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Editorial

The Big ‘H’

by Rick Lewis

You’ll always get a few bad apples, and it pains me to admit that down the ages certain well-known philosophers have been charged with serious crimes ranging from bribery (Francis Bacon) to murder (Louis Althusser). Nonetheless, if you should chance across a philosopher in the dock, then it is statistically most likely that he or she is being done for heresy.

Socrates was executed for crimes which included ‘inventing new gods’, and Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition. Just to show that philosophers can dish it out as well as take it, St Augustine of Hippo managed to have a Welsh idea-wrestler called Pelagius declared a heretic at the Council of Ephesus in 431, though in those more tolerant times no incineration ensued. And 350 years ago this year, Spinoza was expelled from his synagogue in Amsterdam and cursed with terrible curses for his colourfully original ideas on the nature of God.

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