A best friend with different literary tastes than myself recommended a book. An historian buff he reported this psychological, political rendered piece of fiction as his all time favorite. A friendship of many years deserves its many sacrifices. A bit of time seemed small. Maybe many of us here a...
While the study of psychology has offered little in the way of explaining the creative process, Koestler examines the idea that we are at our most creative when rational thought is suspended--for example, in dreams and trancelike states. All who read The Act of Creation will find it a compelling ...
I have to start by pointing out a serious rift between why I was recommended this book and why I kept reading it: a philosophy major drunkenly trying to defend free will told me I might be impressed by the book's arguments, and I took it as a challenge. I'd love to see an intelligent response to ...
s/t: A Tragi-comedy in Memoriam Messieurs Bouvard et Pecuchet
Tout homme a deux visages, semblable en cela à Janus, le dieu latin. Individu unique, il n'en appartient pas moins à un ensemble ; familial, social, national, planétaire. Entre le fini et l'infini, entre l'indépendance et la dépendance, il doit trouver son harmonie. Que l'une des deux tendances f...
The name is of Egyptian origin and signifies “fifty”—the fifty days between Easter and Pentecost on which the khamsin is said to be particularly frequent. As with its kin: sirocco and foehn, bora and mistral, the khamsin’s effect on the humours of man is violent and mysterious. Its intensity vari...
It was as simple as that. But the two pages in which Galileo argues the point against Simplicius 23 are among the most obscure and incomprehensible in the book. He employs his usual tactics of refuting his opponent's thesis without proving his own; in this case not by sarcasm, but by confusing th...
(c) Skull of Tasmanian wolf and skull of placental wolf (after Hardy). 2 The class mammalia has two main sub-classes*: marsupials and placentals. They have evolved, independently from each other, from a common ancestry (the now extinct therapsids, or mammal-like reptiles). The marsupial em...