Articles

On the meaning of life, finally

Why is this worth your time? Regular readers will be aware that I think Dr. Iain McGilchrist is one of the most consequential minds of our times. Last month he published a monster 1,400 page book, The Matter With Things. It’s his masterpiece, and an attempt to comprehensively expand on a thesis that has changed my life. I had the privilege of interviewing him last week.

This essay originally appeared at Adam Smith Works. The University of Virginia Center for Politics, led by Larry Sabato, provides polling results that show deep social, political, and psychological divides between Biden voters and Trump voters. Nowadays, it is common to think that large swaths of other people must be in denial. In the old […]

Enchantment is essentially an experience of wonder, and like the experience itself, the subject is hard to pin down. So think of this essay instead as a wander through one corner of it, with glimpses farther afield.

“The entire book that you are going to read,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in the Introduction of Democracy in America, Volume One (1835), “was written under the pressure of a sort of religious terror in the author’s soul, produced by the sight of this irresistible revolution” (6, Mansfield & Winthrop ed., U. Chicago Press, 2000).

She was born in August 1915, in Roquefort la Bédoule in the south of France. She died this morning. Adeline Blanc was my adopted grandmother.

I was pleased to find that the Oxford philosopher JR Lucas was a fan of The Master and his Emissary, and he sent me a number of his papers over the years.  Most are still accessible but this gem was possibly never published. Before he died I asked if I could quote from it in my […]