Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Etc.
Posted in Culture, Philosophy, politics on Jun 20th, 2008
[ Part 1 ] [ Part 2 ]
I’m starting to think no one but me ever thought about this question. *grin* But what if you did? How would you do it?
Take Aristotle’s approach to definitions, for instance. He would identify the genus to which government belongs, and then specify its “specific difference.”
The “specific difference” of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 8th, 2008
Below the fold, you’ll find the text of my address for Mt. Sophia Academy’s commencement ceremonies.
If you were there, you may notice that some of the jokes are missing. Sorry. One sometimes does a little ad lib-ing (libbing) when one actually delivers a speech . . . . (And then, sometimes, one has things one [...]
Posted in Entertainment, Ethics, Philosophy on May 28th, 2008
In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike is a vampire who — like Angel — hooks up with Buffy and the Scoobies (in different ways). Unlike Angel, however, Spike has no soul and is, therefore, evil. (An interesting theory of evil.)
And yet Spike ends up being attractive to Buffy, turning into a not-half-bad (or maybe merely-half-bad) [...]
Posted in life on May 16th, 2008
By Nancy Atkinson on Universe Today:
According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape.
Something about that sentence really bothers me. Einstein himself had nothing to say about black holes, as far as I know. (Here’s the Wikipedia version of the [...]
Posted in Philosophy, life on Dec 20th, 2007
(The other two being here and here.)
Words are windows.*
*(Words and expressions reveal different aspects of what they are about. So what you say to yourself reveals different things to yourself. And if you are sometimes OCD like me, you may find yourself using the same windows over and over again, and finding that [not surprisingly] [...]
Posted in Biology, Ethics, Philosophy, politics on Nov 14th, 2007
The news media is taking a pleasant interest in Aristotelian Virtues (whether they know it or not). Three stories:
The Downside of Optimism
Or, rather, of extreme optimism. As Aristotle said, virtuous action always observes a mean between the extremes of deficiency a excess. This story focuses on the damages of excess optimism.
But, like Aristotle also said, [...]
Posted in Economics, Ethics, Philosophy, politics, social justice on Nov 9th, 2007
Intro: Nicole Kidman
As my wife and I were riding home from Borders on the Metro, we saw a USA Today lying on the floor. A headline read, “Kidman breathes her roles deeply.” “What would it mean for her to breathe them shallowly?” I complained. A statement can’t make sense if it’s opposite doesn’t.
So I asked [...]
Posted in Ethics, Philosophy, politics, religion on Nov 5th, 2007
A few days ago Scott Adams blogged about “Why We Should All Become Muslims.” He’s a comedian, so you can’t take anything he says seriously (ouch, that’s kind of rough isn’t it?) but the post got about four times more comments than his others. And Aristotle would have something to say about it too.
So, since [...]
Begin Transcript . . .
Yesterday somebody got to my site through a search for “cosmic loneliness.” I found this so amusing I thought I should write a post I’d promised to write a while back. So I went back to find the post where I made the promise, and found the very phrase I thought [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 28th, 2007
I was talking to my students on Thursday about Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV. There he discusses both pride and shame. I pointed out that only Rightist Americans seem to be able to pull off the former (with respect to their being American), while both Right and Left are pretty darn good at at the [...]
WEeding Awards
