Interviews

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...
Raymond Smullyan
Burden of Proof: Raymond Smullyan Puzzles Over Kurt Gödel's Theorems
In January 1978, a 71-year-old man was found dead in his Princeton home, having starved to death. Kurt Gödel, widely regarded as the greatest logician since Aristotle, had developed a... Read more...
Frederic Crews
Frederick Crews: What Did Freud's Theory Owe to Cocaine?
In the winter of 1895, Sigmund Freud wrote a letter to his closest friend, the Berlin physician Wilhelm Fliess, describing a patient he called Emma Eckstein. Freud had referred Emma... Read more...
Shaking Up Foundations Of Math: Roger Penrose On Kurt Gödel's Groundbreaking Work
Shaking Up Foundations Of Math: Roger Penrose On Kurt Gödel's Groundbreaking Work
In the winter of 1970, Kurt Gödel believed he had found a proof for the existence of God. He had been working on it, quietly and with characteristic rigor, for... Read more...
Igor Stravinsky
Rite of Passage: John Heiss on Igor Stravinsky’s Birds, Puppets and Other Musical Tales
On the evening of May 29, 1913, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris hosted the premiere of a new ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. The composer... Read more...
Not Just the Silent Treatment: Frank Scheide Explains Why Chaplin's Work is No Laughing Matter
Not Just the Silent Treatment: Frank Scheide Explains Why Chaplin's Work is No Laughing Matter
In January 1952, Charlie Chaplin boarded the Queen Elizabeth in New York, bound for London for the premiere of his film Limelight. He had lived in the United States for nearly... Read more...