History

Burckhardt quotation on the birth of individualism in the Italian Renaissance

A favorite from Jacob Burckhardt’s great The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860): In the Middle Ages, “Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation — only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of […]

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Kostyło’s review of *Nietzsche and the Nazis*

Professor Piotr Kostyło of University of Casimir the Great reviewed the Polish edition of Nietzsche and the Nazis. Here’s an English translation of Kostyło’s review: “Do We Know What We Advocate? Stephen Hicks’s Defence of Individualism” [pdf]. The original Polish: “Czy wiemy, za czym cie opowiedamy? Stephena Hickss obrana indywidualizmu”. The review was published in

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Iatrochemists: why iron salts cure anemia

A fun anecdote from the history of medicine. (Fun in hindsight, though not necessarily fun for those who lived through the medical history.) The late-medieval Iatrochemists believed that progress could be made by uniting medicine with alchemy. Their intellectual leader was Paracelsus (1493-1541), a Swiss physician whose goal was to reform medical chemistry by rejecting

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The great Renaissance medical bloodletting controversy

Why accurate translation and skilled editing are important: Bloodletting was a common practice in medieval medicine and did not die out until the nineteenth century. The practice was encouraged by the belief that the excellent Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen practiced it. Most phelobotomists followed the Persian genius Avicenna‘s editions of the Greek texts, which

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Appendix 3: Quotations on German anti-Semitism [Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Appendix 3 of Nietzsche and the Nazis. Sources for the quotations are at the end of this post.] Appendix 3: Quotations on German anti-Semitism Martin Luther (1483-1546): “The Jews deserve to hang on gallows, seven times higher than ordinary thieves.” And: “We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them.”[189] Immanuel

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