Watch it here. And it will teach you to love classical music, even if you already do. Continue reading

Just returned from a Liberty Fund conference in Indianapolis. The topic was religion, freedom of speech, and politics in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. These folks really know how to run a show. Three 1.5-hour sessions in the morning, lunch, 4-hour down-time, a fourth session, cocktails, dinner, cocktails. Repeat. Discussion was at a consistently high level, with… Continue reading

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Leslak Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial, pp. 135-6: “My general attitude may be thus expressed: What philosophy is about is not Truth. Philosophy can never discover any universally admissible truths; and if a philosopher happened to have made a genuine contribution to science (one thinks, say, of the mathematical works of Descartes, Leibniz, or Pascal),… Continue reading

After the last post on incommensurability, Mike provided a link to a more theoretical discussion of Lakatos’s and MacIntyre’s objections to Kuhn. In my opinion, the linked article is too abstract to provide any guidance. The author favors MacIntyre’s idea that a scientist moves from one paradigm to another when the old paradigm fails to… Continue reading

T. P. M. Barnett’s take on the need for Blackwater-type companies here, along with a link to a NYT article. What I find interesting is his remark that Blackwater is today’s Pinkerton’s. Continue reading