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Some philosophers before Locke had suggested that it would be good to find the limits of the Understanding, but what Locke does is to carry out this project in detail. In the four books of the Essay Locke considers the sources and nature of human knowledge. Book I argues that we have no innate knowledge. (In this he resembles Berkeley and Hume, and differs from Descartes and Leibniz.) So, at birth, the human mind is a sort of blank slate on which experience writes. In Book II Locke claims that ideas are the materials of knowledge and all ideas come from experience. The term 'idea,' Locke tells us "…stands for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding, when a man thinks" (Essay I, 1, 8, p. 47). Experience is of two kinds, sensation and reflection. One of these - sensation - tells us about things and processes in the external world. The other - reflection - tells us about the operations of our own minds. Reflection is a sort of internal sense that makes us conscious of the mental processes we are engaged in. Some ideas we get only from sensation, some only from reflection and some from both.

"Contemporary philosophical discussions of the imagination have been primarily focused on three sets of topics. Work in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology has explored a cluster of issues concerning the phenomenology and cognitive architecture of imagination, examining the ways that imagination differs from and resembles other mental states both phenomenologically and functionally, and investigating the roles that imagination may play in the understanding of self and others, and in the representation of past, future and counterfactual scenarios. Work in aesthetics has focused on issues related to imaginative engagement with fictional characters and events, identifying and offering resolutions to a number of (apparent) paradoxes. And work in modal epistemology has focused on the extent to which imaginability-and its cousin conceivability-can serve as guides to possibility."

Japanese people often fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is that they barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia. From Homo erectus to the present day - more than a million years of history in just one year of lessons. That is how, at the age of 14, I first learned of Japan's relations with the outside world.

"Whatever your opinion, your judgment shouldn't be swayed by whether the question is posed in your native language or in a foreign language you have mastered. But that is exactly what an international team of cognitive psychologists led by Albert Costa in Barcelona claim they have discovered: People using a foreign language are far more likely to sacrifice an innocent for the sake of many. And they think they understand why: Our mother tongue is laden with emotion, feeling, association."

" And a particular image or fact can start with one person online and inevitably become more distorted as it gets further down the line. Errors are inserted-sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident-until it winds up completely distorting our understanding of the original message. P "

"There is no "but" about what happened at Charlie Hebdo yesterday. Some people published some cartoons, and some other people killed them for it.  Words and pictures can be beautiful or vile, pleasing or enraging, inspiring or offensive; but they exist on a different plane from physical violence, whether you want to call that plane spirit or imagination or culture, and to meet them with violence is an offense against the spirit and imagination and culture that distinguish humans. Nothing mitigates this monstrosity. There will be time to analyze why the killers did it, time to parse their backgrounds, their ideologies, their beliefs, time for sociologists and psychologists to add to understanding. There will be explanations, and the explanations will be important, but explanations aren't the same as excuses. Words don't kill, they must not be met by killing, and they will not make the killers' culpability go away."

"The long-held theory helped to explain a part of the hearing process called "adaptation," or how humans can hear everything from the drop of a pin to a jet engine blast with high acuity, without pain or damage to the ear. Its overturning could have significant impact on future research for treating hearing loss, said Anthony Ricci, PhD, the Edward C. and Amy H. Sewall Professor of Otolaryngology and senior author of the study."