Did you build that?
From a book within a book:
“He said that architecture was truly the greatest of the arts, because it was anonymous, as all greatness. …
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Philosophy
Power does not corrupt
Here are Acton’s famous words: “I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make
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Are Austrian economists anti-empirical?
An instructive trio of essays by economists at Cato Unbound about Austrian economics’ reputation — especially Mises’s praxeological version — for being strongly a priori rationalist: Is Austrian economics anti-empiricist? Steve Horwitz says no. Bryan Caplan says yes. George Selgin also says yes. To Selgin’s series of quotations from Mises, I’d add this one from
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Zelmanovitz on philosophy of money
I was struck by this philosophical economist’s connecting the Aristotelian solution to the so-called naturalistic fallacy to the question of the value of money. “This approach hints at the fact that a key element in this work is the treatment given to questions surrounding the ‘naturalistic fallacy.’ The basic reasoning here is that in regard
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Deep thought on Kant’s “Ought implies can”
Kant’s dictum Ought implies can is true — except when you’re drunk.
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Libraries discriminate against the blind
And symphonies discriminate against the deaf. I mocked that view in criticizing last year’s lawsuit against Chipotle: Chipotle Mexican Grill versus egalitarianism. Turns out, though, that it’s cutting-edge civil rights law based on the Americans with Disabilities Act: “Justice Department Settles with Sacramento, Calif., Public Library Authority Over Inaccessible ‘E-Reader’ Devices”. The library had acquired
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Explaining Postmodernism as university textbook
I learned this week that my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault will be used this academic year as a textbook in philosophy courses in New York, Canada, and South Africa. How cool is that.
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Carlin Romano’s America the Philosophical
Over the years I’ve enjoyed and learned from many of Carlin Romano’s articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He can do good philosophical reporting. So I picked up America the Philosophical, and I was disappointed. Romano’s thesis is that the United States is a nation of vigorous philosophical activity and — contrary to the
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