It’s Friday morning, and I’m sitting in the computer lab because–well, because virtually nobody showed up for my eight o’clock class.  It’s Friday at the start of a holiday weekend, and the other schools in the area have the day off–but still.  I have to wake up at a ridiculous hour to get in for…

It’s stopped raining out where I am at the moment, which is a good thing.  It’s been raining like crazy here for most of a week, and down on the coast the kids are having rain days they way they used to have snow days.  Last week it was the Gold Coast that had to…

Jem wants to know when the whole thing about “man is just another animal” started, and thinking about it, I ended up wondering what is meant by “started.” The simple idea has been around at least as long as there have been literate societies in the West.  It pops up here and there among one…

Well, let me start out by saying that if I could pull this particular rabbit out of this particular hat, I wouldn’t just enjoy reading Aristotle, I’d be Aristotle. But let me start with Aristotle, and sort of go from there. Jem asked, at one point, what sort of evidence Aristotle had for his ideas…

This is an article that appeared in Arts and Letters Daily this week-end.  It’s from Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2248809/ I put it up because it’s a good illustration of those lines from Yeats–and yes, those were the ones I meant, from The Second Coming. I’d never heard them interpreted as being about the Irish Rebellion before.  The…

Part of me wants to respond to yesterday’s commnets by pointing out that I find two of the three examples Jem gave of what she thinks are simple, straightforward harms as problematic. On the issue of racial epithets, for instance, I’d say that morally I can’t see any excuse for using them even in the…

Ahem.  Well. I’m thinking this morning that I did this once on the subject of the consent standard, and what resulted from that was that everybody got mad at me.  But then, I’m not all that upset when everybody is mad at me, so maybe I should have a whack at it. Here’s the thing: …

I’ve finally figured out what it is–when it’s rainy or otherwise yuck out, the computer lab is full of people, most of them with MP3 players that do have earplugs, but they’re playing the damned things so loud, it’s impossible to think. I said I’d get back to the Protestants, and I will, sort of.…

One of the things about writing a blog is this:  it shows you, in no time at all, how little you have to say. When I started this, I had two purproses. The first was to write about the things I think about and get too little time to talk about these days.  I like…

It’s Monday, and I’m sitting in a computer lab that is, as usual, on any day that isn’t beach weather, absolutely insane.  That means I’m really not going to be able to write much that’s coherent.  So I’m not going to go back to the thing about Martin Luther and Protestantism and the Enlightenment until…