The old philosophy question — How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? — has gotten a bad rap.* Yet three important answers contest for dominance: 1. An infinite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin. As purely spiritual beings, angels do not take up physical space, so […]
So how many angels *can* dance on the head of a pin? Read More »
What are Fascism and Nazism, historically and philosophically? What are their connections to Benito Mussolini, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler? And do those words describe today’s Alt-Right and Antifa members? Vin Armani’s one-hour interview with me appears at 60:10:35 of this two-hour show: Related: Nietzsche and the Nazis. Mussolini and Gentile’s The Doctrine
“Fascist” and “Nazi” discussion at the Vin Armani Show Read More »
Wisdom from a giant of the nineteenth-century — Frederick Douglass (circa 1818-1895): “Everybody has asked the question … ‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the
Black History Month: Frederick Douglass Read More »
Historian Thomas Nipperdey on one reason why German philosophy came to prominence in American intellectual life: “Until 1830 it was the general rule that talented and curious young minds gravitated to Paris; but from then on they came, in ever-increasing numbers (American students, for example) to Germany, to Berlin.” For more on the meaning and implications
Thomas Nipperdey in Explaining Postmodernism Read More »
In 1770, tensions were high between the American colonists and their British rulers. Anxious soldiers confronting an angry mob precipitated the Boston Massacre. Eight soldiers were then put on trial for murder. The lawyer John Adams was a strong American patriot, yet he took on the defense of the British soldiers. His purpose was explicitly
Revolutionary justice: French versus American style Read More »
Thomas Hager (p. 240) describes well the attitude of a majority of students and professors within the universities, when Hitler and and his Culture Minister demanded that all Jews be removed from their professorships: “German university students were, in general … devoted to making Germany great again. They were strongly pro-Nazi. Among faculty members, there
Forcing professors out, 1933 edition Read More »
Olympe de Gouges’s first-wave feminism and her The Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791). The first two items: “1. Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility. 2. The purpose of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible
Olympe de Gouges’s 1791 declaration of women’s rights Read More »
When women got the vote fully at the national level: 1893 New Zealand 1902 Australia 1906 Finland 1913 Norway 1915 Denmark 1917 Canada 1918 Austria, Germany, Poland, Russia 1919 Netherlands 1920 United States 1921 Sweden 1928 Britain, Ireland All other countries: Granted later or not yet granted. Note: Six of the fifteen are British or former British colonies; the other nine are northern European. (Also worth
Where women first got the vote and when Read More »