Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, references to scientific findings have permeated public-facing communications. Understanding how members of the public view science, scientists and scientific uncertainty should enhance approaches to communication and individuals' decisions to engage with public health measures, including restrictions and vaccination programmes. A survey was conducted on our behalf by YouGov in November 2020.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article analyses the work of the twentieth-century late modernist Samuel Beckett, in light of the turn-of-the-century anti-rationalist Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the eighteenth-century neoclassicist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). What unites these three very different thinkers is a concern over habitual, automatic and involuntary behavior, which in all three cases has a distinctly neurological dimension. Beckett's writing explores the Bergsonian notion, informed by medicine and experimental psychology, of the limitations of agency, of "the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter," and of the human as always already inflicted by the mechanical, a fact that is poignantly highlighted by the case of Samuel Johnson.
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