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Jane Jacobs

Here is Jane Jacobs expert Sanford Ikeda who happens to be editing a special themed issue on her for C+T Jane JacobsSanford IkedaSpontaneous orderurban planning

Work, its moral meaning or import

Here’s a relatively recent piece from David Wiggins of course invoking the historical figure he is most familiar with — Aristotle: One who agrees to speak about the ethical meaning of work might be expected to say something about its religious significance. Given limitations of time and competence, let me simply offer two remarkable utterances from the…

Walker Percy Wednesday 102

It is a bad time for psychiatrists. Old-fashioned shrinks are out of style and generally out of work. We, who like our mentor Dr. Freud believe there is a psyche, that it is born to trouble as the sparks fly up, that one gets at it, the root of trouble, the soul’s own secret, by…

Jew of Oklahoma

If you appreciate Kinky Friedman then you’ll certainly enjoy Mark Rubin of Bad Livers fame. The seamless confluence of many styles is an authentic distillation that marks this debut out for serious consideration, shot through with a wonderful self-deprecating sense of humor. The interesting/revealing thing is that given the prevailing (crude and superficial) social ontology, i.e., “basket of deplorables” — Mark would easily…

The soft bigotry of low expectations

“Identity and power structure” type courses are ubiquitous across universities these days. It has fed the “activism masquerading as inquiry” expansion of the university underwritten by bureaucraps, mutually reinforcing each other and attracting students who prefer to regurgitate some off-the-peg easily digestible worldview to do their “teacher’s” bidding in the absence of critical thinking and evidence-based theorizing. Now I’m…

The virtue epistemologist

The latest installment of Richard Marshall’s lovely interviews — here he’s talking with Ernest Sosa — a student of the wonderful Nicholas Rescher. It’s also worth listening to Sosa discussing the state of epistemology: EpistemologyErnest Sosanicholas rescherRichard Marshallsocial epistemologyVirtue epistemology

The Central Scrutinizers

Released on this day in ’79 Zappa’s target was, according to some sources, motivated by the banning of music in revolutionary Iran. The target we do know Zappa had in mind was the ascendancy of the fundamentalist Right of the ’80s and the idiotic PMRC proposal . . . but now the target is more appropriately applicable to the regressive…

Robert Musil and Nietzsche

The article examines several references to Friedrich Nietzsche made by Robert Musil in his non-fictional writings. An indication of Nietzsche’s significance for Musil is given by the fact that only one name occurs more often than Nietzsche’s in the collected works of Musil, where references to the philosopher span a period of more than forty…