In my Philosophy of Art course, we’ve been reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy for the last two weeks, and we can add him to the list posted here of intellectuals across the ages bemoaning the poverty of their own time’s culture. Nietzsche on mid-19th century Germany: “What else, in the desolate waste of […]
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The Bases Foundation has announced its Fourth International Conference, to be held in August in Rosario, Argentina, on the theme of “The Austrian School of Economics in the 21st Century”. The conference has an impressive lineup of speakers, including Lawrence White of George Mason University, Christopher Lingle of Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Karol Boudreaux of the
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Wagner, in a letter to Franz Liszt: “If I am obliged to plunge once more into the waves of an artist’s imagination in order to find satisfaction in an imaginary world, I must at least help out my imagination and find means of encouraging my imaginative faculties. So I cannot live like a dog, I
Creative geniuses as selfish — Richard Wagner version Read More »
The great Rachmaninoff on what the creator needs and what this implies for others: “A creator is a very limited person. Always he revolves around his own axis. There is nothing for him but his own creative work. I agree that the wife has to forget herself, her own personality. She must take upon herself
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Four breakthrough trends that will transform the next generation. An energizing talk by Peter Diamondis, founder of the X Prize Foundation and head of Singularity University: computing power and access to it, robotics, artificial life, and personal space travel. Plus how to leverage the unbelievable amounts of untapped human potential out there. (Thanks to R.L.
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From Peter Gay’s brief biography, about the terrible brevity of life in Mozart’s time. Wolfgang Mozart “was born in Salzburg on January 27, 1756, the seventh and last child of Leopold and Anna Maria Mozart. Of his siblings, five died in infancy, and only one sister, four years his elder, survived … . This appalling
Appalling infant mortality numbers, then and now Read More »
Last semester in my Philosophical Foundations of Education course, I worked closely with Marsha Familaro Enright to use Socratic education. As a result of that experiment, I’ve started a Socratic Seminars page with resources. Here are Marsha Enright, Darian George, and Jason Ware in a three-minute conversation about the aspirations of Socratic Seminars.
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The aspiration: “The effort of Socratic Practice is to develop students’ own standard of intellectual judgment by means of placing the onus of responsibility for understanding entirely on them and providing them with the tools and experiences necessary to develop their intellectual judgment. ‘Does it make sense to you?’ is the central question to students
The Nazis were evil, killing millions of human beings, and they have universally and properly properly condemned for their horrors. The Soviets were also evil, killing more millions than the Nazis did, yet they have not been universally condemned. The Soviets have been attacked by libertarians, conservatives, and moderates as a great lesson in evil
Soviets and Nazis — which were worse? Read More »
David R. Henderson is associate professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and research fellow with the Hoover Institution. He has written for the New York Times, Fortune, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Reason, as well as scholarly articles for the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the
Profiles in Liberty: David R. Henderson Read More »