It is, usually, far too awkward to import great figures of antiquity into current political discussions. That said, let’s give it a shot. Thinking through the definitions of conservatism, it seemed to me plausible that a conservative could perhaps make a claim to Cicero. This would assume an . . . . Continue Reading »
President Obama just abruptly and unceremoniously put his Bioethics Council to rest and our own Peter Lawler, a member of the commission, writes its eulogy explaining the importance of its work and of the issues it addressed. While the website still exists, I encourage any and all to take a . . . . Continue Reading »
So any postmodern conservative who would want to give the strongest possible case for Walt Whitman would begin, as I have, with a long footnote to the 1876 preface to his LEAVES OF GRASS: Given the necessarily inegalitarian manifestations of human greatness of war and politics that Whitman . . . . Continue Reading »
Love, I think, is a primary component in the metaleptic phenomenon of being and Eternal Being within the tension of existence. It is the experiential insight that gives succor to man’s deformed yearning (sehnsucht) for perfection in life, and it reveals to us that “God can not be . . . . Continue Reading »
Astute observations and important reflections by James, Will, and Ivan just below nourish my ongoing reflections on the meaning of reason’s responsibility today. The left’s appeals to “scientific” or otherwise purely “rationalist” reason appear more and more febrile . . . . Continue Reading »
One of the perks of working in the biotechnology industry is that one’s colleagues occasionally send along gems like the following: “Health Disparity focuses on understanding and/or addressing factors that contribute to differences in the disease experience across populations . . . . . . . Continue Reading »
The Summer 2009 issue of The New Atlantis is now hot off the press and I have a article entitled “Technocracy and Populism” among the mix. The New Atlantis really is one of my favortite journals, always has lots of interesting and cutting edge studies exploring the . . . . Continue Reading »
This is a part of my study of Kass that I’m posting today instead of saying more about Rousseau . . . The thought of Enlightenment thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes and Condorcet was that only indefinite longevity could transform the world in a genuinely humane way. With it, the progress of . . . . Continue Reading »
(continued from 6/1/09) As little inclined as is Charles Taylor to connect the pre-ontological with the metaphysical, religious “experience” with cognitive assertions, he cannot finally avoid making certain claims about the way things are, or at least the way human things are: We all see . . . . Continue Reading »
Kass reports that he was prepared by his experiences at Harvard (with privileged scientific intellectuals) and in Mississippi (with the nobility of the poor and oppressed) for reading “Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences .” This book was the first major effort of a . . . . Continue Reading »
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