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What is our motivating force today, and can we still hold on to a unified view of the history of philosophy?

Frank Griffel is the Professor in the Study of Abrahamic Religions at the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University and Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall. This is a forum on his book, The Formation of Post-classical Philosophy in Islam (Oxford University Press). Part one.

AMIT MAJMUDAR | As a modern Indian, you might also hear about the epics in the news. That movie version you were eager to go see in the theater might have set off a controversy over whether the main characters were portrayed reverently enough; the public may have declared a boycott.

KELLY M.S. SWOPE | Lives like his were proof that the German philosophy of freedom planted real roots in American institutions before and after the War over Slavery.

PHILIP BALL | According to the old story, we once thought that all this other DNA was just “junk,” a term coined in this context in the 1970s. It was accumulated over the course of evolution, for example by viruses inserting their genetic material into ours, and it did nothing useful but just cluttered up our genome the way all our old detritus of a lifetime clutters up our attic.

Srini Pillay | From this perspective, fantasy is not a luxury but a stabilizing psychic function. . .

PHILIP BALL | Science is often not a competition between theories but a process of narrative creation in which the paradigm tends to be set by the most persuasive narrative

Philip Ball in Conversation with Naomi Moris

SAMUEL LONCAR | Nihilism is killing the university, and not for the first time. The Germany university was the crown jewel of European culture in the 19th-century, the pinnacle and vanguard of scientific progress, and the exemplar of what a wise partnership between state-funding and education could be...

LUKE FISCHER | Humanity is caught within the tension of light and dark, heaven and earth, the eternal and time, divinity and mortality. In its philosophical and mystical tenor and its meditations on the relation between the timeless and time...

AMIT MAJMUDAR | What I seek to do is s to build on Steiner's legacy, because the reverence and memory that he showed for the Western tradition is what I hope to show for as many traditions as I can incorporate.

Naturalism is not intrinsic to a rational scientific understanding. Now, why we think that, then, is partly because we've constructed false narratives about conflicts between science and religion,