Reprising this about Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio [Die Entführung aus dem Serail], which has a charming scene indicating England’s eighteenth-century reputation in Europe as a land of liberty. A woman named Konstanze and her English servant Blonde have been abducted by pirates and sold to Pasha Selim. In Act II, the Pasha’s crude overseer, […]
English liberty and Mozart’s opera Read More »
For use in my courses, additions to my Texts in Philosophy page. Aristotle, Books 1-4 of Nicomachean Ethics (c. 335 BCE) Alain Badiou, “The Adventure of French Philosophy” (2004). Immanuel Kant, On Education (1803). Maximilien Robespierre, The Cult of the Supreme Being (1794).
Texts in Philosophy — late 2022 additions Read More »
Reprising this from when I read E. G. West’s fascinating Education and the Industrial Revolution, which is a powerful argument for the conclusion that … well, let’s first look at some data. Here’s a table comparing school enrollments in various parts of the world with enrollments in England and Wales a century earlier. The table
All from the twenty-first century: * Sorcerers stealing or shrinking men’s penises in Congo. * Black magic murders in Brazil. * Witches beaten and humiliated in in southern India. * God punishes Haiti for its witchcraft and other immoralities. * Though progress in Ghana: a call “for the immediate abolition of witches camps and witchcraft
What’s new in witchcraft Read More »
Reprising this rant-post about those who fail to learn from history, who are condemned to … well … uhhh … something or other. But I digress. Last weekend we went to a school-sponsored Santa Shop. The idea of the Santa Shop is that while the parents eat cookies and sip punch and listen to carols,
Don’t know much about history — anecdote Read More »
Title: “Is Dugin Fascist, Neo-Marxist, or What? (And what Is Dugin’s Political Advice to Putin?“) Description: Alexander Dugin claims that Fascism and Communism are dead—and that Liberalism is evil. So a fourth political theory is needed for Russia’s future. What alternative does he propose? And is it really a fourth alternative—or a re-packaging of old
Hicks lecture on Alexander Dugin, Gdansk, Poland, December 16 Read More »
“The fiercest fanatics are often selfish people who were forced, by innate shortcomings or external circumstances, to lose faith in their own selves. They separate the excellent instrument of their selfishness from their ineffectual selves and attach it to the service of some holy cause.” (Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of
On fanatics and ineffectual selves (Eric Hoffer) Read More »
Refreshing these two strikingly similar passages from Georg Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard, philosophers I generally think of as stylistically opposed. At issue are two key questions:1. What is the origin of the universe?2. What is the self? Hegel on the beginning of the universe: “So far, there is nothing: something is to become. The beginning
Philosophical style: Hegel and Kierkegaard Read More »