by Lucille Turner | Oct 8, 2017 | History and Fiction
The history of the idea of time is the history of progress. The clock changed the world as the wheel changed the world, except that with a clock you can’t travel backwards; time goes one way only, onwards to the future. The direction of time is intuitively obvious to...
by Lucille Turner | Sep 4, 2017 | History and Fiction
In his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell writes, “Until the Punic Wars, the Romans had been a bucolic people, with the virtues and vices of farmers: austere, industrious, brutal, obstinate and stupid.” It was only when they came into contact with the...
by Lucille Turner | Aug 28, 2017 | History and Fiction
In the second century BC, while the Roman Empire was stocking its legions and perfecting its drills, the outlook of Greek philosophers was becoming more and more individualistic. They began to abandon ideas that no longer had a place in the chaos and uncertainty of...
by Lucille Turner | Aug 20, 2017 | History and Fiction
Aristotle’s pupil was a certain Alexander, a Macedonian prince who would grow up to establish an empire as big as the empire of the Ottomans, which would come into being a thousand years later. The Ottomans would one day take the last remnant of the Greek world, the...
by Lucille Turner | Aug 12, 2017 | Philosophy
William of Ockham, an English philosopher, is credited with the principle of Occam’s razor, also used by scientists such as Einstein. The Occam’s razor principle says that the simplest solution is normally the right one, and it rests upon the same rational,...