• Colour drawing of a staged theatrical scene framed by two symmetrical classical structures with niches containing gilded statues, flanked by trees. At the centre, a painted backdrop shows an island within an archipelago, with a visible settlement; in the foreground, a vessel approaches the shore. Four figures stand before the backdrop holding branches and other objects. The composition is enclosed within a thin rectangular gold border.
A statue of Plato in front of an Athens government building

Plato on how to describe the changing world

by Takeshi Nakamura From time to time throughout his dialogues, Plato complains how difficult it is to capture the transient natural world with inert language (e.g., the Theaetetus and the Cratylus). After all, the world in flux changes as you…

An old-time photo of two people riding on a two-seated bike across a field

Moving forward with Aristotle

by John M. Pemberton Is the world changing? When you cycle along on your bicycle, are you moving? If you ask the woman on the Clapham omnibus, then the answer will be an emphatic: ‘Yes, of course!’ However, many of…

A flying fox landing on water

Shimmer: The Kiss of Life Includes Us, Too

An extract from Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril by Deborah Bird Rose Australian anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose’s remarkable final book is a landmark piece of interdisciplinary, multi-species scholarship based on fieldwork with the zoologists, conservationists and Aboriginal…