Free Republic

No, this isn’t a joke.Edward Luttwak, the distinguished Israeli-American strategist and public intellectual, tweeted the following this morning:11 Chinese universities teach Greek and Latin. Another 20 seek staff to so as well. Back in the US, the Princeton CLASSICS department has just eliminated the Latin or Greek requirement “to address systemic racism”. Truly racist say I. Why not just end it ? Jobs await in 中国The Chinese characters at the end mean “Middle Kingdom.”Princeton created an uproar by ditching the requirement for classics majors to learn Greek or Latin. That shouldn’t be a surprise: In 2017 Harvard eliminated the music...

Truth is pliable in Trumpland. In March, the president fired off a tweet accusing former President Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower. Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, dismissed the claim. But the Trump team doubled down, writing off media reports and insisting that evidence of wiretapping would soon surface. It didn’t. We’re used to this pattern by now: The president dresses up useful lies as “alternative facts” and decries uncomfortable realities as “fake news.” Stoking conservative passion and liberal fury, Trump stirs up confusion about the veracity of settled knowledge and,...

From the outside, with its high minarets and bulbous Mughal-style dome, the Wilmersdorf mosque, located on Brienner Street in southwest Berlin, looks much the same as it did when it was built in the 1920s. But the institution, just like the city around it, has changed. Today, the mosque is a quiet place. It mainly serves as an information center: School children sometimes visit on field trips; it hosts interfaith brunches. A small community of Muslims regularly show up for Friday prayer. It’s all a far cry from the days when the Wilmersdorf mosque was the lively center of a...

On July 3, 1907, in a decree bearing the lachrymose Latin title Lamentabili, the Vatican's Holy Office, predecessor of today's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, condemned 65 propositions that it had found contrary to Catholic orthodoxy. Pope Pius X followed up two months later, on September 8, with an encyclical named Pascendi Dominici Gregis (Feeding the Lord's Flock), in which he linked the condemned propositions to a heresy called Modernism and went on to identify its philosophical and theological roots. In conclusion, the encyclical specified stern disciplinary measures for stamping out the heresy.Considering these events from the...

Kant, Not Cant Actually, morning talker Bill Bennett has a much better taste in philosophers than that, but you’ve got the idea. It’s a curious thing, the angst over Don Imus. What’s most interesting is not what he said, but how people are reacting to his possible impending demise. If Don Imus goes, we are worrying — at least, the Washington Post is, but it’s not alone—will there be “No One to Talk To?” What the Post piece actually described is what a humiliating experience it is for a luminary to lower himself to go on Imus’s radio show—to sell...

'snip' I was reminded of this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury of the dialogue carried on-- perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara-- by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was probably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than the responses of the learned Persian. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures...

In his Christmas address to the Roman Curia on true and false interpretations of Vatican II, Pope Benedict XVI asked why the Church had had such a difficult time opening a dialogue with “the modern age.” His answers are provocative — and turn some of the conventional accounts of modern history inside out.A Bad Start The pope suggested that “Catholicism-and-modernity” got off to a bad start when the Galileo trial opened a fissure between the Church and natural science. Immanuel Kant’s philosophical attempt to define “religion within pure reason” then seemed to eliminate any notion of a divine revelation to...

Autocatakinetics, Evolution, and the Law of Maximum Entropy Production By Rod Swenson An Excerpt: Ecological science addresses the relations of living things to their environments, and the study of human ecology the particular case of humans. There is an opposing tradition built into the foundations of modern science of separating living things, and, in particular, humans from their environments. Beginning with Descartes’ dualistic world view, this tradition found its way into biology by way of Kant, and evolutionary theory through Darwin, and manifests itself in two main postulates of incommensurability, the incommensurability between psychology and physics (the “first postulate of...

Russia's Kant airforce base in Kyrgyzstan, which is part of the Collective Rapid Deployment Force in Central Asia, will be supplied with an additional number of combat planes. "There are plans to supply more combat planes to the base and this task will be fulfilled," said Russia's 5th Air and Air Defense Army commander Yevgeny Yuryev. Yuryev said the runway will be enlarged and extended and the old equipment will be replaced. "In the future, following reconstruction, the base will receive a large amount of modern military equipment," the general said. Russian air force headquarters reported that the air group...

A Philosophic Journey A review of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault by Stephen R.C. Hicks Ph.D. by Cass Hewitt Stephen R.C.Hicks' Explaining Postmodernism is really a philosophic history journey—it has a definite start, follows clearly marked guide posts and takes us to a logically unavoidable finish line. In clear simple language, easy to read and often entertaining, Hicks takes us on a guided tour, showing us exactly how and why we have ended up with a culture which is at once blessed by technology and liberal politics—and yet beleaguered by philosophic ideas and related activism...

Ever since Immanuel Kant posed his famous question in 1784--"What is Enlightenment?"--critics and commentators have searched for an answer, and they still do. For it is to the Enlightenment--a particular set of 18th-century ideas--that many thinkers trace the political and intellectual origins of the modern world. To pose Kant's question is to ask nothing less than who we are. The respected historian Gertrude Himmelfarb is the latest critic to take up this challenge. But she gives the question a plural form, asking "What are Enlightenments?" Surveying the experiences of England, France and America, she follows three different "roads to modernity."...

Newton vs. The Clockwork Universe By Jean F. Drew As Wolfhart Pannenberg observes in his Toward a Theology of Nature: Essays on Science and Faith (1993), the present-day intellectual mind-set assumes that there is no relation or connection between the God of the Christian faith and the understanding of the world in the natural sciences. Ironically this separation of God from the world is commonly credited to Sir Isaac Newton, the father of classical mechanics, whose ground-breaking work on the laws of motion and thermodynamics seemed to posit a purely mechanistic, deterministic, “clockwork universe” that was not dependent on God...

<p>"We have always had atheists among us," the philosopher Edmund Burke wrote in his "Reflections on the Revolution in France," "but now they have grown turbulent and seditious." It seems that in our own day some prominent atheists are agitating for greater political and social influence. In this connection, leading atheist thinkers have been writing articles declaring that they should no longer be called "atheists." Rather, they want to be called "brights."</p>

20th Century evil is hydra-headed. Lop off one head; it grows another. With the defeat of the Kaiser's welfare Reich, the menace of Nazism arose. With the defeat of Nazism, Communism menaced. With the collapse of the Reds, the Greens were waiting in the wings. Why? The short answer is that they are interchangeable. They posture as enemies, but they were (and are) each others' best source of recruits. That prompts another "Why?" The answer is that these evils are variants of a more fundamental evil. They are all mutations of nihilism–radical rejection of the good, absolutely and in principle;...

Kant and Mill in Baghdad By John B. Judis Issue Date: 6.1.03 In justifying their war against Iraq, the Bush administration and its supporters based their case primarily on the threat to the United States posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties with al-Qaeda. But to date, American and British troops have found no signs of a chemical-, biological- or, more importantly, a nuclear-weapons program and have uncovered only low-level ties to al-Qaeda. And even if they subsequently find a few canisters of mustard gas, or railway tickets from Kandahar to Baghdad, it would hardly confirm America's claims...

The 20th century is one of wars and dictatorships. It opened with the First World War, during which Communist dictatorship appeared on the European fringe in Russia, and following which Fascist and Nazi dictatorships arose in the heart of Europe. Then came the Second World War and the Cold War. Communist dictatorship spread to Asia, Africa and the Americas (Cuba). Even areas which hadn't arrived at dictatorship were well along the road. They suffered continuous erosion of citizens' rights. We must learn why! We must know the cause to find a cure. History is a record of human actions, and...

Shadworth Hodgson (1832-1912) Shadworth Hodgson's life was an example of rare devotion to philosophy. He had no profession and filled no public office, but spent his time in systematic reflection and writing; and his long life gave him the opportunity of reviewing, confirming, and improving upon his first thoughts. There were two periods in his activity. In the former of these he published three books: Time and Space in 1865, The Theory of Practice in 1870, and The Philosophy of Reflection in 1878. Shortly thereafter he was instrumental in founding 'the Aristotelian Society for the systematic study of philosophy,'...

The exclusive character of the experiencing or epistemic self is a fundamental philosophical concern whose issues are skilfully demonstrated by both Hume and Kant. Are we to adopt a non-substantival account of ourselves as a sequence of impressions based on the empirical data available to us or are we to maintain that certain a priori truths about the self can be deduced? These issues can be approached by analysing two theories as they are presented by Hume in his ‘Treatise of Human Nature’ and Kant in his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’.Hume’s account of the self is discussed in his chapter...

The Cosmopolitan IllusionBy Lee HarrisIs it wrong to teach our children to be patriotic? Or may we teach them to be a little patriotic, provided that we also teach them to value and respect the cultures of others? Should they be encouraged to be loyal to their own nation, or should they be taught that they are citizens of the world before all else? These are the questions that were addressed in the justly celebrated essay “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” by Martha Nussbaum, and her answer was that education should actively encourage “the very old ideal of the cosmopolitan, the person...

1: THE PROBLEM Of the many words written for and against the coming war with Iraq, none has been more perceptive than Paul Johnson's observation in his essay "Leviathan to the Rescue" that such a war "has no precedent in history" and that "in terms of presidential power and national sovereignty, Mr. Bush is walking into unknown territory. By comparison, the Gulf War of the 1990's was a straightforward, conventional case of unprovoked aggression, like Germany's invasion of Belgium in 1914 and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor." The implications of this remark - like the implications of the war with...