while, and http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=774 2007-09-04 14:09:17 How essential is the complex emotion of guilt to morality? Can we define moral standards, in contrast with other sorts of standards, as those standards that it is appropriate to feel guilt for violating? Is it essential to being a moral person that one http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=773 2007-09-03 11:09:10 The best way to understand both Mr Putin's ascent into the Kremlin and his rule since is to see them as the remarkable recovery of the culture, mentality and view of the world of the old KGB. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=772 2007-08-27 21:08:55 The source of the confusion is the mistaken notion that the categories “religious” and “secular” are strictly binary, like an on-off switch. It’s true that some things are inherently religious, like a prayer or a church or a Torah scroll. (It would be imp http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=771 2007-08-27 21:08:16 It was “the most generous act of any people, anytime, anywhere, to another people,” its chief administrator declared. It was “among the most noble experiences in human affairs,” its representative in Europe said. It was “the most staggering and portentous http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=770 2007-08-23 09:08:24 The rich tended to have more children who survived than their poorer compatriots and this led to a kind of downward mobility as sons of merchants became small traders, sons of traders became craftsmen and so on http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=769 2007-08-22 21:08:24 There is something unseemly about watching the avatars of free-market capitalism rely on the government to pay for their bad bets. And there is something scary about contemplating the even bigger bets they’ll make in the future if they know that the Fed i http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=768 2007-08-22 21:08:03 In June 2004, I went door to door in a white, working- class neighborhood of Martinsburg, West Virginia, a small blue-collar town in decline. There, I found voters disillusioned with both the Iraq war and the flagging economy. But, when I returned five mo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=767 2007-08-21 05:08:34 Today's atheist polemics ignore the main insight of the anthropology of religion—that religion is not primarily about God, but about the human need for the sacred. As René Girard argues, religion is not the cause of violence, but the solution to it http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=766 2007-08-18 12:08:41 We in the West find it incomprehensible that theological ideas inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that can leave societies in ruin. We had assumed that that was no longer http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=765 2007-08-19 14:08:48 Download is through rar compressed file. Trial version of necessary software can be downloaded for free at http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm. Great for all zip file functions. Can be used after end of trial period. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=763 2007-08-16 13:08:50 Judith Giuliani likes to have an empty seat next to her on the campaign plane for “Baby Louis”—her Louis Vuitton handbag. Jeri Thompson is a “trophy wife” with a taste for low-cut dresses and gold-lamé wedge sandals. Ann Romney http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=762 2007-08-16 09:08:48 What Ramadan proposes is a "re-Ottomanization" of the Muslim world in which religious communities would once more enjoy a semi-autonomous existence such as they had under the sultan-caliph. The Caliphate was abolished by the Turkish National Asse http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=761 2007-08-15 22:08:46 Churchill hated the Indians: “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” He had a special animus for Gandhi, describing him as a “rascal” and a “half-naked” “fakir.” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=760 2007-08-15 22:08:24 There’s nothing more exciting to an adolescent reader than an unknown genre writer who speaks to your condition and has something great about him. The Ace paperback cover promises mere thrills, and the writing provides real meaning. The combination of evi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=759 2007-08-14 10:08:24 Spencer has been tagged as a social Darwinist, but it would be more correct to think of Darwin as a biological Spencerian. Spencer was very well known as an evolutionist long before Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was published, in 1859, and people wh http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=758 2007-08-06 14:08:16 Spamhaus, an organization that tracks spammers, keeps a list of the world’ spam operators, and many of the best go by obvious pseudonyms, like the Ukrainian spammer who calls himself, variously, Alex Blood, Alexander Mosh, AlekseyB, and Alex Polyakov. For http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=757 2007-08-05 14:08:31 Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertai http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=756 2007-08-05 13:08:33 Stripped of his identity, his country and love, Bourne is now very much a man alone, existentially and otherwise. Mr. Damon makes him haunted, brooding and dark. The light seems to have gone out in his eyes, and the skin stretches so tightly across his ca http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=755 2007-08-05 13:08:42 Conspiracy theorists have a bad reputation. They are usually portrayed as paranoid, isolated, deluded people, best avoided. It is true that there are many sinister and unpleasant conspiracy theories. These are usually the ones that seek to blame all th http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=754 2007-07-31 07:07:35 William James proposed an interesting way of keeping open the door to an afterlife. We know that the mind depends on the physical brain, James said. But that doesn’t mean that our brain processes actually produce our mental life, as opposed to merely tran http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=753 2007-07-30 17:07:42 What is phenomenology? It may seem strange that this question has still to be asked half a century after the first works of Husserl. The fact remains that it has by no means been answered. Phenomenology is the study of essences; and according to it, all p http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=752 2007-07-29 12:07:20 In the Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault said some profound things about statements (énoncés) that concern several domains at once, even if not at the same time. I take two very vague examples. There is a moment in the Greek city when statements of a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=751 2007-07-28 17:07:56 The Ear of the Other. Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=750 2007-07-28 17:07:09 As a rising St. Louis politician in the mid-1970s, Richard Gephardt (pictured) was among a dynamic group of aldermen dubbed "The Young Turks." So perhaps it's not surprising that, 30 years later, the former Democratic minority leader of the House of Repre http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=749 2007-07-27 19:07:26 In recent years, the bonobo has found a strange niche in the popular imagination, based largely on its reputation for peacefulness and promiscuity. The Washington Post recently described the species as copulating “incessantly”; the Times claimed that the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=748 2007-07-27 16:07:05 We dream sometimes of a history of philosophy that would list only the new concepts created by a great philosopher-his most essential and creative contribution. The case of Hume could begin to be made with the following list. - He established the concept http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=747 2007-07-24 16:07:01 The Turkish parliamentary elections held on 22 July 2007 turned out to be a remarkable step towards democratic consolidation and civilian rule. The elections followed the presidential crisis of April when the military, the constitutional court, and the ma http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=746 2007-07-24 14:07:30 (The New Republic. Registration required) The year 2006 marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the Bible of twentieth-century liberalism, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. During that time Rawls's work was the touchstone for liberal http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=745 2007-07-24 14:07:18 “Hairspray” cheerfully conflates racial prejudice with fat-phobia. Tracy and her new African-American friends face equivalent forms of injustice. And hairspray does make the solidarity between them feel like an utterly natural, intuitive response to the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=744 2007-07-22 09:07:38 Warning. Download problem with Firefox Browser. Explorer and Opera browsers are fine. 13 MB file. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=743 2007-07-24 14:07:44 Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law — to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still partici http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=742 2007-07-20 01:07:24 Perhaps to be a Frenchman in the 21st century means to make a choice about certain major and seminal events, like Vichy, colonialism or May 1968. And I will look at the positions he took on these three questions and conclude that when he said that the Vic http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=741 2007-07-19 11:07:35 You know, when I ask people, 'What do you think the goals of America are today?' people don't have any idea. We don't know what we're trying to achieve. And I think that in a life or in a country you've got to have some goals." Senator Hillary Clinton, MS http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=740 2007-07-17 13:07:15 As the bestselling author of such stinging political satires as Peace Kills, Holidays in Hell, The Bachelor Home Companion, and Republican Party Reptile (notable for its advice that “anything that makes your mother cry is fun”), PJ O’Rourke, the American http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=739 2007-07-17 13:07:12 The fate of a book or a movie, the argument goes, is determined by too many factors to be predictable—advertising, reviews, word of mouth, luck, and, in the case of big hits, a simple desire to see what all the fuss is about. De Vany says that the box-off http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=738 2007-07-16 03:07:55 Digital technology has also been touted as a lifeline for independent film-makers, who struggle for attention in sequel-laden summers such as this one. Since the cost of digital distribution is almost zero, the thinking goes, cinemas ought to gamble on mo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=737 2007-07-16 03:07:58 That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger,- and philosophy should still wander towards the meaning of its death - or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying (as is silently confessed http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=736 2007-07-14 10:07:53 Tensions are rising in Turkey's schools and universities as academics and scientists confront the growing influence of Islamic creationists. "Without science, modern civilisation is impossible," says Haluk Ertan, a geneticist at Istanbul University, " http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=735 2007-07-14 09:07:28 A massive granite monument at the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula in western Turkey commemorates the 86,692 Ottoman soldiers who died fighting the Allies during the first world war. To many Turks it also represents the moment at which the armed forces s http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=734 2007-07-13 08:07:41 In this essay, I address the question of whether the indisputable progress being made by the neurosciences poses a genuine threat to the language game of responsible agency. I begin by situating free will as an ineliminable component of our practices of http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=733 2007-07-06 11:07:01 Shortly after he was nominated by Turkey's outgoing government to be a high-profile candidate in this month's general election, Mehmet Simsek made an acceptance speech to ruling party worthies. It did not go down well. "I said all these stupid things a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=732 2007-07-03 08:07:26 At a time when Islamist terrorism seems to have returned to the centre of London, it is easy to forget that during the 20th century terror was used on a vast scale by secular regimes. Today suicide attacks are automatically linked with a belief in martyrd http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=731 2007-06-30 08:06:11 Many EU politicians and their voters are unsure about the merits of Turkish accession. Europe’s entrepreneurs are not. They are showing confidence by investing billions into the fast-growing Turkish economy, partly because they expect that EU accession http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=730 2007-06-30 07:06:57 Imagine that you wanted the EU to go the whole hog, totus porcus, toward statehood. What would you have most wanted to get out of the recent Brussels summit? In fact, much of your work would already have been done. The EU currently possesses many of th http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=729 2007-06-26 10:06:56 Richard Gere’s Clifford Irving, a charlatan and a fool, is also an innocent, blundering into something far bigger and darker than his talent or imagination can contain. “The Hoax” gestures beyond the particulars of its case toward a pervasive social uneas http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=728 2007-06-23 07:06:06 Angelina Jolie plays Mariane Pearl, the wife of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal correspondent kidnapped and beheaded in Karachi. The story begins on the day of his disappearance; as the horrors unfurl, we see Mariane replaying in her mind the moment w http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=727 2007-06-23 07:06:04 It depicts a global economy in which nearly all signs are positive -- and in which the problems that do exist, such as stagnation or setbacks in sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union, will be solved if economic growth and technological improvemen http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=726 2007-06-21 16:06:15 Slate has asked a number of philosophers and intellectuals to share reminiscences of Dick Rorty, personal and otherwise. Rorty, whose characteristic attitude was a shrug and a ho-hum, believed that human beings must stop looking for some nonhuman or extra http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=725 2007-06-20 05:06:28 The Palestinian ruin was a long time in coming. No other national movement has had the indulgence granted the Palestinians over the last half-century, and the results can be seen in the bravado and the senseless violence, in the inability of a people to c http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=724 2007-06-20 03:06:27 “In a Dark Dark House” is, according to LaBute, his first attempt to weave into dramatic fiction “a kernel of hard fact” about his own family, which is otherwise “shrouded in shadows and sadness.” This is perhaps why the play, which deals with sexual jeal http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=723 2007-06-19 16:06:00 For Richard Rorty, the importance of democracy is that it creates a liberal society in which rival truth claims can compete and accommodate each other. His pragmatism was postmodern, tolerant to a fault, its moral and progressive conclusions never appeali http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=722 2007-06-19 07:06:44 Genetic research DNA tests on their Italian descendants show the 'tuscii' came from Turkey. They gave us the word "person" and invented a symbol of iron rule later adopted by the fascists. Some even argue it was they who really moulded Roman civilisation http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=721 2007-06-18 13:06:23 Animals can evolve either to produce a lot of babies very quickly, or to live longer but reproduce more slowly. Animals facing lots of risks — such as getting eaten by predators — may be better on the fast track. Scientists who have studied the life spans http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=720 2007-06-17 03:06:59 n Turkey, the military and the government are engaged in an all-out struggle for power. The country is deeply divided, and decidedly unstable. Turkish writer Ahmet Altan describes his country's paradoxes and warns of the potentially dire consequences. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=719 2007-06-16 03:06:40 This paper shows that it is plausible that the Cartesian belief in the self-transparency of minds is actually an innate aspect of our mind-reading faculty. But it acknowledges that the crucial evidence needed to establish this claim hasn’t been look http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=718 2007-06-15 14:06:17 Richard Bernstein and I are almost exact contemporaries, were educated in mostly the same placesbymostlythe same people,have been exalted by many of the same hopes, and ha