The spread of capitalism worldwide has made people wealthier than ever before. But capitalism’s future is far from assured. The global financial meltdown of 2008 nearly produced a great depression. Economies in Europe are still teetering. Income inequality, resource depletion, mass migrations from poor to rich countries, religious fundamentalism?these are just a few of the threats to continui…
Why does the history of dogmatism deserve our attention? This open access book analyses uses of the term, following dogmatism from Victorian Britain to Cold War America, examining why it came to be regarded as a vice, and how understandings of its meaning have evolved. Whilst the field of scientific thought is committed to continuous innovation, ideas about dogmatism – with their roots in anc…
Modern Western culture is inordinately present-minded. Politicians are ignorant of the past. School curricula foreshorten the historical record by focusing on recent events. People lack a sense of their location in time and fail to perceive that contemporary society is constrained by its cultural as well as its biological inheritance. Many historians of the white South African establishment sta…
Thus we are not going to talk about the consequences that the new wave in AI might have for the empiricism/rationalism debate (see Buckner 2018), nor are we going to consider—much—the question of whether it is reasonable to say that what these programs do is ‘learning’ in anything like the sense with which we are familiar (Buckner 2019, 4.2), and we’ll pass over interestin…
In the same year he published his first Dutch poetry in the influential magazine De nieuwe gids (The New Guide). The journal, founded in 1885, was dominated at this period by the poet Willem Kloos (1859–1938), who used its pages to proclaim a radical aestheticism and advocate literature that was both non-sectarian and non-utilitarian. Poetry, Kloos famously asserted, was ‘the supremely indi…