Interviews

Anne-Sophie Mutter: The Mozart Effect Is Not All In The Brain (It Is Also Soulfood)
Anne-Sophie Mutter: The Mozart Effect Is Not All In The Brain (It Is Also Soulfood)
On the night of December 5, 1791, a 35-year-old man died in his Vienna apartment of a fever whose precise cause has never been definitively established, leaving behind an unfinished... Read more...
A Life by Design: Nicholas Fox Weber on Le Corbusier's Enduring Legacy
A Life by Design: Nicholas Fox Weber on Le Corbusier's Enduring Legacy
On the morning of August 27, 1965, a 77-year-old man ignored his doctor's strict orders, walked down to the Mediterranean at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, and went for a swim. Le Corbusier had... Read more...
Allen Esterson
No Pure Seduction: Allen Esterson On Freud's Disputed Theories, Views and Methods
In the winter of 1896, Sigmund Freud presented a paper to the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna, claiming to have discovered the origin of hysteria. He had found,... Read more...
Gregory Chaitin
It's Not All In The Numbers: Gregory Chaitin Explains Kurt Gödel's Mathematical Complexities
In the autumn of 1930, a twenty-four-year-old Kurt Gödel attended a conference in Königsberg and quietly announced, in a single understated sentence during a roundtable discussion, that he had proved... Read more...
Kant Can: Allen Wood Clears a Path to Immanuel Kant's Complex Philosophies
Kant Can: Allen Wood Clears a Path to Immanuel Kant's Complex Philosophies
In the spring of 1781, after more than a decade of almost complete silence, Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason. He was fifty-seven years old, and his colleagues... Read more...
Colin McGinn
To Be Or Not To Be: Colin McGinn Dissects The Philosophy of WIlliam Shakespeare's Plays
Sometime around 1600, a playwright working in the most popular entertainment medium of his day sat down and wrote a scene in which a Danish prince, holding a skull, meditates... Read more...
High Marx: Simon Tormey's Take on The “Father of Modern Communism”
High Marx: Simon Tormey's Take on The “Father of Modern Communism”
In the spring of 1848, a wave of revolutions swept across Europe with a speed that astonished everyone, including the two young German intellectuals who had spent the previous months... Read more...
Misha Dichter
Liszt Fever: Misha Dichter on Why Franz Liszt is a “Towering Genius”
In the winter of 1841, a concert audience in Berlin witnessed something that had never quite happened before. Franz Liszt walked onto the stage, removed his gloves with a theatrical... Read more...
Rebecca Goldstein
Incompleteness: Rebecca Goldstein on the Life and Mind of Kurt Gödel
In the spring of 1933, Kurt Gödel sat in a Viennese coffee house and watched the world he had known dissolve around him. The Nazis had come to power in... Read more...
Language Rules: Rom Harré Talks About Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Language
Language Rules: Rom Harré Talks About Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Language
In the spring of 1912, Bertrand Russell received a visit in his rooms at Cambridge from a young Austrian who had arrived the previous term to study aeronautical engineering and... Read more...
The Best of All Possible Worlds: Nicholas Rescher Talks About Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz’s “Versatility and Creativity”
The Best of All Possible Worlds: Nicholas Rescher Talks About Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz’s “Versatility and Creativity”
In 1716, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz died alone in Hanover. His employer, the Elector of Brunswick, had left for London to be crowned George I of England and had not invited... Read more...
The Burden Of Proof: James R. Meyer Says Kurt Gödel's Famous Theorem Just Doesn't Add Up
The Burden Of Proof: James R. Meyer Says Kurt Gödel's Famous Theorem Just Doesn't Add Up
In the autumn of 1930, a twenty-four-year-old Kurt Gödel stood up at a philosophy conference in Königsberg and, in a single quiet sentence during a roundtable discussion, announced that he... Read more...