検索キーワード： 著者 "Boris Kriger" すべてのカテゴリー

Nobody read him. Not one of his discoveries entered science through him. Every single one had to be found again, from scratch, by people who had never heard his name.This is a book about what that costs — and about the method that produced the discoveries in the first place. Leonardo da Vinci...

A linguist steps off a boat onto an unmapped shore. A rabbit runs past. A native speaker points and says a single word: gavagai. The linguist writes in a notebook, with reasonable confidence, the translation rabbit. And in that moment of reasonable confidence, as Willard Van Orman Quine...

Everything in the world runs one way. Coffee cools, glass shatters, memory reaches backward and never forward. In the last decades of the nineteenth century one Viennese physicist tried to explain that one-way world using nothing but particles obeying laws that work perfectly well in reverse. He...

For millennia, the North Star has stood as humanity’s ultimate emblem of constancy—the unmoving nail around which the night turns, guiding ancient caravans, ocean-going caravel fleets, and fugitives walking toward freedom. Yet almost every element of that legendary reputation collapses under...

Eighty years after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry vanished over the Mediterranean, his small book about a boy with golden hair, a single rose, and a fox who taught him what the word "tame" really means continues to outsell almost every other work of literature on Earth. It is read by children who...

He swam in the Danube with a flotilla of geese who were convinced he was their mother, and he was right about something enormous: that behavior is inherited the way a bone is inherited, that it can be compared across species, and that the categories we think with were shaped long before anyone...

This book introduces the Anthropic-Independent Reality Index, a conceptual framework designed to assess the degree to which ideas are shaped — or distorted — by evolved cognitive structures. Drawing on insights from evolutionary epistemology, cognitive neuroscience, and the philosophy of science, the index offers a non-utilitarian scale for measuring the ontological independence of a concept from the adaptive biases of the human mind.

Nobody in the ancient world left behind more of himself than Marcus Tullius Cicero. Speeches, letters, treatises, private grumbles, public boasts, jokes at dinner parties recorded for posterity — the paper trail is so vast that we know his moods better than we know those of most politicians...

In 1946 a five-year-old from Queens stood under a tyrannosaur and decided, on the spot, what he would do with his life. He kept the promise for fifty-six years. What nobody could have predicted is that he would spend most of them arguing with people, cheerfully and at enormous length, in a prose...

Everything in the heavens turns. Moons wheel around planets, planets around stars, stars around the bright hubs of their galaxies, and galaxies around one another in gravitational waltzes so slow that a single step outlasts a mountain range. Rotation is the most ordinary fact in the sky. Yet by...

Twenty-four centuries ago, in a windblown town on the northern coast of Greece, a man who reportedly could not stop laughing made one of the strangest and most consequential claims in the history of thought. Everything you have ever seen or tasted or feared, he said, is built from just two ingredients: tiny indivisible bodies, and the empty space they move through. He called that empty space nothing, and then he did something no one had dared to do before him. He insisted that nothing is every bit as real as something.

What is it that we do when we think? We imagine the mind as a mirror, faithfully reflecting a world that shines in through the senses. It is nothing of the kind. The mind is a fire that exists only while it burns—an activity, not a container; a verb, not a vessel.

Everybody agrees that Mark Twain was funny. This is one of the very few things about which everybody agrees, which ought to make a thinking person suspicious, and this book sets out to spoil the agreement by asking a rude question: why? Laughter looks like the most innocent thing in the world. It is not. A joke is a small machine for slipping a truth past a guard who would have stopped a sermon at the door. Twain understood this better than almost anyone before him and most who have come since.

Under the old rule of the Sanhedrin, a man convicted by every single judge walked free. Seventy-one votes for guilt, and the court released him. The reasoning was not mercy. It was quality control. If nobody on the bench could find a word to say for the accused, then nobody had been looking, and a court that has stopped looking is not a court. Unanimity was treated as a sign that the instrument had broken. Modern life produces unanimity by the hour, and we treat it as proof. This book argues that our century is not less dogmatic than the ones we condescend to, merely better dressed.

We are told that the moral life is a matter of choices, and that a good person is someone who chooses well. Iris Murdoch spent a lifetime quietly dismantling that comfortable picture. For her, the decisive moral work happens long before any choice arrives, in the invisible labor of how we look at the world. By the time we act, the seeing is already done, and the seeing is nearly everything. This book takes the luminous, demanding philosophy of one of the twentieth century’s most original minds and sets it loose in our own restless age.

Alan Turing broke the German naval Enigma, designed the machine you are almost certainly holding or sitting in front of, invented the test that still frames every argument about artificial intelligence, and explained why leopards have spots. He was prosecuted for being who he was, given hormone injections instead of prison, and died at forty-one beside a half-eaten apple that nobody thought to test. Thinking Machines tells that story, but it argues something most accounts leave out. Turing proved the same thing twice.

Three hundred years ago, a professor of rhetoric in Naples proposed a criterion of truth that his century could not bring itself to hear. We know for certain only what we have made. Everything else we merely observe, and observation, he warned, is a poorer kind of knowing than we like to pretend.

For twenty-four centuries a stubborn Greek has been telling us that motion is impossible, and no one has quite managed to prove him wrong. Achilles can never catch the tortoise. The arrow in flight is, at every instant, perfectly still. To cross a room you must first cross half of it, and then half of what remains, and then half of that, without end. These are the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, and the quietly embarrassing truth is that the standard replies to them, from Aristotle through the calculus to Cantor, defeat the arithmetic while leaving the wound untouched.

Born into servitude and left lame by a master's cruelty, owning nothing that a Roman court would have recognized as property, Epictetus arrived at a conclusion the rich and the powerful could only glimpse: that the self worth keeping is not the body, not the bank account, not the name on the door, but a single faculty no one else can reach—the power to judge, to refuse, to give or withhold agreement. Everything else, he taught, is on loan and can be repossessed without notice. Once you know which is which, a tyrant has nothing left to threaten you with.

A man moves to the forest to be left alone. The forest turns out to be fully staffed. Twenty-five years ago Boris Kriger drove north out of Toronto on a nice day, kept going until he got tired, and bought a house on a hill with six and a half acres of impassable bush. He had been in Toronto three days. He was looking for silence.