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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Archaeology needs to stay relevant. To do so, it will need to change, but that won’t be simple given how much needs to change, and how many of the things that need changing are systemic, firmly embedded both within disciplinary traditions and practice and within society.
Years before I wrote about the edge of sentience, I remember looking at a crayfish in an aquarium and wondering: Does it feel like anything to be you? Do you have a subjective point of view on the world, as I do? Can you feel the joy of being alive? Can you suffer? Or are you more like a robot, a computer, a car, whirring with activity but with no feeling behind that activity? I am still not sure. None of us is in a position to be sure. There is no magic trick that will solve the problem of other minds.
Since the October 7 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, race and religion have loomed large in debates over appropriate solidarities linking the United States with Israel and Palestine, with the breakdown and reorientation of durable Black-Jewish U.S. civil rights alliances, mounting pressure coming from African American Christian clergy for a ceasefire in Gaza, and even organized Black clergy denunciations of U.S. military aid for the State of Israel as enabling “mass genocide.”
In common parlance, a “prophecy” is a special kind of utterance. Perhaps an oracle about the future, words of approval or condemnation, critique or consolation. Scholars often define prophecy as a kind of message, issued from a deity to their people and mediated through an individual called a prophet.
Perhaps the most popular command in the Bible is to “love your friend”—or “neighbor,” as it’s commonly translated— “as yourself” (Lev 19:18). Less popular today are the preceding verses, which command friends to rebuke each other if one has sinned. In ancient Judaism, a good rebuke was a mark of friendship, although it had to be done the right way.
Who was Charles Darwin the geologist? Was he a nephew, or maybe a cousin, of the illustrious naturalist, who first published the theory of evolution by natural selection? I know they had big families… But no, this is the one and the same. It is often forgotten that, early in his career, Charles Darwin was a ‘card-carrying’ geologist.
Approaching present-day Paris from the south, the ‘rue-Saint-Jacques’ passes through the Latin quarter near the Pantheon and the Sorbonne (Paris IV) on its way to the Petit Pont bridge that crosses to Île de la Cité near Notre Dame Cathedral. For many centuries, this was the avenue of approach to the city for travelers from all points south.
If I met you at a party and we started chatting and telling each other about our favourite authors, and I mentioned Colette, you might look blank.
Inspired by fellow philosopher Anthony Weston, I often ask my ethics students to create a diabolical toolkit of rules that would torpedo public dialogue. The idea here, I explain, is to spell out rules that would maximize the distance between “us” and “them,” ensuring that possibilities for cooperatively setting and achieving social goals—like peace, security, justice, public health, or sustainability—go forever unnoticed. For example, consider things like “prepare your comeback instead of listening” or “be angrier and talk louder than others.”
Reading is good; rereading is better. I can’t say with certainty how many times—forty? fifty?—I’ve read James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” only that for more than thirty-five years I’ve been reading and teaching the story, each time with an undiminished sense of awe and appreciation for how Baldwin issues a prophetic warning about the outcome of racism while making deeply felt gestures of hope and reconciliation.
Human civilization has always celebrated movement. Whether as recreation in everyday life, or elite competition to honour the gods of Olympus, sport has been a cornerstone of human culture for both spectator and competitor since records began. From the cricket crease to the athletics track to the All England Lawn Tennis Club, discover the history of sport in 8 books and bibliographies from Oxford University Press.
This blog post introduces readers to the well-traveled remains of an Egyptian mummy now residing in Houston, Texas. If old Ankh-Hap still had his original hands and an endless supply of papyrus, he might have made entries like these in a diary of his afterlife.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is Germany’s greatest poet, then and now. At the age of thirty-seven he was on the way to being the centre of a national culture, and a European celebrity.
It’s an eventful time in the OUP Music office, as we’ve just sent to press the latest editions of the Piano Time method books by Pauline Hall. It’s always exciting to see the publication of a new title, but these books feel extra special.
The middle of the twentieth century was an optimistic time in the study of human rationality. The newly rigorized science of economics proposed a unified decision-theoretic story of how humans ought to think and act and how humans actually think and act. For the first time, we had good scientific evidence that humans were by-and-large rational creatures.
The music has been hidden—unseen and unheard—for centuries. Listen to the playlist and hear a historic soundscape unfold—songs of compassion and hope, created to accompany the final breaths of life.