In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we did some  things that were wrong.  We did a whole lot of things  that were right, but we tortured some folks. — President Barack Obama, Press Conference (Aug 1, 2014) "That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect,  who had a fashion of calling everything "odd"…

 Recent research has led me to look at the role of irony in aesthetics and philosophy. My interest was most immediately stimulated by section 408 of Vico’s New Science, which seems to me to point towards the role of irony and literary aesthetics in the Jena Romantics and Kierkegaard. Vico does so by referring to…

Article here. Discuss.

Who is the hidden one? The last one here? After the blockade? Who, in the violated courtyard, walks around on feathers of torn bedding, strewn about, Who walks on wrecked crockery and kitchen gear, thrown, broken, of no human use? and too on family photographs of those driven from their homes ,pursued to be destroyed?…

Gary Shaprio raised the issue of the relationship between Nietzsche and Vico in the comment thread of my recent post on Vico (comments 2 and 5), and that is a topic well worth exploring a bit further. I've looked at it in the past in my personal blog, but too far back to bring in thoughts…

I know a few regular readers of this blog have views about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.   I want to ask a question about what is supposed to be the response to a basic worry about a whole family of approaches.  (David Wallace's recent book would be an obvious case, but so…

Shocking report here on how bad the California ground water situation is to go along with the terrible drought conditions.  Groundwater is the only thing keeping California afloat, so to speak, through the last 3 consecutive years of drought.    

Eric Kaplan, who overlapped with me in grad school at Berkeley but who is now much more famous as a comedy writer for Big Bang Theory, Futurama, and several other shows, has been cooking up weird philosophical-comical blog posts since March at his WordPress blog here. Check it out!

from Thane Rosembaum, professor of law at NYU, here. [Update:  Rosenbaum's status at NYU is unclear.  See comments below.]  He argues that Gaza civilians aren't really innocent civilians because they elected Hamas. Isn't this the same argument that Osama bin Laden made for the legitimacy of 9/11? Rosembaum goes on to say: " children whose parents are…

This is the third and last of a brief sequnce of posts widely dispersed over time on three major texts, which I taught during the academic year that has just passed. The first was on the Essays of Montaigne  and the second was on Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. These are rather different cases, so that wit Montaigne it is…