The point of philosophy, as I see it, is to change thinking, and thereby to change the conversation.

The variety within Mann's fiction is impressive and fascinating. But Joyce is even more various and many-sided. He begins his career with a wonderful sequence of bleak studies about the ways in which human lives can go awry - in my view, Dubliners is underrated.

I'm very suspicious of the idea of a "final theory" in natural science, and the thought of a complete system of ethical rules seems even more dubious.

Schopenhauer's thought that Will is insatiable, that once satisfied in one form it must be expressed in new desires, is inherited both by Mann and by Aschenbach (it's in Mahler, as well). So life is inevitably incomplete.

After the success of Buddenbrooks, he married and fathered six children. Yet the surviving diaries tell us of recurrent sexual problems - and of Katia Mann's extremely sympathetic response to them

Experiments work when, and only when, they call into action cognitive capacities that might reliably deliver the conclusions drawn.

After two years of undergraduate study, it was clear that I was bored by the regime of problem-solving required by the Cambridge mathematical tripos. A very sensitive mathematics don recommended that I talk to the historian of astronomy, Michael Hoskin, and the conversation led me to enroll in the History and Philosophy of Science for my final undergraduate year.