When I teach Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, my focus in class is philosophical, but I point out along the way how her fiction-writer’s methods concretize, dramatize, and foreshadow her abstract themes. One of my favorite examples is based on the premise that first meetings matter in life and literature. Here are our first meetings of […]
80th Anniversary of *The Fountainhead* Read More »
My ongoing series on the great philosophers, each episode devoted to a key text with my commentary.
The Philosophers You Need to Know Read More »
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 »