The Great Conversation: Space
A vacuum is defined precisely by not being anything, unless sheer empty space is a thing. But if it is, what is it? How do you define it?
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Great Ideas
The Great Conversation: Rhetoric
The techniques of persuasion have been so habitually separated from logic and wisdom, it’s assumed that rhetoric is persuasion through bad reasons for bad purposes. But in truth, the art of persuasion is as necessary for good arguments as it is for bad ones.
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The Great Conversation: Nature
The natural can be opposed to the artificial, the immoral, the moral, the civilized, the supernatural, the unnatural—and all of these have further ramified senses, including some that combine with each other.
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Student Essay: The Peculiarities of Zero
Zero: The Weirdness of Nothing By Kaiser Himmelberg The Origins of Zero In the history of number theory, zero took a while to catch on. For example, the
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The Great Conversation: History
“Such is the unity of all history that anyone who endeavors to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web.” — Sir Frederick Pollock
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The Great Conversation: Eternity
During quarantine, ideas like eternity and time dilation can go from “abstract speculation” to “oh, I could have told you that.” Eternity can therefore be a very useful point of entry into the great conversation, in which it has (appropriately) been a perennial topic.
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The Great Conversation: Astronomy
The paradoxes in how gravity, light, and atomic nuclear forces operate have prompted subtle theories about not only nature, but reality as such—bending science back towards its parent discipline of philosophy.
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The Great Conversation: Virtue and Vice
“All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening.” — Alexander Woollcott
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The Great Conversation: Prophecy
The secrets of the past, the present, the future, and the transcendental all appeal to the insatiable human mind. The prophet claims to access them.
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The Great Conversation: Mathematics
God himself is regularly described and depicted in art as the supreme geometer, creating all things in number, weight, and measure.
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