Libya’s Film Industry Begins To Emerge From Qaddafi’s Long Dark Night

“There was no film-making culture here at all under [the late dictator],” says one director recently returned to the country. “He didn’t want anybody to be more famous than him. Even the football players had just numbers on their shirts, because he didn’t want anyone to know their names. He certainly wasn’t going to let anybody be a film director.”

What Exactly Is Reality? (Or Should That Be ‘Reality’?)

“What do we actually mean by reality? A straightforward answer is that it means everything that appears to our five senses – everything that we can see, smell, touch and so forth. Yet this answer ignores such problematic entities as electrons, the recession and the number 5, which we cannot sense but which are very real. It also ignores phantom limbs and illusory smells.”

How Do We Know For Sure There Is Reality?

“Philosophers are not being rude when they describe the approach most of us take as naive realism. After all, when they cross the street on the way to work, they tend to accept implicitly – as we all do – that there is an external reality that exists independently of our observations of it. But at work, they have to ask: if there is, how can we know?”

The Crucial Advantage Professional Book Reviews Have Over Blogs

“Such a review will usually run somewhere between 500 and 1,500 words. Before publication, it will be subjected to a prolonged and intense process of subediting. Crucially, it will be signed, and usually paid for. … None of this guarantees that such a review will not be savage, destructive, ad hominem or partisan, but it will be considered”.