A striking quotation about Aristotle’s Poetics and its contemporary relevance. Pixar Animation Studios is one the great technical and financial successes in the movie industry. Early in its development, two individuals who were to be instrumental to that success, John Lasseter and Pete Docter, knew that story-telling and not just techical wizardry was essential to […]
Aristotle at Pixar Animation Studios Read More »
Part of a work-in-progress in philosophy of economics, here is the video of a seminar I led on “Economics as a Value Science.” Part of my argument is that there is a large, problematic gap in economic theory about the relationship between economic facts and economic values. Along the way I discuss Friedrich Hayek, David
Seminar on “Economics as a Value Science” Read More »
“The basis of a democratic state is liberty.” “He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.” The final meeting of this semester’s reading group on Aristotle’s Politics will be on Friday, December 2, 3 p.m., at
Aristotle’s Politics — reading group Read More »
When I was teaching out east some years ago, I noted a Philadelphia Inquirer piece on the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. This organization, firmly in the grip of zero-sum anti-humanist environmentalism, was calling for the elimination of human beings by unspecified means. I expect that VHEMT’s members are no longer with us, but somehow the
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I will be giving a talk next week to a graduate philosophy class at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The theme of my talk is: What Philosophers Need to Know about Economics. Over the past generation BGSU has developed one of the country’s strongest programs in applied ethics and political philosophy, so it will
I am organizing a session for the Association for Private Enterprise Education conference to be held April 11-13, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The theme is “Reason in Hayek and Rand.” Here we have two giants of twentieth-century thought, but few comparative studies have been done. So as a start I have chosen Reason as
Hayek and Rand on reason Read More »
My fourth contribution to contest, my earlier three being from John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and Aristotle. I am surprised that we have no entries from Hegel, Fichte, or Heidegger, noted for their why-say-it-in-eight-words-when-sixty-are-available tendencies. But to my knowledge, the longest sentence written by a philosopher is the following 309-word original from the pen of
Philosophy’s longest sentences, part 4 Read More »
My third contribution to the contest to find the longest sentences ever published by a philosopher, my first and second contributions being a 161-word contender from John Stuart Mill and a 163-word heavyweight from Immanuel Kant. We turn now to Book 1 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: “Now if the function of man is an activity
Philosophy’s longest sentences, Part 3 Read More »