The twelve days of Christmas: consumer price index
How much do the twelve days of Christmas cost this year?
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Philosophy
Anatomy and philosophy
Following up on The Knife Man and John Hunter, the great 18th-century anatomist and surgeon. In Hunter’s era surgery was brutal, in large part due to surgeons’ ignorance of anatomy, and in that earlier post I wondered why there was still such ignorance given that the 1700s were two centuries after Andreas Vesalius and a
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Appendix 4: Quotations on German militarism [Nietzsche and the Nazis]
[This is Appendix 4 of Nietzsche and the Nazis. Sources for the quotations are at the end of this post.] Appendix 4: Quotations on German militarism Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): “War itself, if it is carried on with order and with a sacred respect for the rights of citizens, has something sublime in it, and makes
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Metaphysical solutions to Kant
[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault] Metaphysical solutions to Kant: from Hegel to Nietzsche Georg W. F. Hegel’s philosophy is another fundamentally Counter-Enlightenment attack on reason and individualism. His philosophy is a partially secularized version of traditional Judeo-Christian cosmology. While Kant’s concerns centered upon epistemology,
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What is the most dangerous philosophy book?
For my Introduction to Philosophy course, the final question on the final exam was: In your judgment, what is the most dangerous book we read this semester? Present the book’s most important themes and explain why you think it is dangerous. We read five major authors in the course: Plato’s Apology and Crito, Ayn Rand’s
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Religion: help or hindrance to philosophy?
The Greeks were the first to do philosophy, and one of the perennially great questions is: Why the Greeks and not some others? Various answers focus on their cosmopolitan trading economy, their concurrent development of democratic politics, or some other combination of factors. I have long thought that the Greeks’ naturalistic religion was a positive,
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Economic socialism, not capitalism [Section 8 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]
[This is Section 8 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.] 8. Economic socialism, not capitalism The second theme of the Program is a stress upon socialism and a strong rejection of capitalism. Numerically, socialism is the most emphasized theme in the Nazi Program, for over half of the Program’s twenty-five points—fourteen out of the twenty-five, to
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Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School [EP]
[This excerpt is from Chapter 5 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault] Marcuse and the Frankfurt School: Marx plus Freud, or oppression plus repression Marcuse had long labored in the trenches of academic philosophy and social theory before coming to fame in America in the 1960s. He studied philosophy at Freiburg
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