Edinburgh
Does Biology Make us Liars?
The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life By Robert Trivers (Basic Books, 397 pp., $28) ARISTOTLE WAS a cynic. Sure, the Bible exhorts to “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” but he knew better. “The friendly feelings that we bear for another,” instructed his Ethics, “have arisen from the friendly feelings that we bear for ourselves.” READ MORE >>
Highland Games
The Known Unknowns
The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century HistoryBy Emma Rothschild (Princeton University Press, 483 pp., $35) READ MORE >>
Where Do We Come From?
Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790 By Jonathan I. Israel (Oxford University Press, 1,066 pp., $45) I. READ MORE >>
The Boundaries of Justice
Armchair Experts
My colleague on ‘Entanglements,’ Adam Kirsch, posted a perceptive column a few days ago that asked both why we are—as we seem to have been since at least the advent of the middle-class newspaper-reading public in eighteenth-century London, Edinburgh, and Amsterdam—so passionately interested in the affairs of “leaders and nations we don’t know, never will see, and certainly have no power over,” and whether this avidity for consuming news actually brings us closer to reality or instead makes it harder to “see things as they actually are?” READ MORE >>
Being and Time
History Man: The Life of R.G. Collingwood By Fred Inglis (Princeton University Press, 385 pp., $39.50) READ MORE >>
Venice in Texas
Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece Blanton Museum of Art READ MORE >>
The Sordid Tale of Gadhafi and Labor Britain Continues: With 189 Americans Dead on Pam Am 103, The Administration Is Strangely Detached
Let's face it: Moammar Gadhafi has outsmarted the Western powers, and he has been outsmarting them for exactly forty years. Not outsmarting them, by the way, in behalf of an ideology either collectivist or Islamist—although it aspires to leadership in both orbits. Libya's rise this coming year to the presidency of the United Nations General Assembly is a symbolic victory for the mangy man and his very wealthy country with deprived people. READ MORE >>
