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Ideas & Philosophy

1,874 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 19 of 32.

1081. Modern criminal justice grew out of a Milan club called the Academy of FistsIn the 1760s a group of young Milanese aristocrats mocked Italy's stuffy academies by naming their own after fistfights. Out of their talk came a slim 1764 book by Cesare Beccaria…
1082. Charles Beard argued the Founding Fathers followed their wallets as much as their principlesIn 1913 a Columbia historian published a study linking how Constitutional Convention delegates voted to their own economic interests. Politicians denounced it, scholars embraced i…
1083. In 1886 Charles Peirce saw that electrical switches could do logicDecades before digital computers, the American logician Charles Sanders Peirce realised electric switching circuits could carry out logical operations. Bertrand Russell called him…
1084. Cicero's name means chickpea, and he refused to change itMarcus Tullius Cicero inherited a family nickname from an ancestor whose nose had a chickpea-like cleft. Urged to drop it on entering politics, he vowed to make it glorious instea…
1085. The father of structural anthropology did only one stint of fieldworkClaude Lévi-Strauss insisted that so-called savage and civilised minds share the same structures. Yet his only ethnographic fieldwork came during a few years in Brazil in the 1930…
1086. Clifford Geertz read cockfights and bazaars the way critics read novelsFor thirty years no American cultural anthropologist was judged more influential than Clifford Geertz. He built that reputation on patient fieldwork in Javanese towns, Balinese vi…
1087. Confucius is a name invented by Jesuit missionaries two thousand years laterThe sage Chinese people call Kongzi, Master Kong, became Confucius only in the late sixteenth century, when Jesuits Latinised a grander title meaning roughly Great Master Kong. Bo…
1088. The laughing philosopher imagined atoms and countless worlds 2,400 years agoDemocritus pictured everything, from water to people, as clumps of tiny indivisible bodies moving through empty space. He guessed there were many worlds, some without a sun, other…
1089. The most influential psychologist of the century first wanted to be a novelistB. F. Skinner graduated in English literature and spent a miserable stretch trying to write fiction, despite encouragement from Robert Frost. He gave up, discovered John B. Watson…
1090. Bertrand Russell's secular godfather was John Stuart Mill, who died a year laterBorn into a Whig dynasty, Bertrand Russell was orphaned at four and raised by a Presbyterian grandmother who overturned his father's wish that he grow up agnostic. He became a fou…
1091. Reading The Golden Bough turned a sickly Polish philosopher into anthropology's great fieldworkerBronisław Malinowski started out studying mathematics and physics in Kraków. Illness, travel and one book by James Frazer sent him to the Trobriand Islands, where years of living …
1092. Freud picked Carl Jung as his heir, then lost himSigmund Freud hoped the young Swiss psychiatrist would carry psychoanalysis forward and lend it credibility beyond its largely Jewish founders. He made Jung president of the new I…
1093. Asked if the heavens were eternal, Averroes wisely said nothing at firstIn 1169 the Almohad caliph asked Ibn Rushd whether the heavens had always existed. Fearing a dangerous answer, he stayed silent until the ruler showed he knew Plato and Aristotle …
1094. Before his heresy trial, Spinoza had himself declared an orphan to escape debtIn March 1656 a young Amsterdam merchant asked city officials to rule him a legal orphan, freeing him from his late father's crushing debts. It worked, but it broke synagogue rule…
1095. Drunken monks accused Bede of heresy for doing his own arithmeticBede worked out for himself how old the world was and put the birth of Christ 3,952 years after creation, well short of the accepted figure of over 5,000. At a feast in 708, some …
1096. The phrase meaning of life is younger than the steam locomotivePeople have always wondered why they exist, but the English words meaning of life first appeared in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus in the 1830s. German Romantics had coined the …
1097. Why "Can you open the window?" is not really a questionTaken literally, a teacher asking whether you can open the window is enquiring about your arm strength. Everyone hears a request instead. That gap between what a sentence says and…
1098. Children copied the adults who hit Bobo, and psychology changed courseIn 1961 Albert Bandura let children watch an adult either attack an inflatable doll or ignore it. Those who saw the violence were more likely to pummel the doll themselves. The fi…
1099. Albert Ellis cured his own shyness by approaching 100 strangers in a monthAt 19, terrified of rejection, Albert Ellis made himself start conversations with 100 women in the Bronx Botanical Garden over a single month. Not one agreed to a date, but his fe…
1100. Tocqueville crossed the Atlantic to inspect prisons and came back with DemocracyIn 1831 the French government sent a young aristocrat to report on American penitentiaries. Alexis de Tocqueville did tour some jails, then spent nine months roaming from Michigan…
1101. At 63, a mathematician with no philosophy training became a Harvard philosopherAlfred North Whitehead spent decades on algebra and co-wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell. Then, with no formal grounding in philosophy, he accepted a Harvard philo…
1102. Locked up by Mussolini, Gramsci filled 3,000 pages that outlived fascismAntonio Gramsci stood under five feet tall, was jailed by the fascist regime in 1926, and wrote more than thirty notebooks behind bars. To slip past the censors he sometimes calle…
1103. Everything we read by Aristotle was never meant for the publicAristotle wrote polished dialogues for a general audience, and almost all of them are lost. What survives, about a third of his output, is essentially teaching material for studen…
1104. The philosopher of pessimism lived comfortably on government bond interestArthur Schopenhauer taught that the world is driven by a blind, irrational will and praised the denial of self. He could afford to think so freely because his inheritance, parked …
1105. Comte named sociology only after someone else took social physicsAuguste Comte first called his science of society social physics. When the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet adopted that phrase, Comte coined sociologie in 1838, unaware that…
1106. The Oxford historian so popular his lectures were moved to 8:30 a.m.A. J. P. Taylor packed Oxford lecture halls so tightly that he was scheduled at half past eight in the morning to thin the crowds. Millions more knew him from television, and Rich…
1107. Maslow was so embarrassed by his master's thesis that he hid itBefore he mapped human needs into a famous hierarchy, Abraham Maslow wrote a thesis on memorising verbal material, judged it trivial, and tore its listing out of the library catal…
1108. The father of economics tried to refund his students, and they refusedWhen Adam Smith quit his Glasgow chair halfway through a term in 1764 to tutor a young duke, he offered his students their fees back. They would not take the money. The same scrup…
1109. Why medieval thinkers ranked al-Farabi second only to AristotleLater writers gave al-Farabi a remarkable nickname: the Second Master, with Aristotle as the first. He built the earliest full philosophical system in the Islamic world, wrote a v…
1110. A ninth-century Baghdad philosopher invented the codebreaker's favourite trickCounting how often each letter appears in a secret message, then matching the commonest symbols to the commonest letters, is called frequency analysis. Al-Kindi described it in Ba…
1111. Modern philosophy opened with a man trying to doubt absolutely everythingIn six short meditations, René Descartes set out to throw away every belief he could, from physical objects to mathematics. The one thing left standing was the fact that he was do…
1112. Water, air or fire: the first monists each bet on a single stuffThales said everything is ultimately water, Anaximenes said air, Heraclitus fire. Each was guessing at one underlying principle, and that instinct, that reality is at root a singl…
1113. Cicero invented the Latin word behind morality to translate one Greek termMorality comes from the Latin mos, meaning manner or custom, and Cicero coined the adjective moralis to render the Greek word for ethics. Chaucer brought it into English around 13…
1114. No pile of facts, Hume warned, adds up to a single moral dutyIn one short paragraph of his 1739 Treatise, David Hume noticed moralists sliding from describing how things are to declaring how they ought to be, without explaining the jump. Th…
1115. Arabic falsafa reshaped almost every branch of medieval European thoughtWhen Latin scholars translated Arabic philosophical texts, nearly every discipline in medieval Europe was transformed, from psychology to metaphysics. The Arabic word for this ent…
1116. Stop at the only real barn in fake-barn country: do you know it's a barn?A driver passes a string of fake barn facades, pulls up by chance at the one genuine barn, and believes there is a barn in front of them. The belief is true and well grounded, yet…
1117. China's harshest school of statecraft may never have been a schoolLegalism helped the state of Qin conquer its rivals and found China's first imperial dynasty, then took the blame for Qin's cruelty. Yet the label was invented afterwards by Han-e…
1118. Golfers handed a so-called lucky ball actually played betterIn a 2010 study, golfers told their ball was lucky outperformed those who were not. Luck may be nothing but chance, as Daniel Dennett insists, yet believing in it seems to work a …
1119. Some materialists doubt that beliefs, as we picture them, exist at allMaterialism says matter comes first and mind arises from it, but its boldest modern form goes further. Paul and Patricia Churchland argued that some everyday mental notions may be…
1120. Aquinas, the towering medieval thinker, refused to call himself a philosopherTo medieval scholars, philosophers were pagans like Plato and Aristotle. Thomas Aquinas even complained that they fell short of true wisdom. Yet thinkers who saw philosophy as the…
1121. Can a bad mood be about anything? A theory of mind hinges on itMost cognitive scientists think the mind works by shuffling internal symbols that stand for things in the world, even things that never existed. The theory faces an awkward test c…
1122. Metaphysics may owe its grand name to a librarian's shelving decisionAristotle never used the word metaphysics. An editor roughly two centuries after him, probably Andronicus of Rhodes, seems to have titled a book that way simply because it came af…
1123. One modern dualist compares the soul to a magnetic fieldDescartes split reality into thinking stuff and extended stuff in 1641, and medicine largely followed his split for three centuries. Today's dualists are more inventive. William H…
1124. Humanism began as a school syllabus before it became a worldviewLong before it meant a life without gods, humanism meant a reading list. Renaissance teachers used it for grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. A Bavarian theol…
1125. The word hypothesis once meant the plot summary of a Greek playIn ancient Greek the word literally meant placing something underneath, and theatre audiences used it for a synopsis of a drama. Today it names a proposed explanation that must ri…
1126. What if mind, not matter, is the bedrock of everything?Idealists argue that reality is at bottom mental: spirit, consciousness or ideas come first, and physical things depend on them. The claim sounds exotic, yet it has champions from…
1127. One medieval Indian catalogue counted sixteen schools, including one that prized mercuryClassical India produced a crowded marketplace of philosophies, sorted by whether they accepted the Vedas. The familiar count is six orthodox schools and five heterodox ones, but …
1128. Draw three black balls from an urn of twenty, and guess what?Pull four balls from an urn holding twenty, see three black and one white, and you might guess fifteen black in total. That is one of seventeen possible answers. Inductive reasoni…
1129. A winning Siberian football team could betray a secret weapons cityPicture an American in 1950s Moscow reading that a tiny, snowbound Siberian town keeps beating the capital at football. The sensible leap is that the town is no longer tiny, and t…
1130. The Golden Rule got its English name from two Anglicans in 1604Treating others as you would want to be treated is found in nearly every ethical tradition, from Egyptian papyri to Confucius to the Torah. Yet the label itself is surprisingly re…
1131. The ancient Greek word for good first meant brave and capableIn early Greek, agathos described someone good at things, brave and competent, while kakos meant bad or cowardly. Only around 400 BC, with Democritus and then Plato, did the words…
1132. Chasing pleasure directly may be the surest way to miss itHedonism, one of philosophy's oldest ideas, puts pleasure at the centre of motivation, value or morality. Yet its own supporters face awkward obstacles: the paradox of hedonism an…
1133. One medieval Hindu school sought immortality through mercuryHindu philosophy calls itself darshana, a word meaning viewpoint, from a root meaning to see. The views were remarkably varied. Alongside rigorous logicians and dualists sat syncr…
1134. Ancient India produced atomists, sceptics, materialists and logicians long before modern scienceEastern philosophy spans Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Indian traditions. India alone produced a startling range: one school argued the universe reduces to indivisible…
1135. A 12th-century desert-island novel helped shape John Locke's blank slateIbn Tufail, an Andalusian philosopher, imagined a child growing up alone on an island and reaching adult understanding through experience alone. A Latin translation published in 1…
1136. Stopping by the one real barn in fake-barn country breaks the definition of knowledgeImagine driving through a district full of convincing fake barns, unaware of the trick, and happening to stop at the only genuine one. You believe it is a real barn, you have good…
1137. Does Santa Claus have being without existing? One philosopher said yesAlexius Meinong argued that every object of thought has being, but only some of them exist. Santa Claus, on his view, is a genuine individual that simply lacks the property of exi…
1138. Sartre first rejected the existentialist label, then made it famousGabriel Marcel, a French Catholic philosopher, pinned the word existentialism on Jean-Paul Sartre at a 1945 colloquium, and Sartre refused it. Weeks later, on 29 October 1945, he …
1139. Does pain represent anything, or is it just raw feeling?Philosophers traditionally held that every experience points at something beyond itself. Pain is the awkward test case. Critics say it is pure sensation with nothing represented; …
1140. A clever argument suggests there might be only one fact: the truthThe Slingshot argument claims every true statement ultimately stands for the same thing, the value true. If facts are whatever true statements refer to, the conclusion is bizarre:…

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