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When I’ve been on holiday in a foreign city, I’ve always enjoyed wandering around aimlessly in its public spaces, getting to know them in a wholly unsystematic and haphazard way, and even in Cambridge, where I have lived and worked for almost thirty years now, part of my day, unless the press of work was […]
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An emergency is defined not by the inherent badness or dangerousness of a situation, but by what we make of it. To call something an ‘emergency’ is to declare that something can and must be done about it – even at the cost of significant disruption to everyday life. Things judged to be beyond our […]
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The most important virtues in our present situation are undoubtedly patience, self-restraint, and forbearance. Yet none of them is contained in the catalogue of virtues in Aristotle’s ethics (see Nicomachean Ethics II 7). This is not because his assessment of the conditions of the good, active human life is particularly optimistic or because he does […]
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I knew in mid-February that we might be quarantined, and so I stocked up on essentials that became rare later. I knew in early March that economic catastrophe was imminent. My foreknowledge didn’t surprise me; I bet in early 2016 that Donald Trump would win the presidency, to the mockery of my friends from whom […]
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I am seventy-nine years old and I have Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. It is a pretty severe lung disease and, until recently, if you developed it, make sure your will is in order and you might think about pre-arranging your funeral. It was fatal in a couple of years or so. Now, thanks to a very […]
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There is an image, associated with the covid-19 pandemic, that I am unable to forget among the countless reports of the crisis one encounters every day in newspapers and online. It is not an image of suffering or devastation but of something both more hopeful and, viewed from a certain perspective, more provocative. The picture […]
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Sooner or later, our pandemic triggers a heartfelt question from its reflective victims: Why us? Of course, we can sketch a biological answer in terms of viral mutation and transmission, but that only would scratch the surface. We sometimes have in mind a deeper ‘Why?’, unless we consider the world devoid of such explanatory depth. […]
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Did the God of theism—omnipotent, wholly wise, and perfectly good—use Darwinian evolution to create species? Many contemporary thinkers see this “evolutionary theism” as wildly implausible. Why? One reason is that Darwinian evolution has caused unimaginable amounts of brutal suffering by animals in an unfathomably long planetary past, and it does so in nature now. Did […]
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