Mark English recounts some details of the life, character, beliefs and attitudes of a remarkable woman. Her father was a Chinese general and a colleague of Mao Zedong. As a very small child -- during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution -- she was sent to the countryside for a time to live with peasants. She was a professional gymnast from the age of seven to the age of fourteen. After a bad fall, she went back to school and built a career in an area of applied science. Her deep knowledge of traditional culture came mainly from her mother (an opera singer) and from her maternal grandmother who had been a concubine in the old China.
Mark English introduces himself and explains what he has in mind for the podcast. The general idea is to explore personal values, relating them...
Gottlob Frege was a mathematician with strong philosophical interests and preoccupations. In an attempt to discover and make explicit the logical foundations of mathematics...
Personal and political values can be intertwined in complicated ways and, even within close families, there are often serious, politically-driven divides. Mark English talks...