London Pollution Disaster

The whole world needs to burn coal and oil, right? So what’s wrong with our coal? Do you know how much coal China has burned? In 2013, we had already burned 3.6 billion tons. But do you know how much all the other countries in the world have burned? We have burned more coal than the rest of the world combined. The last time a country had this kind of consumption was England in 1860. But as a result they paid a heavy price. Deep in an abandoned mine in South Wales lies the heart of England...

 Molyneux's problem

I shall here insert a problem of that very ingenious and studious promoter of real knowledge, the learned and worthy Mr. Molyneux, which he was pleased to send me in a letter some months since; and it is this:- "Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on...

 John Locke VS Babies

Another great English philosopher, John Locke, posed another classical epistemological problem. What would happen if you miraculously restored the sight of someone who had been blind from birth? Would that person recognize all the objects he had known so intimately through touch, or would he have to painstakingly learn that the smooth, hard, curved surface looked like a porcelain teacup, or that the familiar, soft, yielding swells and silky hairs translated into a visual wife? Locke thought t...