Our current understanding of philosophy is a relatively recent invention. It took shape in late eighteenth-century Germany, when a small group of scholars redefined what philosophy was and how its history...
Music forms the soundtrack that accompanies and brightens our daily lives. It is one of the very few endeavours that unite us all. Its intrinsic value is undeniable. However, this often does not translate...
How do scientists interpret the results of an experiment? How do they draw conclusions from experiments? In January of 1939, the young Alan Hodgkin decided to break in some new lab equipment and he had...
First, in China, mediation is not the “soft periphery” of law but one of the system’s operating cores. It is embedded across institutions: from people’s mediation at the grassroots, to court-led...
One afternoon, having just clocked in, I sat down next to a resident of the care home where I worked in the mid-2010s and asked her what she thought about the programme she was watching on TV. Looking...
When the intellectual historian István Hont (1947-2013) defected to the United Kingdom in 1975, he knew that he would likely never see his native country or much of his family ever again. He also knew,...
It is a commonplace too often taken for granted that the Enlightenment––in particular Kant’s grounding of morality in reason––was a failure. For some, the Enlightenment’s attempt to clear...
What did it mean to travel in the premodern world – long before passports, maps, or reliable roads? Countless surviving yet often overlooked accounts open a window onto a time when people from Asia,...
On March 4, Mexico took a remarkable step backward: Congress approved a new electoral reform that will, once again, ban consecutive reelection for all elected officials starting in 2030, with the stated...
In 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a group with deep roots in religious politics, won a decisive electoral victory in Turkey. The party secured a majority of the national vote, formed a...
My book, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Early American Linguistics, addresses an audience of interested scholars and potential readers with the following concentrations: historians of linguistics with attention...
During the 1960s and 1970s, most Latin American republics saw their democratic systems ousted by ruthless military dictatorships. Whether in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, or Uruguay, these regimes...