Stalin as Writer and Thinker

Nurse as writer, writer as nurse.

Stalin and Our Times

The paper considers how a number of features of Stalin’s rule that appear most pointless or counter–productive from a present day standpoint, summed up as “futile repression”, can be understood as the rational choices of a dictator optimising his regime. The same reasoning may be applied to those aspects of Stalin’s legacy that are most commonly seen as positive, such as the industrial and mili...

Wallace as writer

But despite their differences each man deeply valued the other. Darwin persuaded the British government to award Wallace a pension for services to science. Wallace dedicated his book The Malay Archipelago to Darwin, “as a token of personal esteem and friendship but also to express my deep admiration for his genius and his works.” Wallace also called his 1889 collection of evolutionary essays Da...

Philosophy as Literature: the Case of Borges I. Borges the Artist and Borges the Thinker

For you took it, taking a look, that he was there, supposing quite correctly that things would not have looked that way unless he was. (This is not Dretske's example, but I hope it does not botch his point.) The third point, implicit of course in those others, is -that, while in a sense what we can see is simply what is there to be seen, there is no such ineluctable limit to what we can 'get to...

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Tim Snyder’s ambitious Bloodlands set out to place the murderous regimes of the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union in their overlapping European contexts. Snyder proceeded from the central observation that the annihilation fantasies of Hitler and Stalin were to a large part played out in the same space: ‘in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet reg...