Reprising this post about the early death of Franz Schubert, the great lyrical composer of the early nineteenth century. He died at age 31. While his music is usually too melancholy for my taste, what a sadness. Franz was lucky to get that many years. Biographer Christoper Gibbs reports that Schubert’s parents had fourteen children […]
Franz Schubert’s early death Read More »
My review essay on Donald Frey’s America’s Economic Moralists: A History of Rival Ethics and Economics (State University of New York Press) was published in Business Ethics Quarterly. Subscribers to BEQ can access the issue here. Or my author-read audio version is at YouTube. My conclusion: “America’s Economic Moralists is a good historical survey of
My review of Frey’s *America’s Economic Moralists* Read More »
Kleist was widely traveled, energetic, a brilliant writer — and a suicide at age 34. Why? In reviewing Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, Ian Brunskill writes: “Kleist in his youth had espoused with enthusiasm all the optimism of the Enlightenment. Reason would conquer all; happiness would come with experience and understanding. In March 1801,
Kleist: How Kant ruined my life Read More »
Reprising this worth-reading piece on the Maoism of Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and other fellow-travelers: Alan Schrift’s critical discussion, in Philosophy in Review, of Richard Wolin’s The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s, which is now out in a second edition. Excerpt: “For young leftists—and this
Refreshing this from Thomas Sowell’s classic Ethnic America: I am struck by this comparison he makes between the desperate state of the Irish peasantry in Ireland and the black slaves in America: “A French traveler in the early nineteenth century returned from a trip that included America and Ireland and wrote: ‘I have seen the
Irish peasants and black slaves Read More »
From the preface to Andy Grove‘s (recommended) Only the Paranoid Survive: “The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You have one employee: yourself. You are in competition with millions of similar businesses: millions of other employees all over the world.
Andy Grove on the entrepreneurial employee Read More »
The flowchart is from the end of Chapter 5 of Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011), summarizing the argument developed in that chapter. Click the image to enlarge. See also Professor Hicks’s discussions of the philosophers’ primary texts, in his Philosophers, Explained series:
The Evolution of Socialist Strategies Read More »
In his open letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615), Galileo offered a defense of science against the prevailing heavy hand of religious orthodoxy: “But I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended to forgo their use and by some other
Galileo’s modern compromise: Letting science work *with* religion Read More »