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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The idea that Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues entirely lacked the philosophical bite or intellectual depth of Plato’s had become a commonplace in a philosophical discourse which prioritised abstract knowledge over broader ethics. Dr Carol Atack makes the case for Xenophon’s kinder Socrates.
Now the dust has settled on another eventful year, it’s time to look back on some of the words that characterised 2022.
Scottish poetry produced in the long eighteenth century might strike you as at once familiar and unknown. Hundreds of poets, balladists, and songwriters born or raised in Scotland throughout the long eighteenth century need to find new readerships.
I have always wanted to write about the enigmatic phrase “red gold.” Our characterization of color is a matter of culture, not physiology.
To help put you in the apt mood for Halloween this year, we have created a quiz to test your knowledge on some of Oxford World’s Classics scariest tales. Are you up for the challenge?
There are three components to empathy and its expression: cognitive—the ability to grasp what the person thinks, to see things from their perspective; affective—the ability to discern another’s feelings; and importantly, the ability to act in such a way as to convey understanding to the other, sometimes referred to as compassionate empathy.
To help curate your summer playlist and reading list, here are 10 songs and Oxford World’s Classics we recommend you add to your rotation:
Months before the Grand Finale of the Eurovision Song Contest on May 14, 2022 in Turin, Italy, Ukraine was able to claim both moral and musical victory with its entry, the Kalush Orchestra’s “Stefania” (Stephanie). Together with the official videos of all other national entries, “Stefania” began circulating globally on multiple internet platforms in the early weeks of 2022, even as the threat of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine intensified and then reached the full force of invasion on 24 February.
To my knowledge, Price’s Boston address remained inconclusive until I visited Special Collections at the University of Arkansas Mullins Library this past January to find new leads for the Price biography I am co-authoring with Samantha Ege, the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, Oxford. The recovery of this information fills a void in a life story for which “the necessary evidence to write a detailed biography,” as preeminent Price scholar Rae Linda Brown once put it, “is surprisingly scant.”
[long read] Transhumanists insist that their vision of the “radical” bioenhancement of human capacities is light-years removed from prior eugenics, which was state managed. This reassuring, empowering picture is undercut by transhumanists’ own arguments, which offer incompatible pictures of personal autonomy in relation to decisions about the use of bioenhancement technologies.
The ideas of generations and generational differences are ubiquitous. Millennials are characterized as job-hoppers; Baby Boomers are painted as selfish and materialistic. Media accounts blame generations for everything from changes in red meat consumption to the declining popularity of high-heeled shoes, doorbells, and paper napkins. Generations are likewise accused of disrupting normative ways of life and social institutions; these ideas are alluded to and supported […]
In a time of global crisis that has reproduced many inequalities and reinforced mistrust across lines of identity in diverse societies, one may easily succumb to a sense that meaningful redress and social cohesion are impossible. But, learning from contexts of large scale violence and civil war, there’s reason to believe that “recognition” based strategies can […]
Would you like to be as learned as Dr. Doddipol? Those heroes of our intensifying similes! Cooter Brown (a drunk), Laurence’s dog (extremely lazy), Potter’s pig (bow-legged), Throp’s wife (a very busy person, but so was also Beck’s wife)—who were they? I have at least once written about them, though in passing (see the post for October 28, 2015). They show up in sayings like as drunk as…, as lazy as…, as busy as…, and so forth. Many people have tried to discover the identity of those mysterious characters.
Air pollution harms billions of people worldwide. Pollutants are produced from all types of combustion, including motor vehicles, power plants, residential wood burning, and forest fires so they are found everywhere. One of the most dangerous of these, fine particulate matter, is 20 to 30 times smaller than a strand of human hair. Their tiny […]
When “quit lit,” the trend of disillusioned PhDs writing personal essays about their decision to leave academia, hit its peak around 2013, I was just finishing my own PhD coursework. It seemed that every day, as I revised my dissertation proposal and worked on recruiting potential field sites, there was another column about the scarcity of tenure-track […]
Fans of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale proliferated as the novel’s scenarios came to resemble the realities of American women who were subject to more regulation and surveillance. In its 2019 sequel, The Testaments, Atwood gives us a different voice and a different tale, told largely from the perspective of someone who perpetuated the authoritarian regime instead of […]