A contemporary of Galileo’s in reply to his 1610 discovery of Jupiter’s moons: “There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head. From this and many other similarities in nature, such as the seven metals, etc., which were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven. […]
Why there can be only seven planets Read More »
G. W. F. Hegel: “From the Kantian system and its completion I expect a revolution in Germany.” Johann Holderlin: “Kant is the Moses of our nation.” “Within a few years of the publication of his Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was recognized by his contemporaries as one of the seminal thinkers
Some post-Kantians on Kant, pro and con Read More »
When women got the vote fully at the national level: 1893 New Zealand 1902 Australia 1906 Finland 1913 Norway 1915 Denmark 1917 Canada 1918 Austria, Germany, Poland, Russia 1919 Netherlands 1920 United States 1921 Sweden 1928 Britain, Ireland All other countries: Granted later or not yet granted. Note: Six of the fifteen are British or former British colonies; the other nine are northern European. (Also worth
Where women first got the vote and when Read More »
Stanley Fish, postmodern provocateur, gave a talk at Indiana University when I was a graduate student there in the late 1980s. He was then working on what would become There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech, And It’s a Good Thing, Too. Fish’s theme was social construction and oppression: We all are products of our
How Randy Newman Solved Stanley Fish’s Credibility Problem Read More »
Yet another reason to despise the Russian experiment in socialism. After the communist revolution, the great composer Sergei Rachmaninoff went into exile, losing his home and other property to the Soviets — along with his publisher and his status in Russia as leading musician of his generation. Starting over in the West was a challenge,
How Rachmaninoff’s composing was hurt by the Soviet Union Read More »
Defeating an enemy such as politicized Islam is a multi-front battle—police, military, diplomatic, cultural, and philosophical. Any fight is triggered by short-term, local disagreements. But long-term, generalized conflicts are always about abstract principles in collision. As with neo-Nazis, Communist revolutionaries, violent environmentalists, bomb-the-government anarchists, and others—our conflicts with them are intellectual in origin. Terrorism is
How to Tame Religious Terrorists [Good Life series] Read More »
