Category: Uncategorized
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: September Songs
Lotte Lenya sings Kurt Weill: September Song. "September in the Rain" (published 1937, music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin) enjoys an assured place in the Great American Songbook. Here is Dinah Washington's version. Here is a Liberace-Jack Benny spoof of 'September Song." And while we are on spoofs, check out this one of Patsy…
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The Existence of Infinite Sets
A reader asked whether one can prove that there are actually infinite sets. Well, let's see. It occurs to me that 'actually infinite set' is a pleonastic expresson. If there are infinite sets, then they are actually infinite, such that a potentially infinite set would be no set at all. For if there are mathematical (as opposed…
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A Latina Defends AZ SB 1070
Here.
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Why Mix Philosophy and Politics?
I am sometimes asked why I intersperse political entries with narrowly philosophical ones. But in every case the question was put to me by someone who tilts leftward. If my politics were leftist, would anyone complain? Probably not. Academe and academic philosophy are dominated by leftists, and to these types it seems entirely natural that one will be…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Blue Velvet
Tony Bennett's 1951 version. Can't find The Clovers' 1955 effort which is as good as any. Bobby Vinton had a #1 hit with it in 1963. Featured in David Lynch's 1986 "Blue Velvet." And while we're in a surreal mood, how about a little of the Big O's In Dreams?
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The Millenials: A Chump Generation?
Robert Samuelson, The Real Generation Gap. Concluding paragraph: Millennials could become the chump generation. They could suffer for their elders' economic sins, particularly the failure to confront the predictable costs of baby boomers' retirement. This poses a question. In 2008, millennials voted 2-1 for Barack Obama; in surveys, they say they're more disposed than older…
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Another Look at Anderson’s Trinitarian Mysterianism (Peter Lupu)
(Hauled up from the vasty deeps of the ComBox into the light of day by BV who supplies minor edits and comments in blue.) I strongly recommend to everyone interested in the subject to read Anderson’s “In defense of mystery: a reply to Dale Tuggy” (2005), Religious Studies, 41, 145-163 in which he replies to Dale…
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Cottingham on the Origin of the Religious Impulse
John Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (Routledge 2003), p. 52: . . . the whole of the religious impulse arises from the profound sense we have of a gap between how we are and how we would wish to be . . . . This is not quite right, as it seems to me.…
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Simone Weil and the Illusoriness of Worldly Goods
A correspondent, responding to Weil's Wager, has this to say: [. . .] What worries me when I turn to Weil’s argument is that she seems to be trying to replace Pascal’s serviceable scale of goods with a dichotomy of illusory and absolute goods. I have no idea what it means to say ”health and…
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Der Untergang des Abendlandes
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Is the Libertarian Principle of Self-Ownership Axiomatic?
See Ed Feser's outstanding post on this topic. For background on libertarianism, see Stephan Kinsella, What Libertarianism Is.
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A Post-Racial President?
Excellent commentary by Thomas Sowell.
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Ideals
Not only do we fail to live up to the ideals we have, we fail to have the ideals we ought to have. There are two problems here, the first pertaining more to the will, the second more to the intellect, or rather to the faculty of moral discernment. Let us consider the second problem. It…