Why is our planet called “Earth” (Terra) when 71% of its surface is covered in water? And when you consider that the human body is itself roughly 60% water, the question becomes stranger still. We named the world after the part of it we stood on, the part that is relevant to us. Science comes last to the party.

That is not an accident. That is how human consciousness works.

We do not experience reality whole. We sample it. The philosopher John Vervaeke calls this relevance realisation: the mind’s continuous, mostly unconscious process of selecting what matters from a combinatorially explosive field of possible stimuli.

Every second, our senses are flooded with data. We attend to almost none of it. What we attend to is shaped by what is relevant to us, biologically, culturally, personally. We named our world after ground because we walk on ground. The ocean was other. It’s less relevant to our terrestrial lives.

It might look like a cognitive flaw, but it’s not. It is a structural feature of having a self. And it’s a central feature of what makes us human.

One of the most persistent myths about medieval Europe is that its people believed they were at the centre of the universe. The Ptolemaic system placed Earth there, and we have read that as ignorance or arrogance. But consider what Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, called the “natural attitude”: the pre-reflective, lived experience of being a subject in a world. From inside experience, you are always the centre. The horizon recedes in every direction from where you stand. The sun rises for you and sets for you. Phenomenologically, geocentrism is not wrong. It is honest.

The so-called fallacies of anthropomorphism, false attribution, and causal over-reading are routinely presented as errors to be corrected. They are, of course, errors in formal reasoning. But they are also symptoms of something more fundamental: the fact that all experience originates in a self. Thinking, feeling, and acting emerge from a first-person perspective. There is no view from nowhere, in the words of Thomas Nagel. It’s hard to imagine what that would look like.

Even science knows this, at some level. The scientific method is a collective technology designed to discipline and aggregate first-person observations into something that feels, and, more importantly, usefully functions, like objectivity. But the data always begins with a human looking at something and deciding it matters.

We still call it Earth.

“History is written by the winners” is an evolutionary statement.

Every organism alive carries within it the encoded record of what worked, a compressed archive of successful adaptations. The losers left no descendants, no texts, no traditions.

To recover their story is a legitimate intellectual and moral act, but an honest one requires acknowledging what is actually being done: choosing a value, such as pluralism, justice, inclusion, over the grain of biological logic.

The same logic governed attitudes toward novelty for most of human history. What persists has been tested. What is untested carries unknown costs. The boring old mushroom always wins over the exciting new toadstool.

The Greeks had a word, neōterismos, for political innovation, and it was not a compliment. From antiquity through the medieval world (the medieval Latin res novae, literally ‘new things’, meant revolt or political change) the burden of proof lay entirely with the new: demonstrate your value, or yield to what endures. Rational risk management, written into the body (politic).

That burden has now inverted. In every domain, be it technology, medicine, business or culture, novelty is presumptively valuable and the status quo must justify itself.

This inversion coincides with something else: in our culture, biology features less and less in how we understand ourselves. Our intelligence is increasingly conceived as computational, our social life as networked, our bodies as peripheral to who we are. The more we abstract ourselves from our embodied, evolved nature, the more natural it feels to take large risks in pursuit of progress, because the ancient calculus that made caution rational operates below the threshold of awareness.

This is worth sitting with rather than judging.

Progress may be defined precisely as the wager that novelty now serves survival better than caution does. For most of biological and human history, though, that wager would have been refused on instinct.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European humanists became drunk on Ciceronian wine.

Metaphorically drunk, maybe, but also genuinely intoxicated, philologically and rhetorically, by the rediscovery of classical Latin prose. Prose in itself and for itself.

The effect was electrifying. New ways of thinking about words and clauses unlocked new way…

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No freedom. No notes. No maps. No travel companions to correct his recall. No literary talent. No recent memories. The journeys were decades old. No framework of his own to hold it all together.

Marco Polo left Venice in 1271, aged seventeen, with his father and uncle, both seasoned merchants of the eastern trade. He would not return for 24 years.

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What does the mind do when it encounters something it has never seen before, not something slightly unfamiliar, not a variation on a known theme, but something genuinely, categorically new?

The brain, it turns out, does not like starting from s…

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We are not good at not knowing. Something in us moves toward conclusions with an urgency that has more to do with relief than with thinking. We confuse commitment with clarity, and non-commitment with failure.

The late Gregory Vlastos, one of the most influential twentieth-century scholars of ancient Greek philosophy, described the Socratic method as “a…

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A historical narrative these days can take many forms. It can be popular or academic, narrative or analytical, sympathetic or forensic. It can engage with the eviden…

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Last Wednesday was the Feast of the Annunciation, the 25th of March, nine months before Christmas. Yesterday the clocks went forward.

Both feel like routine sacred/secular calendar events (depending where you are), and in a way they are, but they are also …

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Everyone has opinions on artificial intelligence. Whether what we’re seeing in the GenAI space constitutes intelligence at all, whether it will scale to something general, whether that’s desirable, and what its impact will be — these are live debates, running from techno-ut…

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Two words. An admission, almost an embarrassment, the author stepping forward to confess that something has been added.

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One thing you won’t hear anyone saying is ‘Now, let’s shallow dive into this topic.’ And if there’s no other type of diving imaginable or allowed, as most recreational swimming pools signs will warn against, then what’s the point of deep-ing the verb into a tautological modification?

Welcome to one of the more quietly fascinating corners of linguistics: …

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There is something peculiar about the way we humans solve problems.

Not the tidy, procedural kind of solving, follow the steps, get the answer, but the messier, more interest…

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Democracy lasted maybe two centuries in Athens. Two centuries. In the sweep of recorded history, let alone the deep time of human existence, that is barely a breath. And then it was gone, swallowed by its own contradictions, by strongmen and exhaus…

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Not just the physical energy of slaves, soldiers, and oxen - though that was immense - but the continuous, costly expenditure of information.

To s…

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I surely saw, and it still seems I see,
a trunk without a head that walked just like
the others in that melancholy herd;

it carried by the hair its severed head,
which swayed within its hand just like a lantern;
and that head looked at us and said: “Ah me!”

Out of itself it made itself a lamp,
a…

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The instinct seems backwards. Languages grow by accretion, by borrowing, bending, forgetting, and the drift is almost always toward complexity.

To reverse that trend re…

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“Q: I’ll hazard I can do more damage on my laptop sitting in my pajamas before my first cup of Earl Grey than you can do in a year in the field.
BOND: Oh, so why do you need me?
Q: Every now and then, a trigger has to be pulled.
BOND: Or not pulled ... It’s hard to know which in your pajamas.”

The exchange from Skyfall captures something essential abo…

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The ancient Mediterranean was a graveyard of political experiments.

Greek cities cycled through regimes with startling speed, moving from kingship to aristocracy to tyranny to democracy and back again, often within a century or two; Athenian democracy in its classical form lasted roughly 140 years, from the reforms of Ephialtes and Pericles in the mid‑5…

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His laments about the corruption of Roman mores and the breakdown of republican institutions register a profound sense of decline, but decline within a world that remains, in principle, continuous and repairable.…

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