Category: thatch

If the reader of Five Billion Years of Solitude does not surmise the argument of the book from the title, then certainly the first chapters do. Astronomer Frank...

Besides his many insightful observations of the natural world, biologist Bernard Heinrich adds philosophical insights that confirm the relevance of science to a...

Intelligent reading always requires the use of translations, and however short they may fall from conveying an author’s or language’s nuances, we ar...

Composers of classical music have always tried to reflect moods, themes, narratives, and settings in their works, sometimes literally as in Respighi’s The...

Whether dwelling in forest, mountain, desert — or crowded urban center — the hermit is the most peaceable of people. Sometimes irascible, pedantic, ...

“To hope” is to maintain an expectation, but often a vain, idle, naive one, something unlikely to come to past by sheer logic or probability. What i...

To judge means to come to an affirmative conclusion, whether the process be a quick or a studied reflection. Judgment suggests thorough attention to nuances and...

The hypersensitivity towards the body today has its ironic counterparts in two divergent classic points of view: the derived hedonism of ancient Greek thought m...

Aristotle is noted for his description of the ethical mean (in the Nichomachean Ethics) as balance or mean between two vices, the one involving excess, the othe...

Many scientists lament the apparent fulfillment of Fermi’s paradox, which states that as the universe rapidly expands, the likelihood of finding intellige...