- British Columbia is the westernmost province of Canada. Situated in the Pacific Northwest between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains, the province has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, forests, lakes, mountains, inland deserts and grassy plains. British Columbia borders the province of Alberta to the east; the territories of Yukon and Northwest Territories to the north; the U.S. states of Washington, Idaho and Montana to the south, and Alaska to the northwest. With an estimated population of over 5.7 million as of 2025, it is Canada’s third-most populous province. The capital of British Columbia is Victoria, while the province’s largest city is Vancouver. Vancouver and its suburbs together make up the third-largest metropolitan area in Canada, with the 2021 census recording 2.6 million people in Metro Vancouver. British Columbia is Canada’s third-largest province in terms of total area, after Quebec and Ontario.
- Cicero (plato.standford.edu)
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) is best known to posterity as a prominent statesman and orator in the tumultuous period of the late Roman republic. As well as being a leading political actor of his time, he also wrote voluminously. Among his writings, around a dozen philosophical works have come down to us. Philosophy was a lifelong passion for Cicero. In addition to what one might call his strictly philosophical compositions, much else of what he wrote – including his speeches, works on rhetoric, and a large collection of letters – show evidence of his philosophical interests. In terms of modern scholarship, the value of Cicero’s philosophical work was held, until relatively recently, to lie chiefly in the information it provided about the thought of the leading philosophical schools of his day: Stoicism, Epicureanism and Academic scepticism among them. However, in part because of the creative way in which he engages with his predecessors, he is increasingly studied today as a philosophical thinker of independent interest.