People have always been xenophobic, but an explicit philosophical and scientific view of human racial difference only began to emerge during the modern period. Why and how did this happen? Surveying a range of philosophical and...
Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. In...
The irrationality of 2020 Irrationality was published in 2019, but the real subject of the book, it turns out, is the year 2020. The book now seems to me to be describing a world that had been gestating for some years, but that only came out kicking and screaming, loud enough...Read More
Justin Smith on IrrationalityIt’s a story we can’t stop telling ourselves. Once, humans were benighted by superstition and irrationality, but then the Greeks invented reason. Later, the Enlightenment enshrined rationality as the supreme value. Discovering that reason is the defi...Read More