Interviews

Paul Guyer
Pure Reason: Paul Guyer Analyzes Immanuel Kant's Moral Philosophy
In the summer of 1762, a thirty-eight-year-old Immanuel Kant picked up a copy of Rousseau's Émile and did not put it down for days. Kant was famously disciplined in his habits,... Read more...
P.M.S. Hacker
Not in Plain Language: P. M. S. Hacker Explains Wittgenstein's Complex Philosophy
In the summer of 1919, Ludwig Wittgenstein walked into a publisher's office in Vienna and placed a manuscript on the desk. He had written it in the trenches and prisoner-of-war... Read more...
Avrum Stroll
Beyond Paradox: Avrum Stroll's Analysis of Bertrand Russell's Philosophical—and other—Development
In 1940, Bertrand Russell was appointed to teach philosophy at the City College of New York. He never gave a single lecture. A Brooklyn mother named Jean Kay filed a... Read more...
Julian Rushton
Something to Sing About: Julian Rushton Raises the Curtain on Mozart's Operas
In the autumn of 1787, Mozart received a commission from the Prague opera house that would produce, in the space of a few extraordinary weeks, one of the most psychologically... Read more...
Philip Weinstein
Tales From the South: Philip Weinstein Explores the “Emotional Intensity” of William Faulkner's Works
In 1948, William Faulkner was broke. Despite having produced some of the most acclaimed novels in American literature, his books were almost entirely out of print, his Hollywood screenwriting work... Read more...
Not Just Pure Reason: Pablo Muchnik on Immanuel Kant's Far-Reaching Influence
Not Just Pure Reason: Pablo Muchnik on Immanuel Kant's Far-Reaching Influence
In 1793, at the age of 69, Immanuel Kant published a book that promptly landed him in trouble with the Prussian government. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone argued... Read more...
Peter Holland
Shakespeare As You Like It: Peter Holland’s View of The Bard’s Life and Works
How does a writer from Elizabethan England still manage to capture the human heart with such uncanny precision? Four centuries after his death, William Shakespeare remains the most performed, most... Read more...
Of Men and Machines: David Leavitt on How Alan Turing Had Computers Down to Science
Of Men and Machines: David Leavitt on How Alan Turing Had Computers Down to Science
In the spring of 1954, a housekeeper arrived at a modest home in Wilmslow, England, and found Alan Turing dead beside a half-eaten apple. He was 41 years old. The... Read more...
James Flannery
James Flannery: W. B. Yeats' Poetry Is A “Dialogue Of Self And Soul”
In the summer of 1889, a twenty-three-year-old William Butler Yeats opened his front door in London and found himself face to face with Maud Gonne. She was twenty-two, strikingly beautiful,... Read more...
Malcolm Macmillan
It's Not All In The Mind: Malcolm Macmillan Analyzes Freudian Slips
In September 1823, a twenty-five-year-old railway construction foreman named Phineas Gage was tamping down blasting powder in a Vermont rock face when the charge detonated prematurely. The explosion drove a... Read more...
Tristram Hunt
The Brave New World: Tristram Hunt On Marx and Engels' Revolutionary Vision
In the autumn of 1842, a twenty-two-year-old Friedrich Engels arrived in Manchester to work at his father's cotton mill and found himself inside the most brutal laboratory of industrial capitalism... Read more...
Playing Along With Mozart: Robert Levin Gives Mozart's Music a High Score
Playing Along With Mozart: Robert Levin Gives Mozart's Music a High Score
In 1787, a letter arrived in Vienna from Leopold Mozart to his daughter Nannerl. It contained news of their family, observations on the weather, and a passing remark that Wolfgang... Read more...