Products and services
A crucial topic in moral philosophy involves the aggregation and comparison of harms and benefits. How many, for instance, minor headaches relieved is worth a single human life? How many people being able to travel 75 miles per hour rather than 70 miles per hour are worth some number of additional car accidents and deaths? […]
Read More
Boredom“How dreadful boredom is,” declared Soren Kierkegaard in Either/Or. He didn’t say whether he was referring to everyday boredom or whole-life boredom. We might regard the first as merely unpleasant—we can’t wait until an uninteresting lecture gets done, or we don’t know what to do on a slow Saturday afternoon. In whole-life boredom, however, nothing […]
Read More
One of the greatest challenges in fundamental physics is to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity in a full theory of "quantum gravity”. It is a challenge that has by turns excited and frustrated physicists, for nearly a century.
Read More
Before turning to the pandemic, allow me to tell a story. One of my cousins—let’s call him “Walt”—grew up loving cars. As a 12-year-old, Walt could name the make and model of every car we passed in his rural New Hampshire town. When Walt got old enough to drive, he and his friends would modify […]
Read More
Writers, cinematographers, and philosophers have often wondered what love could look like in a virtual age. Could we fall in love with a sophisticated AI? Will there be a time in which people think that having sex in person is odd or even gross? Will the children of our children ever leave their bedroom in […]
Read More
So much about COVID-19 seems uncertain. When will a vaccine be widely available and how many will refuse it? What’s the infection fatality rate? To what extent are we undercounting, or over-counting, the number of infections and deaths? Can the virus spread from contaminated surfaces? How risky is it to use public transportation or go […]
Read More
Although religious practice has not withered away as some once predicted, its continuing influence is the source of widespread unease. Theorists such as Charles Taylor suggest that modern science and market capitalism have banished the gaps and crevices through which transcendence used to appear. In response, my book – Hope in a Secular Age – […]
Read More
A few weeks ago I went out for my daily walk on Thursday evening just before 8pm. I had forgotten that since the current lockdown in the UK, this is the time set aside for the weekly Clap for our Carers campaign. It’s a public event to show appreciation of all NHS and frontline staff. […]
Read MoreKeep up with the latest from Cambridge University Press on our social media accounts.
