Wabi-sabi is the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of what we think of as traditional Japanese beauty. It occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideas of beauty and perfection in the West. Wabi-sabi can in its fullest expression be a way of life. At the very least, it is a ( Read more... )

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"In May of 1951, at the age of twenty, Jacques Derrida took the entrance exams for the prestigious École Normale Supérieure a second time, having failed, as many students do, in his first attempt the previous year. Fueled by amphetamines after a sleepless week, he choked on the written portion and turned in a blank sheet of paper. The same month, ( Read more... )

(Original essay by Austin L. Hughes, at The New Atlantis…)

"When I decided on a scientific career, one of the things that appealed to me about science was the modesty of its practitioners. The typical scientist seemed to be a person who knew one small corner of the natural world and knew it very well, better than most other human beings living and ( Read more... )

(Original story by David Weinberger at The Chronicle Review...)

"Kuhn undid Popper even more fundamentally than Popper had undone the positivists. The individual propositions within a science might be characterized by falsifiability, but how about the sort of gestalt that crystallized for Kuhn when at last and in an instant he understood Aristotle ( Read more... )

Watch From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians (Pt. 2) on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Watch From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians (Pt. 1) on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

(Original article by John Gray at Prospect Magazine...)

"In accepting that illusion could be productive, Freud was retracing the steps of Schopenhauer’s errant disciple Nietzsche. At the same time Freud was making a decisive break with a dominant strand of Enlightenment thinking. According to Alasdair MacIntyre, who developed the idea in his book ( Read more... )

(Original review by Leon Wieseltier, at The New Republic...)

"NOT LONG AGO the prestige of science was nastily contested by American politics, as conservatism’s war on evolution, environmental science, and other forms of empirical research threatened to confound the American sense of reality. It was George W. Bush against Francis Bacon. Against ( Read more... )

If you had happened to be one of my office-mates this afternoon, you might have been privy to a bit of profane muttering as a certain someone subjected himself to reading Thomas Kuhn's The Structures of Scientific Revolutions. Such blasphemes which might have struck your ears may have included...

• "That makes no G&#-&$#@ed sense."
• "What the bloody ( Read more... )