I’ve always admired the Greeks — one must admire a culture that has a god for drinking and partying — but now the Lithuanians of old have risen in my affections. The Baltic pagans had not one but three deities devoted to beer and beer production: Raugutis, the god of beer; Raugutiene, Ragutis’s consort who […]
What the pagan Lithuanians got right Read More »
Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) was a leading neo-Kantian philosopher. He trained under Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), a founder and leader of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, which was perhaps the most dominant school of philosophy in the German academic world in the 19th century. Here is Cassirer’s assessment of why Kant matters to the history of socialism:
Kant and socialism, according to Cassirer Read More »
James Orr defends “the conservative’s instinct for the particular over the universal, the empirical over the rational, the concrete over the abstract, the pragmatic over the ideal.” That is from Dr. Orr’s opening essay in this Reason Papers three-round debate with Dr. Stephen Hicks. Orr advocates and defends Conservatism; Hicks does the same for Liberalism.
What Is Conservatism? James Orr (Cambridge Univ.) debates Stephen Hicks (Rockford Univ.) Read More »
When composer Igor Stravinksy met Pablo Picasso in Italy in 1917, Picasso drew Stravinsky and gave him the portrait as a gift. But when Stravinksy tried to cross the border with it, he was suspected of attempting to smuggle secret plans out of the country. As Stravinsky tells it in his autobiography: “I shall never
Interpreting Picasso — amusing anecdote from Stravinksy Read More »
George Orwell in 1944: “To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like. It is this habit of mind, among other things,
Year 1500 context: 50 years earlier Gutenberg had developed his printing press, eight years earlier Columbus had crossed the Atlantic, Michelangelo had just finished his Pietà, Luther was in school, and Copernicus was in university. Fewer than 10% of Europeans were literate. Source: Robert C. Allen, Global Economic History, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 26.
Literacy Rates in Early Modernity Read More »
“The very corner-stone of an education intended to form great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth: and this without a particle of regard to the results to which the exercise of
Liberal Education vs. Indoctrination (quotation from J.S. Mill when younger) Read More »
In her Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art, Wendy Steiner, a professor of literature at Penn, argues that “In modernism, the perennial rewards of aesthetic experience — pleasure, insight, empathy — were largely withheld, and its generous aim, beauty, was abandoned” (p. xv). Steiner notes that “the main symbol of such
Wendy Steiner on Kant and what Modern Art Abandoned Read More »