Free Republic

Why it matters that our democracy trust in GodFATHER ROBERT BARRONI was pleased to see that the United States Supreme Court recently dismissed a suit brought by Michael Newdow, a Sacramento man who wanted to remove the phrase “In God We Trust” from the nation’s coins and paper currency, as well as from the fronts of our public buildings. The tired argument that the gentleman brought forward was that this custom somehow violates the first amendment guarantee that the government shall make no law either establishing an official religion or prohibiting the free exercise of religion in the United...

January's Physics World features a fanciful re-imagining of the 10-year period in the life of the medieval Muslim polymath, written by Los Angeles-based science writer Jennifer Ouellette... In 11th-century Egypt, Aristotle's ancient thought that visible objects and our own eyes emit rays of light to enable our vision still held... As Ouellette writes, "This is a work of fiction -- a fanciful re-imagining of a 10-year period in the life of Ibn al-Haytham, considered by many historians to be the father of modern optics. Living at the height of the golden age of Arabic science, al-Haytham developed an early version...

Ptolemy's Geography, America and Columbus: Ancient Greeks and why maybe America was discovered Michael Lahanas Aristotle: “there is a continuity between the parts about the pillars of Hercules and the parts about India, and that in this way the ocean is one.” [As] for the rest of the distance around the inhabited earth which has not been visited by us up to the present time (because of the fact that the navigators who sailed in opposite directions never met), it is not of very great extent, if we reckon from the parallel distances that have been traversed by us... For...

For 2,000 years, the document written by one of antiquity's greatest mathematicians was ill treated, torn apart and allowed to decay. Now, US historians have decoded the Archimedes book. But is it really new? When the Romans advanced to Sicily in the Second Punic War and finally captured the proud city of Syracuse, one of their soldiers met an old man who, surrounded by the din of battle, was calmly drawing geometric figures in the sand. "Do not disturb my circles," the eccentric old man called out. The legionnaire killed him with his sword. That, at least, is the legend....

For seventy years, a prayer book moldered in the closet of a family in France, passed down from one generation to the next. Its mildewed parchment pages were stiff and contorted, tarnished by burn marks and waxy smudges. Behind the text of the prayers, faint Greek letters marched in lines up the page, with an occasional diagram disappearing into the spine. The owners wondered if the strange book might have some value, so they took it to Christie's Auction House of London. And in 1998, Christie's auctioned it off—for two million dollars. For this was not just a prayer book....

A long-lost text by the ancient Greek mathematician shows that he had begun to discover the principles of calculus. ~~~snip~~~ An intensive research effort over the last nine years has led to the decoding of much of the almost-obliterated Greek text. The results were more revolutionary than anyone had expected. The researchers have discovered that Archimedes was working out principles that, centuries later, would form the heart of calculus and that he had a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of infinity than anyone had realized. ~~~~snip~~~~

For five days in May, the ancient collided with the ultra-modern at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), bringing brilliant, long-hidden ideas to light with brilliant X-ray light. A synchrotron X-ray beam at the Department of Energy facility illuminated an obscured work - erased, written over and even painted over - of ancient mathematical genius Archimedes, born 287 B.C. in Sicily. Archimedes' amazingly advanced ideas have been lost and found several times throughout the ages. Now scientists are employing modern technology — including X-ray fluorescence at SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) — to completely read the Archimedes Palimpsest, the...

A long-obscured transcription of Archimedes' mathematical theories has been brought to light through x-rays, US scientists say. The 1000-year-old parchment, made of goatskin, contains Archimedes' original work, which was written in the 3rd century BC but copied down by a 10th century scribe. The manuscript includes the only copy in the original Greek of the treatise "Method of Mechanical Theorems", in which the Greek mathematician, physicist, and inventor describes how he developed his mathematical theorems using mechanical means. It is also the only source in the original Greek of Archimedes' theory of flotation of bodies. In the 12th century parchment...

X-rays reveal Archimedes secrets By Jonathan Fildes Science and technology reporter, BBC News A series of hidden texts written by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes are being revealed by US scientists. Until now, the pages have remained obscured by paintings and texts laid down on top of the original writings. Using a non-destructive technique known as X-ray fluorescence, the researchers are able to peer through these later additions to read the underlying text.

SAN FRANCISCO – Previously hidden writings of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes are being uncovered with powerful X-ray beams nearly 800 years after a Christian monk scrubbed off the text and wrote over it with prayers. Over the past week, researchers at Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park have been using X-rays to decipher a fragile 10th century manuscript that contains the only copies of some of Archimedes' most important works. The X-rays, generated by a particle accelerator, cause tiny amounts of iron left by the original ink to glow without harming the delicate goatskin parchment. “We are...

An ambitious international project to decipher 1,000-year-old moldy pages is yielding new clues about ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of Hyperides... What is slowly coming to light, scholars say, represents the most significant discovery of Hyperides text since 1891, illuminating some fascinating, time-shrouded insights into Athenian law and social history... [T]here is more to the palimpsest than Archimedes' work, including 10 pages of Hyperides, offering tantalizing and fresh insights into the critical battle of Salamis in 480 B.C., in which the Greeks defeated the Persians, and the battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C., which spelled the beginning of...

A CELESTIAL event in the 5th century BC could be the earliest documented sighting of Halley's comet - and it marked a turning point in the history of astronomy. According to ancient authors, from Aristotle onwards, a meteorite the size of a "wagonload" crashed into northern Greece sometime between 466 and 468 BC. The impact shocked the local population and the rock became a tourist attraction for 500 years. The accounts describe a comet in the sky when the meteorite fell. This has received little attention, but the timing corresponds to an expected pass of Halley's comet, which is visible...

Students, particularly conservatives, can get a good idea of how much they missed in their education by reading 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read: Plus Four Not to Miss and One Imposter by Benjamin Wiker. The names that you might expect to see in such a compendium are here, including Hayek, Chesterton and even C. S. Lewis. What may surprise some are the additions, specifically Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Aristotle. Benjamin Wiker, with each book, gives a backdrop for each author’s life and how modern Wiker then meticulously analyzes each book, comparing them to situations that a modern conservative reader...

"If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence."

"We know that the moment of greatest danger to a society is when it comes near realizing its most cherished dreams." - Eric Hoffer From its origins in Athens some 2,500 years ago, it has been obvious to some astute observers that democracy, like all other forms of government, carries with it a certain type of energy. Barack Obama rode this unique democratic energy into the White House over a year ago. He called it a "righteous wind" and promised something rather vague that he called "change." To many otherwise innocent American voters, "change" likely meant the change from...

This weekend’s feedback is in response to a number of queries about the Church of England (Anglicans) officially apologizing to Darwin. However, they don’t speak for all attenders of this church, since many of them are still faithful to Scripture and are appalled by their ‘leaders’. There are numerous mistakes in the article by the official CoE representative, a Rev. Dr Malcolm Brown, on the official CoE website, and Jonathan Sarfati replies point-by-point...

In the Aristotelian tradition, virtue stands in the middle, between two extremes, a too much and a too little. Aristotle thought that a non-arbitrary middle could be found. Prudence arrived at it, but did not constitute it. Aristotle's good man lived virtuously, not just any way. Our actions were judged midst the actual circumstances in which we lived our lives. But suppose I have an argument about what is half of thirty. One man says it is twenty, the other twenty-five. Thus, their mean is twenty-two and a half. But all three views are wrong, though twenty is closer...

Gay Marriage and Natural Kinds by David R. Carlin What does Aristotle have to do with same-sex marriage? Aristotle held that the human race, in addition to being divided into male and female, was also divided into slave and free. This latter division was not merely conventional or legal; like the male-female division, it was a product of nature. Just as nature had made some humans male and others female, so it had made some free and others slave. I mention this Aristotelian idea, not because I want to discuss slavery and freedom, but because I want address the idea...

Aristotle: “… it is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens: upon the same principle, if it is advantageous to place the supreme power in some particular persons, they should be appointed to be only guardians, and the servants of the laws, for the supreme power must be placed somewhere; CHAPTER XVI [1287a] We will next consider the absolute monarch that we have just mentioned, who does everything according to his own will: for a king governing under the direction of laws which he is obliged to follow does not of himself create any particular...

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....