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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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The Question of the Meaning of Life: Philosophy and Judaism

The question of the meaning of life is a modern question. This claim may elicit surprise. After all, didn’t ancient and medieval people, especially religious people, believe that they had answers to...

Alan L. Mittleman | 30 Oct 2023

What is democratic perfectionism?

American philosopher Stanley Cavell is read widely across the humanities and social sciences, yet his work has not received much uptake in the field of political philosophy. My new book Stanley...

Jonathan Havercroft | 30 Oct 2023

How Narrative Politics Shapes American Military Might

The end of the Cold War heralded a substantial ‘peace dividend’ during the 1990s, a series of large cuts in defense spending by the United States, the world’s sole remaining military superpower....

Alexandra Homolar | 27 Oct 2023

Performance, Modernity and the Plays

Why engage with a canonical playwright? Isn’t there enough work to do trying and recovering the works of playwrights who have all but been erased from the canon of Irish theatre history and whose plays...

Hélène Lecossois | 26 Oct 2023

Why Kathleen Stock is wrong to assume that ‘it’s not hate speech to say males can’t be women’

Kathleen Stock identifies as a philosopher of (expert on) sex and gender identity partly on the grounds that she has spent years (let us take her word for it) thinking, researching, and building careful...

Alexander Brown | 25 Oct 2023

Joseph Conrad on Russian Despotism

Although the scale and variety of Conrad’s authorship are colossal, no author is perhaps more closely linked to a single text than Conrad is to Heart of Darkness. Critics equate Conrad with its main...

Johan Adam Warodell | 25 Oct 2023

What Makes the Ten Commandments Meaningful?

Most books about the Ten Commandments ask the question: what did they really mean? My book, The Ten Commandments: Monuments of Memory, Belief, and Interpretation, asks instead how they mean. In other...

Timothy S. Hogue | 25 Oct 2023

Henry James and the Promise of Fiction

Henry James has long been recognized as one of the most important theorists of the novel. His extensive reflections on fiction, together with his overriding concern with questions of ethics, explains...

Stuart Burrows | 23 Oct 2023

Reconstructing an ancestral African language, mother to 80 present-day languages in the central African Sahel

In this blog, I provide answers to a few basic questions that I imagine a reader, who is not an expert in historical African linguistics, might wish to ask the author. Why this topic, what’s so interesting...

Ekkehard Wolff | 19 Oct 2023

The Importance of Probability in Computing

A Q&A with Professor Mor Harchol-Balter, author of the new Cambridge textbookIntroduction to Probability in Computing In today’s blog post, we’re delighted to catch up with the author...

Mor Harchol-Balter | 19 Oct 2023

Rebuilding Intellectual Life After The First World War

Students and professors being fed with Commonwealth Fund donation in Innsbruck, June 1921. Hoover Institution Archives In late 1920 Vienna, an old café basement, recently used as a storeroom...

Tomás Irish | 17 Oct 2023

Monks, Merchants, and Exchanges between China and Japan, 839 – 1403 CE

While Muslim traders from the Arabic world and Jewish traders in the Mediterranean have enjoyed a long-established reputation for business acumen, Buddhist traders maintain a rather obscure position in...

Yiwen Li | 16 Oct 2023