Boris Kriger

A linguist steps off a boat onto an unmapped shore. A rabbit runs past. A native speaker points and says a single word: gavagai. The linguist writes in a notebook, with reasonable confidence, the translation rabbit. And in that moment of reasonable confidence, as Willard Van Orman Quine...

For millennia, the North Star has stood as humanity’s ultimate emblem of constancy—the unmoving nail around which the night turns, guiding ancient caravans, ocean-going caravel fleets, and fugitives walking toward freedom. Yet almost every element of that legendary reputation collapses under...

Everything in the world runs one way. Coffee cools, glass shatters, memory reaches backward and never forward. In the last decades of the nineteenth century one Viennese physicist tried to explain that one-way world using nothing but particles obeying laws that work perfectly well in reverse. He...

Eighty years after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry vanished over the Mediterranean, his small book about a boy with golden hair, a single rose, and a fox who taught him what the word "tame" really means continues to outsell almost every other work of literature on Earth. It is read by children who...

He swam in the Danube with a flotilla of geese who were convinced he was their mother, and he was right about something enormous: that behavior is inherited the way a bone is inherited, that it can be compared across species, and that the categories we think with were shaped long before anyone...

Nobody in the ancient world left behind more of himself than Marcus Tullius Cicero. Speeches, letters, treatises, private grumbles, public boasts, jokes at dinner parties recorded for posterity — the paper trail is so vast that we know his moods better than we know those of most politicians...

In 1946 a five-year-old from Queens stood under a tyrannosaur and decided, on the spot, what he would do with his life. He kept the promise for fifty-six years. What nobody could have predicted is that he would spend most of them arguing with people, cheerfully and at enormous length, in a prose...

Everything in the heavens turns. Moons wheel around planets, planets around stars, stars around the bright hubs of their galaxies, and galaxies around one another in gravitational waltzes so slow that a single step outlasts a mountain range. Rotation is the most ordinary fact in the sky. Yet by...

Twenty-four centuries ago, in a windblown town on the northern coast of Greece, a man who reportedly could not stop laughing made one of the strangest and most consequential claims in the history of thought.

We are told that the moral life is a matter of choices, and that a good person is someone who chooses well. Iris Murdoch spent a lifetime quietly dismantling that comfortable picture.

What is it that we do when we think? We imagine the mind as a mirror, faithfully reflecting a world that shines in through the senses. It is nothing of the kind. The mind is a fire that exists only while it burns—an activity, not a container; a verb, not a vessel.

The universe was perfectly content until someone arrived and began to ask why. Stars burned, rivers ran, and matter rearranged itself without complaint—until consciousness appeared and demanded an explanation that was never going to come. From that single, fateful encounter, the absurd was born.

We spend a great deal of energy pretending to be certain. We sign our names to opinions we have not examined, defend convictions we inherited rather than chose, and treat the absence of doubt as though it were the same thing as the presence of truth.

Ce livre n’a pas été écrit pour vous apaiser. Il ne vous offrira ni espoir, ni promesse de progrès, ni cette douce illusion que le projet humain possède encore une noblesse intrinsèque.

For sixty years Barbara McClintock grew corn and read it the way other people read a page. What she found in it should have rearranged biology in 1951. Genes are not beads fixed on a string. They move. They switch one another on and off.

A short, dry, extremely funny novel about the one offence a society never pardons: a person who declines to behave as he is expected to behave.

Penseur d'une profonde originalité et d'une difficulté notoire, Martin Heidegger reste l'une des figures les plus controversées du XXe siècle.

What if topology were not about objects, but about transformations? Not about space, but about the conditions under which identity persists?

Under the old rule of the Sanhedrin, a man convicted by every single judge walked free. Seventy-one votes for guilt, and the court released him. The reasoning was not mercy. It was quality control.

Alan Turing broke the German naval Enigma, designed the machine you are almost certainly holding or sitting in front of, invented the test that still frames every argument about artificial intelligence, and explained why leopards have spots.