Three academics are launching a new journal in which arguments can be made anonymously. But is separating ideas from their authors the best way forward? Jeff McMahan is a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University. He’s a snowy-haired American, originally from South Carolina, and he works in a large, dark oak-panelled, and not very warm study in Corpus Christi college. It’s a room with an illustrious past. A little over 400 years ago, the committee that translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek (and some Aramaic) into English gathered to do its work in this very place. What they produced became known as the King James Version, a scholarly and aesthetic achievement that amounted, in the late Christopher Hitchens’s words, to “a giant step in the maturing of English literature”. “It’s a lot to live up to,” jokes McMahan, as we settle down as near to the electric radiator as possible. Continue reading...
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