Free Republic

Roller derby resurgence 2:01 Women across the country are suiting up for some excitement playing roller derby...

Text reveals more ancient secrets By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC News The commentary on Aristotle lay hidden within the parchment Experts are "lost for words" to have found that a medieval prayer book has yielded yet another key ancient text buried within its parchment. Works by mathematician Archimedes and the politician Hyperides had already been found buried within the book, known as the Archimedes Palimpsest. But now advanced imaging technology has revealed a third text - a commentary on the philosopher Aristotle. Project director William Noel called it a "sensational find". The prayer book was written in the 13th...

The California Assembly just passed a bill widely described in the press as “an end run around the Electoral College.” It now goes to the California Senate, which is likely to agree. There is only one slight problem with this proposal. It is thrice-times unconstitutional. The bill is an “interstate compact,” and has been introduced in the legislatures of most of the largest states, by do-gooders who are clueless about the Constitution and how it works. The theory is that if states possessing “a majority of the votes in the Electoral College” pass similar bills, those states would be committed...

Iron meteorites thought to have originated in the asteroid belt beyond Mars may actually have formed near Earth, a new study reports... Iron meteorites are made up of iron and nickel alloys and comprise about 6% of all catalogued space rocks on Earth... Studies show that the known iron meteorites come from about 80 different parent asteroids, while the thousands of known stony meteorites broke off from just 40 or so parent bodies. That suggests astronomers should see many "differentiated" asteroids in the asteroid belt today, says William Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US. But observations...

Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, published in 1948, was among the founding documents of contemporary conservatism. The title phrase has become something of a cliché, and overuse has stripped it of the interesting meaning it once had. Nowadays most people assume that what Weaver was saying was that how we think is bound to affect how we act, and that the intellectual trends that prevail in a society will determine its moral and political character. To be sure, that was part of his meaning, but if that were all he had in mind his message would have been a...

Like you, I receive a pile of e-mails every day, beyond those my spam blocker catches. They offer to lower my mortgage rate, increase the size of a certain part of my body, or (often) offer me something that might be funny. Below is one of those, exactly as I received it. Following that are some serious points to consider. Enjoy. Then think about it. TO: Honorable Secretary of Agriculture, Washington, D.C. Dear Sir, My friend, Ed Peterson, over at Wells Iowa, received a check for $1,000 from the government for not raising hogs. So, I want to go into...

Freeper Investigation: Original Intent and Constitutional Jurisprudence by Jean F. Drew English and Anglo-American law’s core principle is the opposition to abusive power as exercised by the state. As Dan Gifford writes in “The Conceptual Foundations of Anglo-American Jurisprudence in Religion and Reason,” “The law is not the law regardless if it be good, bad, or indifferent. There is a higher moral law, originating within ancient Jewish law, which requires individual responsibility for opposing evil and promoting goodness. It is from this basic tenet that English law and Anglo-American law embody the following principle: The individual has rights against the...

The “Cartesian Split” Is a Hallucination; Ergo, We Should Get Rid of It by Jean F. Drew The Ancient Heritage of Western Science The history of science goes back at least two and a half millennia, to the pre-Socratics of ancient Greece. Democritus and Leucippus were the fathers of atomic theory — at least they were the first thinkers ever to formulate one. Heraclitus was the first thinker to consider what in the modern age developed as the laws of thermodynamics. Likewise Plato’s Chora, in the myth of the Demiurge (see Timaeus), may have been the very first anticipation of...

ROME, MAY 2, 2005 (Zenit.org).- ZENIT is reprinting this message that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) sent to a meeting of the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation in August 2002. The group was meeting in Rimini, Italy. * * * "The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty" By Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger Every year, in the Liturgy of the Hours for the Season of Lent, I am struck anew by a paradox in Vespers for Monday of the Second Week of the Psalter. Here, side by side, are two antiphons, one for the Season of Lent, the other for...

    Tastes and interests change in literature. Different themes, different styles, indeed whole different genres come in and out of being depending on the spirit of the age.     Nevertheless, there is something to be said for a “classical” style—not in a restricted sense as the style of Greco-Roman antiquity, nor any later genre which took inspiration from it—but rather a super-cultural literary style that rises up above its own genre and belongs as much to the ages as its own time period.     This is the old concept of the “Republic of Letters”—a community not of time and space...

I’ve never before used a long quote from anyone who has, in Dave Barry’s words, the IQ of a kumquat. But there are exceptions to every rule. The following appeared on an exceptionally paranoid website known as the Democratic Underground. See for yourselves that this quote is typical of DU. "The Iraq vote is making me sick this morning "All the media keeps talking about is how happy the Iraqis are, how high turnout was, and how ‘freedom’ has spread to Iraq. I had to turn off CNN because they kept focusing on the so-called ‘voters’ and barely mentioned the...

All manner of essays from the Left and Right, presented for your reading (and quoting) pleasure.. All EssaysQuotations Links to Related Topics

I used to do two series of threads. One was about politics and government in the Greco-Roman civilization, and the other was my own columns. Here's a list of them: Ancient Politics and Government The Athenian Constitution, Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five by Aristotle Chapter One of Polybius and the Founding Fathers by Marshall Davies Lloyd Deeds of Augustus by Caesar Augustus Cicero by Plutarch The Conspiracy of Catiline by Sallust Lives of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius JuliusAugustusTiberiusCaligulaClaudiusNeroGalbaOtho The American Constitutionalist-In Defense of "Underage" Drinking -Anarchy vs. the Right to Life -Calling a...

  A Universal Mistake One of the most important of Ayn Rand's contributions to the field of epistemology is contained in the seventh chapter of her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology entitled, "The Cognitive Role of Concepts." In it she explains how the world we are conscious of is comprised of an infinite complexity of existents, events, and relationships and why it is not possible for us to comprehend this complexity simply by perceiving it. To understand it, we must "break it up," into manageable pieces we can identify and understand. This, Ayn Rand explains, is the role of concepts."The essence...

  Aristotle: Ayn Rand's Acknowledged Teacher by Edward W. Younkins Ayn Rand, whose philosophy is a form of Aristotelianism, had the highest admiration for Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). She intellectually stood on Aristotle’s shoulders as she praised him above all other philosophers. Rand acknowledged Aristotle as a genius and as the only thinker throughout the ages to whom she owed a philosophical debt. According to Rand, Aristotle, the teacher of those who know, is the fountainhead behind every achievement in civilized society including science, technology, progress, freedom, aesthetics (including romantic art) and the birth of America itself. Aristotle’s philosophy has underpinned...

Fr. James V. Schall on Political Philosophy By Ken Masugi Posted December 23, 2003 James V. Schall, S. J. has had a venerable career in teaching and publishing. He is Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. His books include: Another Sort of Learning, At the Limits of Political Philosophy, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, Schall on Chesterton, Idylls and Rambles, What Is God Like? and Jacques Maritain: A Philosopher in Society. His writings are posted here. Last December, the Claremont Institute's Ken Masugi interviewed Fr. Schall at length. He picked up the conversation again, earlier this...

Worthy Causes I grew up in a Protestant church that believed in a literal interpretation of the King James Bible. Since there is no mention in the Bible of Dec. 25, the church refused to make Christmas a religious observance. Baldwin pianos and Hammond organs were verboten for the same reason. In that they are probably right, since Christmas was adapted to a pagan festival. There is no written record of when the Christ child was born. Nevertheless, that didn't stop my family from observing Christmas, since, like most families with small children, Christmas was more about Santa Claus than...

The Delusion of Darwinian Natural Law Marc D. GuerraIn a short, inconspicuous paragraph in the conclusion to the first edition of On the Origin of Species, Darwin speculates that "in the distant future … psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation." One hundred and forty years later, Darwin's eerie prediction about the revolutionary effect of his work on human beings' self-understanding seems all too prophetic. After a century of dissemination, the once-novel theory of evolution is widely accepted as established scientific fact. Given the quasi-religious hold...

Modern liberalism, even as its philosophers hold that no act is objectively sinful, treats hypocrisy as a serious sin. Why? If nothing is sinful, why is hypocrisy sinful? Hypocrisy is sinful -- that is, damaging to the soul -- if the moral principles the hypocrite voices then violates are true. But liberals tell us those principles aren't true, that humans can depart from them without damage to their character. So what's the moral problem with violating a moral code liberals consider false in the first place? Hypocrisy is a moral problem, but liberals can't reach that conclusion on the basis...

According to Aristotle, the wise man strives always for moderation. In art and in life, he argued, “The Golden Mean is best.” Medieval theologians agreed, noting that temperance, one of the seven cardinal virtues, requires moderation in all things. In politics especially, moderation is an important virtue. Barry Goldwater was wrong. Extremism in the defense of liberty may in fact be a vice: it may destroy the very liberty it claims to be defending. One of the great strengths of America is that, through most of our history, we’ve avoided political extremes, choosing the path of moderation. In the first...

In our capacity as political scientists, historians, or philosophers we all have had occasion at one time or another to engage in debate with ideologists – whether communists or intellectuals of a persuasion closer to home. And we have all discovered on such occasions that no agreement, or even an honest disagreement, could be reached, because the exchange of argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence – with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his...

<p>Berkeley, the first city to ban Styrofoam and wood-fired pizza ovens, could become the first to enact Aristotle's ancient law of logic -- that every entity is equal to itself. In a philosophical effort to come up with a city law that no one could ever break, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats wants Berkeley to legally acknowledge Aristotle's law, commonly expressed as A=A.</p>

Who says education has improved in 2000 years? You couldn’t prove it by this man. ACHIEVMENT For the excellence of an achievement is not the same as that of a possession: the possession that we prize most is that which is most valuable, e.g. gold; but the achievement is the one that is great and splendid (because the contemplation of such a thing excites one's administration, and magnificence is an object of administration), and magnificence is an achievement is excellence on a grand scale. - Aristotle, Ethics. c.334-23 B.C. ACTION Just as at the Olympic Games it is not the...

An excerpt from "Culture Wars Invade the Lives of Boys". [full text] ... Christina Hoff Sommers, a former philosophy professor turned popular writer, is the author of the most intense salvo: The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (Simon and Schuster, 2000; $25). Now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Sommers throws down the gauntlet from the book's opening pages. She writes that it has fallen to her to tell "how we are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness and corporal daring of normal, decent males is...

[CAPITALISMMAGAZINE.COM] How do you get young Middle Eastern men to fly a jet full of Americans into the side of a skyscraper? You tell them their creator will love them for it and reward them beyond their wildest dreams. But they have to believe in such a creator first. To instill this belief you educate them from a very young age. You tell them things like: in death, the true believer lives. In life, the true believer, when directed by god, kills unbelievers. In both death and life, a true believer's happiness is fulfilled by a grateful and all-powerful god....