Finally, this is one way to reconcile the delight in beauty with the bourgeois life. Aschenbach, on one reading, has spent virtually all of his adult life balancing his restrained homosexuality, which is bound together with his sensitivity to beauty and thus with his artistic vocation, against the demands of conventional society.

Those citizens are distracted by the toys technology has supplied, and fail to recognize the ways in which what they most deeply want is made vulnerable by the coming disruptions of human relations on an over-heated planet.

When we read a literary work (or, in some instances, listen to music) our imagination is stimulated, we feel various emotions, and we arrive at new judgments. These attitudes are brought into relation with many others, including our standing tendencies to think and feel in particular ways, and we try to fit our psychological capacities and responses together.

Secular humanists should recognize those forms of religion as allies in the struggle for human advancement. They should also learn from them, as they try to build a fully secular world in which people can have the opportunity to live rich and fulfilling lives.

I'm quite pessimistic about climate change. This is an urgent problem, and much of the world is only now waking up to the easiest part of solving - the realization that anthropogenic global warming is real.

For a pragmatist like me, the important issues concern the words we might deploy to achieve our purposes, rather than the language we actually use.

It's a very bad idea for scientific conclusions to be accepted because they fit with the political values of a group of researchers.