Hobbes (1651, 1985), Thomas, Leviathan: The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, Penguin Classics 1985 ' Written during the turmoil of the English Civil War, Leviathan is an ambitious and highly original work of political philosophy. Claiming that man's essential nature is competitive and selfish, Hobbes formulates the case for a powerful sovereign—or "Leviathan"—to enforce peace and the law, substituting security for the anarchic freedom he believed human beings would otherwise experience. This worldview shocked many of Hobbes's contemporaries, and his work was publicly burnt for sedition and blasphemy when it was first published. But in his rejection of Aristotle's view of man as a naturally social being, and in his painstaking analysis of the ways in which society can and should function, Hobbes opened up a whole new world of political science. Based on the original 1651 text, this edition incorporates Hobbes's own corrections, while also retaining the original spelling and punctuation, to read with vividness and clarity. C. B. Macpherson's introduction elucidates one of the most fascinating works of modern philosophy for the general reader.' 
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Polanyi (1966, 2009), Michael, and Amaryta Sen (foreword), The Tacit Dimension, University Of Chicago Press 1966, 2009 ' “I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell,” writes Michael Polanyi, whose work paved the way for the likes of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The Tacit Dimension argues that tacit knowledge—tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments—is a crucial part of scientific knowledge. Back in print for a new generation of students and scholars, this volume challenges the assumption that skepticism, rather than established belief, lies at the heart of scientific discovery.' 
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Aatish Taseer, In Search of a Lost Spain, ' ON A MORNING of haunting heat in Seville, I sought out the tomb of Ferdinand III. There, in the Gothic cool, older Spaniards came and went, dropping to one knee and crossing themselves before the sepulcher of the Castilian monarch. There were men in staid tucked-in shirts, gray checked with yellow, and women with short-cropped hair and knee-length dresses, slim belts around their waists. They sat in pews under a coffered ceiling, dourly communing with El Santo, the patron saint of what would come to be called La Reconquista — the man under whom five and a half centuries of Muslim rule had in 1248 come to an end in this town: Seville, or Ishbiliya, as it was known then./ back

Aquinas, Summa, I II, 2, 8, Does any created good constitute man's happiness?, 'I answer that, It is impossible for any created good to constitute man's happiness. For happiness is the perfect good, which lulls the appetite altogether; else it would not be the last end, if something yet remained to be desired. Now the object of the will, i.e. of man's appetite, is the universal good; just as the object of the intellect is the universal true. Hence it is evident that naught can lull man's will, save the universal good. This is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone; because every creature has goodness by participation. Wherefore God alone can satisfy the will of man, according to the words of Psalm 102:5: "Who satisfieth thy desire with good things." Therefore God alone constitutes man's happiness.' back

Bourgeoisie - Wikipedia, Bourgeoisie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The bourgeoisie is a sociologically defined social class, equivalent to the middle or upper middle class. They are distinguished from, and traditionally contrasted with, the proletariat by their affluence, and their great cultural and financial capital. . . . The bourgeoisie in its original sense is intimately linked to the existence of cities, recognized as such by their urban charters (e.g., municipal charters, town privileges, German town law), so there was no bourgeoisie apart from the citizenry of the cities. . . . In Marxist philosophy, the bourgeoisie is the social class that came to own the means of production during modern industrialization and whose societal concerns are the value of property and the preservation of capital to ensure the perpetuation of their economic supremacy in society.' back

Foo, Arabaci, Zych & Mann, Quantum Signatures of Black Hole Mass Superpositions, 'Abstract We present a new operational framework for studying “superpositions of spacetimes,” which are of fundamental interest in the development of a theory of quantum gravity. Our approach capitalizes on nonlocal correlations in curved spacetime quantum field theory, allowing us to formulate a metric for spacetime superpositions as well as characterizing the coupling of particle detectors to a quantum field. We apply our approach to analyze the dynamics of a detector (using the Unruh-deWitt model) in a spacetime generated by a Banados-Teitelboim-Zanelli black hole in a superposition of masses. We find that the detector exhibits signatures of quantum-gravitational effects corroborating and extending Bekenstein’s seminal conjecture concerning the quantized mass spectrum of black holes in quantum gravity. Crucially, this result follows directly from our approach, without any additional assumptions about the black hole mass properties.' back

Henri Bergson (1911), Creative Evolution, Citation: Henri Bergson. "Table of Contents", Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell, Ph.D. New York: Henry Holt and Company (1911).
Editors' Note: The jacket of a recent republication of this book described it as "the fullest expression of the philosopher's ideas about the problem of existence, propounding a theory of evolution completely distinct from those of earlier thinkers and scientists".' back

Honor killing - Wikipedia, Honor killing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' An honor killing (American English), honour killing (Commonwealth English), or shame killing[1] is the murder of an individual, either an outsider or a member of a family, by someone seeking to protect what they see as the dignity and honor of themselves or their family. Honor killings are often connected to religion, caste and other forms of hierarchical social stratification, or to sexuality. Most often, it involves the murder of a woman or girl by male family members, due to the perpetrators' belief that the victim has brought dishonor or shame upon the family name, reputation or prestige.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (2019b), Essay 29: Political dynamics: Rousseau, Rawls and the Physiology of Contract, ' In this essay I wish to briefly examine the provisions made by Rousseau and Rawls for dealing with contractual problems and then to examine the overall problem in the light of the physiology of multicellular creatures. A mammal is a stable self reproducing system comprising of many trillions of individual cells which is continually assailed by millions of species of freeloading parasites, ranging from cells turned cancerous through viruses and bacteria to large carnivores. In broad terms we are dealing with cooperation and immunity, and I hope to throw some light on the immunity of the social systems envisaged by Rousseau, and Rawls. back

Jessica Genauer, A struggle between normality and madness: why Volodymyr Zelensky’s speeches have captured the world’s attention, ' Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has captured the world’s attention with powerful speeches broadcast from a besieged Kyiv. His words have galvanised global support for Ukraine’s struggle. Now, a selection of 16 wartime speeches, chosen by Zelensky himself, will be published in a new volume: A Message From Ukraine. All proceeds from book sales will go to United24, an initiative established by him to raise funds for Ukraine. . . . Perhaps, the true power of Zelensky’s speeches lies ultimately in the very ordinariness of his manner and message – reminding us that we all strive for freedom and life, and showing us the power of remaining human even under the most inhuman conditions.' back

Joshua Zeitz , Where Will This Political Violence Lead? Look to the 1850s. , ' The decision of so many American conservatives to embrace political violence, or the language and symbolism of political violence, is a troubling reality. We can’t have a functioning democracy if one side refuses to accept its norms and rules. But history suggests we might have more to worry about. Democratic violence in the 1850s ultimately led a majority of Republicans, who represented the political majority, to draw a line in the sand and enforce it by violence when necessary. If history is a guidepost, we are on the precipice of dangerous future in which politics devolves into a contest of force rather than ideas. That’s a future everyone should want to avoid.' back

Kenan Malik (2022_10_30), TS Eliot’s Waste Land was a barren place. But at least a spirit of optimism still prevailed, ' In an essay on James Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot portrayed the novel, published in the same year as The Waste Land, as depicting “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”. That may be a curdled reading of Joyce, but it is revealing of Eliot’s own preoccupations. Eliot suggests we live in a world that preferred the deadness of cynicism to the fragility of hope Those preoccupations turned The Waste Land, paradoxically, into both the greatest modernist poem and a profound lament for the impact of modernism and for the loss of a moral anchor through the erosion of faith and tradition. The modern world had, for Eliot, become a spiritless, barren wasteland in which people lived disconnected from each other, driven largely by individual lusts and desires: “Here is no water but only rock/ Rock and no water and the sandy road".' back

Lucretius - Wikipedia, Lucretius - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Titus Lucretius Carus c. 15 October 99 BC – c. 55 BC) was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the didactic philosophical poem De rerum natura about the tenets and philosophy of Epicureanism, and which is usually translated into English as On the Nature of Things. back

Megan Greenwell, Universal Basic Income Has Been Tested Repeatedly. It Works. Will America Ever Embrace It?, ' If empirical evidence ruled the world, guaranteed income would be available to every poor person in America, and many of those people would no longer be poor. But empirical evidence does not rule the world, and it is far from clear that there is a political path forward for guaranteed income on a large scale.' back

Mick McKenzie, Amerlia Ballinger & Joel Tozer, Trafficked: Women shunted ‘like cattle’ around Australia for sex work, ' A global human trafficking syndicate has exploited flaws in Australian border security and the immigration system that allowed it to run a national illegal sex racket moving exploited foreign women around the country like “cattle”. The crime boss at the operation’s centre set up his Australian operation immediately after his release from jail in Britain, where he was implicated in a similar illegal sex ring. Binjun Xie, now a wealthy Sydney resident but previously identified by UK police as a Chinese triad boss nicknamed “The Hammer”, is one of several crime syndicate figures using migration system gaps.' back

Thucydides - Wikipedia, Thucydides - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Thucydides (c. 460 – c. 400 BC) was an Athenian historian and general. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the fifth-century BC war between Sparta and Athens until the year 411 BC. Thucydides has been dubbed the father of "scientific history" by those who accept his claims to have applied strict standards of impartiality and evidence-gathering and analysis of cause and effect, without reference to intervention by the gods, as outlined in his introduction to his work.' back

Yang-Mills theory - Wikipedia, Yang-Mills theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Yang–Mills theory is a gauge theory based on the SU(N) group, or more generally any compact, reductive Lie algebra. Yang–Mills theory seeks to describe the behavior of elementary particles using these non-Abelian Lie groups and is at the core of the unification of the electromagnetic force and weak forces (i.e. U(1) × SU(2)) as well as quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong force (based on SU(3)). Thus it forms the basis of our understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics.' back