I had the good fortune to meet at a conference the very excellent Frances White who is featured in this documentary. Frances is so much more interesting and empirically sound than the cultural anthropologists who typically operate under a highly derivative and lazy Marxist lens.
Didymus the Blind and the Alexandrian Christian Reception of Philo
This recent title caught my attention given my longstanding interest in Philo. The index heavily features David Runia, which prima facie, is a good indicator.
Walker Percy Wednesday 154
THE DELTA FACTOR
How I Discovered the Delta Factor Sitting at My Desk One Summer Day in Louisiana in the 1950’s Thinking about an Event in the Life of Helen Keller on Another Summer Day in Alabama in 1887
In the beginning was Alpha and the end is Omega, but somewhere between occurred Delta, which was nothing less than the arrival of man himself and his breakthrough into the daylight of language and consciousness and knowing, of happiness and sadness, of being with and being alone, of being right and being wrong, of being himself and being not himself, and of being at home and being a stranger.
WHY DOES MAN feel so sad in the twentieth century? Why does man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making over the world for his own use? Why has man entered on an orgy of war, murder, torture, and self-destruction unparalleled in history and in the very century when he had hoped to see the dawn of universal peace and brotherhood? Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why do people often feel so bad in good environments that they prefer bad environments?
Wagner and German Idealism
Scruton, Grayling, Janaway, Tanner and Deathridge each present a short episode on the philosophical influences on Wagner.
Liberty and Equality in Political Economy From Locke versus Rousseau to the Present
Stephen Hicks reviews Nick and Gordon’s latest: an incentive for me to begin reading it given that all three are some of the best conference discussants I’ve come across.
The Lockeans ask, “How can we raise everyone up?” while the Rousseaueans ask, “If we can’t raise all of the poor up, how can we lower the rich to an appropriate level?” Psychologically, then, Lockeans are oriented toward success, while Rousseaueans are oriented toward alienation. Further, Lockean social psychology emphasizes respect for others’ achievements while Rousseauean social psychology attends to the envy felt toward those who have more.
The Nightmare
From the start, caricaturists also adopted Fuseli’s composition, and political figures from Napoleon Bonaparte to President George W. Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have all been lampooned in satirical versions of Fuseli’s painting.
Stigmergic epistemology, stigmergic cognition
Cognitive Systems Research Volume 9, Issues 1–2, March 2008, Pages 136-149. As improbable as this might sound there is a bit of Hayek, Oakeshott and Marx in here.
The Poet Laureate of Englishness
Here is a new review essay in The Atlantic. Here too are The New York Times, The Guardian, London Review of Books and Washington Post.
An Interview with Louis Armstrong House’s Research Director, Ricky Riccardi
An interview with the keeper of the flame — truly an officer and a gentleman. The shot below really captures the essence of this wonderful man with the safest of hands: a more appropriate guardian of one of the 20th Century’s most important cultural legacies one will not find. Every Pops fan needs to make a pilgrimage to the Louis Armstrong House Museum and if you are New York-based you have no excuse at all not to.
Ricky Riccardi, the museum’s Director of Research Collections, is an ebullient man whose love for Louis is surpassed only by his desire to share his depth of knowledge about his icon with others.
manwithoutqualities 