Huenemanniac

A. J. Jacobs spent a year trying to follow every rule in the Bible. Hear him recount his experiences, and what he learned from them, here. Continue reading

Here’s a question prompted from some conversations with Mike: To what extent do ideas influence the formation of culture? This is a big one, of course. At one extreme we have Hegel, who thought culture, civilization, history, and politics were nothing but the evolution of ideas, like a great big collective consciousness making up its… Continue reading

Continue reading

Continue reading

Continue reading

Read Thomas P.M. Barnett’s view of a possible upcoming war with Iran that “nobody wants but everyone seems to need” here. Continue reading

Order yours here! Continue reading

Just saw the movie last night. The main idea is that Lou Salome is worried about the mental state of her friend Nietzsche, and asks Josef Breuer (a physician beginning to dabble in psychoanalysis) and his friend young Sigmund Freud to help him out of his despair. Breuer has problems of his own, and Nietzsche… Continue reading

Good TPMB post here diagnosing what’s going on now with Iran. Also, I hope this photo draws a lotta laughs from the international community. Continue reading

Here is an interesting article by Laura Miller in Salon about Obama’s refreshingly broad interest in reading, including the following observation: Obama himself went through a period of “devouring” the work of Nietzsche while living in New York. It’s difficult to say what Obama might have absorbed from the German philosopher, mostly because Nietzsche himself… Continue reading

Mike has created the perfect image to go on our übermenschen t-shirts, mugs, etc: Continue reading

(That’s Supreme Court Of The United States). Apropos of the discussion over at usuphilosophy.com, here is a NYT review of the decisions handed down over the last term. A leftish-leaning president cannot come fast enough! (There aren’t any genuine leftists in the field; we’re limited to extreme-right, not-so-extreme right, and drifting from time to time… Continue reading

… sure hurts. On Sunday I joined Darrick, Tim, and Janet for a bike ride from Franklin, ID to the summit of Immigration Canyon. Turned out to be about 72 miles round trip, with 4400 feet of climbing in all. I’m proud to say I made it to the top — the hardest ride I’ve… Continue reading

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

Continue reading

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

I learned this lesson intellectually some time ago, but it was driven home to me over the last week: philosophers with different paradigms will find no central question, no decisive claim, that will provide an objective ruling in favor of one paradigm or the other. The lesson was taught most famously by Thomas Kuhn in… Continue reading

… in southern Utah: Continue reading

I’m going to assume that if some kind of contemporary pantheism is plausible, then it has to have more going for it than merely intellectual or emotional support. What I mean is this. If the only reason you have for being a pantheist is that you can’t think of reality except as a single unified… Continue reading

Lately I have been thinking about Spinoza’s attitude toward God. Many contemporary scholars put Spinoza’s metaphysics in the center of his vision: he thinks there is one substance, and all particular things are expressions of its unchanging essence. That one thing can be called “God,” since it has many of the core features attributed to… Continue reading