Interviews

Adolf Grünbaum
Testing Freud: Adolf Grünbaum On The Scientific Standing Of Psychoanalysis
In 1896, Sigmund Freud presented a paper to the Society of Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna in which he claimed to have discovered the specific cause of hysteria: sexual abuse... Read more...
Susan Sterrett
On Kites, Models and Logic: Susan Sterrett Investigates Models in Wittgenstein's World
In the autumn of 1908, a nineteen-year-old Ludwig Wittgenstein arrived in Manchester to study aeronautical engineering. He had come to design kites and propellers, to solve the practical problems of... Read more...
Arthur Danto
Not Just Good and Evil: Arthur Danto Reflects on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Radical Views
In the autumn of 1865, a twenty-one-year-old Friedrich Nietzsche was browsing a secondhand bookshop in Leipzig when he pulled a volume from a shelf almost at random. It was Arthur... Read more...
Sky is the Limit: Martin Rees On Einstein and Astrophysics
Sky is the Limit: Martin Rees On Einstein and Astrophysics
On the morning of September 14, 2015, a pair of detectors in Louisiana and Washington State registered a disturbance so faint that it took months of analysis to be certain... Read more...
Cristanne Miller
Pure Poetry: Cristanne Miller on Emily Dickinson's Life, Works and Irreverent Style
In 1862, Emily Dickinson did something she had never done before and would rarely do again. She wrote to a literary critic named Thomas Wentworth Higginson, enclosing four poems and... Read more...
Jaakko Hintikka: Wittgenstein’s Groundbreaking “Language Games” are Not Child’s Play
Jaakko Hintikka: Wittgenstein’s Groundbreaking “Language Games” are Not Child’s Play
In the spring of 1914, the philosopher Bertrand Russell received a visit in Cambridge from one of his most brilliant and most exhausting students. Ludwig Wittgenstein had been working on... Read more...
John Searle's Philosophical Investigations Into Wittgenstein's Logic of Language
John Searle's Philosophical Investigations Into Wittgenstein's Logic of Language
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His explorations of linguistic meaning, logical structure, and the limits of what can... Read more...
Einstein's Universe: Frank Wilczek Explains The Physicist's Massive Contributions To Science
Einstein's Universe: Frank Wilczek Explains The Physicist's Massive Contributions To Science
I n the spring of 1905, a twenty-six-year-old patent clerk in Bern submitted four papers to the journal Annalen der Physik in the space of a few months. He had no laboratory,... Read more...
Reel Chaplin: Richard Schickel’s View of the Legendary Comedian
Reel Chaplin: Richard Schickel’s View of the Legendary Comedian
In the spring of 1972, Charlie Chaplin returned to Hollywood for the first time in twenty years. He had been effectively exiled from the United States in 1952, his re-entry... Read more...
Joe Nuzzolo
The Persistence of Memory: Joe Nuzzolo Explains Why Dali's Works Still Inspire, Influence Artists
In the summer of 1929, a young Salvador Dalí received a visit in Cadaqués from a group of Surrealists that included René Magritte, Louis Aragon, and Paul Éluard, who brought... Read more...
Janna Levin On Kurt Gödel: Incompleteness Theorem Is Not Just A Numbers Game
Janna Levin On Kurt Gödel: Incompleteness Theorem Is Not Just A Numbers Game
Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein used to walk home together from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, two European refugees in a quiet New Jersey town talking about physics,... Read more...
Deep Freud: Tamas Pataki Analyzes The Psyche Of A Genius
Deep Freud: Tamas Pataki Analyzes The Psyche Of A Genius
In the early hours of June 4, 1900, a book arrived in Viennese bookshops that its author was convinced would change the world. Sigmund Freud had spent four years writing The... Read more...