In his essay “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” Kant wrote that “the spirit of commerce, which is incompatible with war, sooner or later gains the upper hand in every state.” Kant was not a friend of the spirit of commerce, which he associated with the Jews, whom he despised as “immoral and vile” and […]
Is commerce rendering war obsolete? Read More »
Reprising this chart on the Enlightenment of the long 1700s and it self-conscious grasp it its own significance. Related: My “Enlightenment Vision” flowchart and other posts and lectures on the Enlightenment. The chart is from Chapter One of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
How the Enlightenment solved all of our problems Read More »
In Henry the VIII’s time, sugar became widely available in England. Those who could afford it used it on just about everything, and too much sugar causes one’s teeth to become black. But sugar was still expensive, so having black teeth came to be a symbol of wealth. Soon many of the English, women especially,
Fashion: white teeth — or black? Read More »
Reposting this question: In this post-colonial era, what explains the dramatically different levels of prosperity in nations after they become independent of their colonizing powers? Why, for example, has the prosperity of North America been consistently higher than that of Central and South America? Both are rich in natural resources, both involve nations started from scratch,
Empires of conquest and empires of commerce Read More »
A striking quotation from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: “Every civilization of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and so on. In many cases those facets of civilization have been as developed as our own. But only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic
Kuhn on the Greeks and scientific culture Read More »
Syphilis is thought to have been brought back from America by Christopher Columbus’s fellow travelers. In Europe, it first manifested in Naples and so came to be called “the disease of Naples,” though most Italians came to call it the “French Pox.” As it made its way across Europe and then Asia, syphilis acquired a
Syphilis and friendly ethnic relations Read More »
A re-post of my Galileo and the Modern Compromise: 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
Galileo, free speech & censorship, religion and science Read More »
From Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven: “For Beethoven’s German and Austrian contemporaries, the Napoleonic image was especially potent: Bonaparte’s admirers included Kant, Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schiller, Goethe, Hölderlin, Wielan, and Klopstock. Grillparzer, in his Autobiography wrote, ‘I myself was no less an enemy of the French than my father, and yet Napoleon fascinated me with a
Napoleon’s German admirers Read More »