Macat

How do we know what knowledge is? In his 1963 article "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" American philosopher Edmund Gettier radically challenged the accepted definition of knowledge itself. Greek philosopher Plato, discussing knowledge well over 2000 years ago, defined it as "justified true belief." To be considered knowledge a proposition had to fulfill three criteria: A) It is true. B) You believe it to be true. C) You are justified in believing...

Some people think nationhood is as old as civilization itself. But for anthropologist, historian, and political scientist Benedict Anderson, nation and nationalism are products of the communication technology of the era known as the modern age, which began in 1500. After the invention of the printing press in around 1440, common local languages gradually replaced Latin as the language of print. Ordinary people could now share ideas of their own. Later,...

A History of Financial Crises was first published in 1978, the world was entering a new period of global economic turbulence. Established economists based their analyses on the assumption that investors act rationally, and these economists often communicated their ideas with dry, technical language. Kindleberger rebelled against convention. Using a more literary and descriptive style, he came up with a new view. He argued that markets are unstable...

What might society look like if we were brave enough to emerge fully from the shadow of the Christian God? The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche explores this intriguing question in his 1886 work, Beyond Good and Evil. Going further, Nietzsche then asks of his "philosophers of the future" that they take on the challenge of supplying humanity with new ideals to live by. Nietzsche bases his understanding of our current morality in history and...

Europeans once thought all swans were white. "White" was part of how they defined "swan." Then black swans were discovered, and the definition changed forever. In his 2007 book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb says the Black Swans of his title can appear at any time, in the form of financial crises, wars, and other unexpected events that have profound, irreversible consequences. Taleb draws on philosophy, mathematics, economics, and other disciplines...

Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War is generally acknowledged as the first great work in the fields of both history and political theory. It uses a combination of narrative, debate, and analysis to document the war between Athens and Sparta (431—404 b.c.). But the importance of the work lies less in the story, than in the way Thucydides tells it. History was the first major work of political inquiry that did not relate events to divine...

Since the nineteenth century people have claimed that the prosperity enjoyed by the First World was the result of its devotion to unconstrained economic freedoms. In his 2003 book Kicking Away the Ladder, South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang claims this was not the case and that, in fact, First World economic success was due to exactly the kinds of state intervention that traditional economic thinking consistently opposes today. Chang's detailed...

Most likely written between 170 and 180 c.e., Meditations is a remarkable work, a unique insight into the thinking of one of the most conscientious and able Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius, who ruled at the apex of Roman might in the late second century c.e. It was never intended to be widely circulated. Indeed, it was almost unknown until the sixteenth century. The work is like a series of jottings, written for its author's own improvement; it has...

After World War II ended in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States began a decades-long confrontation that would become known as the Cold War. American foreign policy focused on "containment"-preventing the communist USSR from gaining more ground-and many people looked at the geographical and political implications of this policy. Others, meanwhile, explored American domestic life in that same period. But historian Elaine Tyler May became the...

US psychologist Abraham Maslow's 1943 essay "A Theory of Human Motivation" established his idea of humanistic psychology as a "third force" in the field. Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis developed the idea of understanding the mind through dialogue between patient and analyst. The behaviorism of Ivan Pavlov and John Watson focused on comprehending it through behaviors that can be measured, trained, and changed. Maslow, however, outlined a new approach...