A contemporary of Galileo’s in reply to his 1610 discovery of Jupiter’s moons: “There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head. From this and many other similarities in nature, such as the seven metals, etc., which were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven. […]
Why there can be only seven planets Read More »
G. W. F. Hegel: “From the Kantian system and its completion I expect a revolution in Germany.” Johann Holderlin: “Kant is the Moses of our nation.” “Within a few years of the publication of his Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was recognized by his contemporaries as one of the seminal thinkers
Some post-Kantians on Kant, pro and con Read More »
Stanley Fish, postmodern provocateur, gave a talk at Indiana University when I was a graduate student there in the late 1980s. He was then working on what would become There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech, And It’s a Good Thing, Too. Fish’s theme was social construction and oppression: We all are products of our
How Randy Newman Solved Stanley Fish’s Credibility Problem Read More »
Yet another reason to despise the Russian experiment in socialism. After the communist revolution, the great composer Sergei Rachmaninoff went into exile, losing his home and other property to the Soviets — along with his publisher and his status in Russia as leading musician of his generation. Starting over in the West was a challenge,
How Rachmaninoff’s composing was hurt by the Soviet Union Read More »
Defeating an enemy such as politicized Islam is a multi-front battle—police, military, diplomatic, cultural, and philosophical. Any fight is triggered by short-term, local disagreements. But long-term, generalized conflicts are always about abstract principles in collision. As with neo-Nazis, Communist revolutionaries, violent environmentalists, bomb-the-government anarchists, and others—our conflicts with them are intellectual in origin. Terrorism is
How to Tame Religious Terrorists [Good Life series] Read More »
Each spring brings a new outburst of graffiti activity at Aldeen Park here in Rockford. Regular themes are who loves whom, religion, death motifs, and comments about sex. This year I learned that Jesus kills demons, Nathan and Angela are an item, All you need is Love, and A bag of donuts makes a party.
Graffiti at Aldeen Dam, 2017 Read More »
Six years ago, I snarkily conjectured that the egailtarians would go after libraries on the grounds that most of their content was inaccessible to the deaf and blind. That was meant to be a reductio ad absurdum. But now the Department of Justice has gone after UC Berkeley’s online library for precisely that reason. The
First Chipotle, now Berkeley — egalitarianism wins again Read More »
Here is a list of the 30 most polluted cities on Earth. Per country, here’s where those cities are located: India: 14 China: 6 Saudi Arabia: 3 Pakistan: 2 Iran: 2 Bangladesh: 1 Cameroon: 1 Uganda: 1 All of them are clustered in the bottom half of rankings for economic freedom. Which reminds me of
Free markets versus pollution? Read More »
Don’t you care for my love? she said bitterly. I handed her the mirror, and said: Please address these questions to the proper person! Please make all requests to head-quarters! In all matters of emotional importance please approach the supreme authority direct! — So I handed her the mirror. And she would have broken it
“Intimates,” D. H. Lawrence Read More »
For use in my courses, additions to my Texts in Philosophy page. All files are PDFs. William Bennett and Milton Friedman, Open Letters on the War on Drugs, from The Wall Street Journal (1989). Nathaniel Branden, “Self-Esteem in the Information Age” (1997). Max Forrester Eastman (1883-1969), excerpt from Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955).
Texts in Philosophy — very early 2017 additions Read More »