Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The last few years have seen enormous public debate over the collection of metadata through mass surveillance. We now know that intelligence authorities globally have been casting a wide dragnet to capture communications metadata, which they then retain and mine for information.
How can realism in science be defined? Philosophers, historians, and the general public, have always related it to a philosophical doctrine or a technological effect. However, there is a type of realism — very widespread in science — that has gone unnoticed among scholars: the realist attitude of social and cultural origins. Behind this attitude lie commercial and engineering interests.
Recently philosophers and scientists have tried to identify how to make the world better by making people more likely to do good rather than evil. This same problem has also faced those interested in artificial intelligence. As Giuseppe di Lampedusa had Tancredi say in The Leopard, “If we want things to stay as they are things will have to change”… and that goes for people also!
With a record-breaking sixteen Tony Award nominations for his hit musical “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda will soon have to clear some space on his trophy shelf next to his Grammy and Pulitzer. But there is something remarkable about the play that all the critical acclaim has missed entirely. Reviewers have rightfully celebrated Miranda for telling the life story of one of America’s greatest Founders using energetic numbers, a multiethnic cast, and a strong emphasis on hip-hop.
By this time, the thrust of the posts united by the title “Not a dog’s chance” must be clear. While dealing with some animal names, we plod through a swamp (or a bog, or a quagmire) and run into numerous monosyllabic words of varying structure (both vowels and consonants alternate in them), lacking a clear etymology, and designating several creatures, sometimes having nothing to do with one another (for instance, “doe” and “grasshopper,” though this is an extreme case).
Historians and political scientists have quite the task ahead in making sense of the bizarre 2016 presidential race. Fissures in both major parties betray pervasive hostilities. The rise of Donald Trump from investment mogul to television personality to presidential candidate—a process that once horrified GOP insiders—has produced one kind of theater: the spectacle of anger and resentment.
For many others, globalization has dangerous repercussions in terms of entry of foreign direct investment, and foreign corporations into national markets, thus eroding and eradicating indigenous business—for example, think of the street protest among small traders of Delhi against the entry of retail giant WalMart in India. My frustration with globalization is that the narratives I discovered were too fragmented.
Broccoli prevents cancer. Broccoli causes cancer. We are all familiar with the sense that we are constantly being pulled in a million different directions by scientific studies that seem to contradict each other every single day. We are all familiar with the sense that we are constantly being pulled in a million different directions by scientific studies that seem to contradict each other every single day.
With the exception of Kid A/Amnesiac, Radiohead has reinvented itself sonically on every album since OK Computer. Saying that a new release represents a departure from their previous style is therefore paradoxical—the only possible departure would be non-departure.
Some of the controversies in contemporary Equity are of both theoretical and practical significance. This is particularly true of the controversy concerning so-called “backward tracing”. If a defendant misappropriates trust money in order to buy a car, then the beneficiary can trace the value of his equitable proprietary interest in the money into the car.
Several widely circulated opinion pieces assert that because there is no detectable increase in all brain cancers in Australia in the past three decades, cell phones do not have any impact on the disease. There are three basic reasons why this conclusion is wrong.
Despite the biographical clues that historical fact and fiction may afford in excavating Joshua’s life, the investigation itself rests on a set of assumptions that implicate literary studies of slavery and, in particular, the social and intellectual historiography by which we delineate the agency of slaves themselves. The attractive notion that we can access the life of Joshua by way of the literature of Paul betrays the complexity of that actual investigation.
The security of individual nations and the wider world is protected through many means, force or diplomacy, culture or environment. Law is increasingly deployed as an alternative to military force, although its use dates back as far as international law itself. Even private sector and other non-governmental attorneys play a leading role in lawfare.
Aristotle’s ideas had been dismissed in many quarters of the philosophical world as expressions of a bygone pre-scientific age. But Putnam saw through the dismissive haze to the empirically- and philosophically-respectable core of Aristotle’s philosophy: hylomorphism.
Mortality is not a theme that Shakespeare shies away from in his works, and in many cases death serves an integral part of a play’s plot. Occasionally his deaths are tragic, others are gruesome and violent, and others are just creative (we’re looking at you, Antigonus), but they play move the play along or resolve its final conflict.
May is known as International Zombie Awareness Month. After witnessing many poor comrades lose their lives in Hollywood zombie uprisings, we’ve decided that we need to prepare for any eventuality. Suppose the living dead do come calling, where is the best place to hide, and, as Simon Pegg hopes, “wait for the whole thing to blow over”? There is but one option, a library. Here’s five reasons why.