The Unnamable Present, by Roberto Calasso, is curious and compelling. The first half is about the features which render the post-millenial age “unnameable.” In it, Calasso connects otherwise disparate strands of thought, in very interesting ways. The presentation of these series of connections together characterize the unnameable present. In the second half, Calasso presents […]
Read more...Blog
Resurgent Paganism
A review of Pagans & Christians in the City/Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac, by Stephen D. Smith Stephen D. Smith is the author of several works concerning secularism and religious freedom, some of them from a Constitutional and legal perspective, as befits a law professor, as he is. In this book, […]
Read more...Postmodernism 101
In my ongoing effort to try to figure out why half the world has lost its collective mind, I read Postmodernism 101 by Heath White, and offer here a few thoughts about it. Very readable, first of all, which is not so for many tomes purportedly about postmodernism. I attribute the usual lack of […]
Read more...Brain-eating Drug
One of the blogs I pay pretty close attention to is Rod Dreher’s. On December 17th, one of his topics was porn. You may have intuited there must be a connection between porn and sexual dysfunction and perversion of various kinds; that it might not be an innocuous activity, even putting moral considerations aside. […]
Read more...Fideism and Empiricism
Apostrophe Abuse I have affirmative proof of the imminent collapse of civilization. In Britain there was something called “The Apostrophe Protection Society.” They just announced: “We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won.” In case you think I make this stuff […]
Read more...Overton Window
The Mind Friday’s (11/22/10) Wall Street Journal article by Robert Lee Holtz: Music’s Universal Pull Studied by Algorithm. Turns out there are some “universal patterns” in music, even correcting for biases of culture, perception, and the findings appearing in Western scholarship. Music apparently has “bedeviled” Darwinian biologists. Luke Glowacki of Pennsylvania State University […]
Read more...Beauty and Art
A few years ago I commented on a book by philosopher Edward Feser titled The Last Superstition. Feser laid out the reasoning of ancient philosophers, emphasizing Aristotle, showing how the existence of physical things pointed unmistakeably to a non-physical reality behind it. Feser’s book ended with a saying attributed to Confuscious: when the finger points […]
Read more...Anxious Reason
I stumbled on an excellent article nominally about Daniel Dafoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe but really about the Enlightenment debates about the supernatural; how we reconcile the two ways of knowing. Crusoe at the Crossroads/On Robinson Crusoe, Lost, and why we keep returning to mysterious islands where science blurs with the supernatural. It’s at […]
Read more...The Judge
Here are a few themes of Blood Meridian, subtitled The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy. The character Holden, called “the judge” is Mephistophelean, and at the end is revealed as the devil himself. His chief attribute is that he is the accuser, as with the preacher at the beginning, the expriest Tobin […]
Read more...Uploaded Mind?
What do you think of this? In an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago, Princeton Neuroscience professor Michael S.A. Graziano asserts “the day is coming when we will be able to scan our entire consciousness into a computer . . . .” The title of the piece asks rhetorically “will […]
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