As World War I wound down, German scholar Oswald Spengler argued in The Decline of the West that civilizations, like organisms, pass through a natural life cycle.
Posts published by “John Horgan”
I recently encountered a term for a syndrome that has bugged me since childhood: genealogical anxiety. The phrase was coined by philosopher Amia Srinivasan in her paper “On Genealogy.”
At the beginning of my book Mind-Body Problems, I describe one of my earliest childhood memories. I was walking through weeds on the bank of a river with two friends when suddenly I thought, and then said aloud, “I’m me.”
Climate change is like death. The larger it looms, the less I want to think about it. Recently, however, I’ve made an effort to face global warming squarely.
Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything? This belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began.