The Philosophers You Need to Know
My ongoing series on the great philosophers, each episode devoted to a key text with my commentary.
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English liberty and Mozart’s opera
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,
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Texts in Philosophy — late 2022 additions
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).
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Do we need political compulsion for education? E. G. West on education and the Industrial Revolution
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
What’s new in witchcraft
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
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Don’t know much about history — anecdote
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,
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Hicks lecture on Alexander Dugin, Gdansk, Poland, December 16
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
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On fanatics and ineffectual selves (Eric Hoffer)
“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
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