Posted by: lettrist on: May 6, 2009
Very little about imperialism has changed since the First Crusade. Imperialism, evangelism, and militarism collide with this video released by Al Jazeera late yesterday. Churches raise money so that US soldiers can distribute Bibles in Pashtu and Dari to Afghan people after they’ve bombed and slaughtered their families.
The religious peoples view [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: April 11, 2009
I am new to WordPress. But already I like the tag feature that allows you to see all the other WordPress blogs tagged with the same things as yours. I like seeing who else writes about ‘anarchism’, ‘postmodernism’, ‘Lyotard’, ‘John Stuart Mill’, and whatever else I am interested in.
One thing I noticed is that there [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: February 3, 2009
La Commune (2001) – a self-reflective film about the short-lived commune that arose out of social tension and upheaval in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. This is a groundbreaking film that did not show up on too many radar screens.
The film asks you to imagine you’re walking in the shoes of Paris [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: May 6, 2007
One theme in A Hunger Artist and other Kafka works is the negative effect industrialization and capitalism has on art.
Right away we notice the difference between Kafka’s pessimism and the optimism of Victorian literature. Kafka describes the hunger artist as the passionate starving artist who ignores his destitution and the necessity of a regular job. [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: May 5, 2007
Mysticism seems to lead to creativity and social action. In “The Book of Margery Kemp”, an autobiography, Margery refers to herself in the third-person. The Middle-Aged mind needed to seek a spiritual explanation for everything. When Margery first hears Jesus’ message, she had just experienced a madness up to the birth of her first child. [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: November 25, 2006
Let’s consider Taylor’s cosmological argument for the existence of God seriously this time. I have heard it before many times. But this time, I will honestly consider it. I will start at the beginning.
First, what of the principle of sufficient reason? It states that for every positive fact or truth there is a sufficient cause [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: November 8, 2006
[An essay on D. McCloskey’s rhetorical analyzes of the economic science, why it matters that economics is rhetorical, why methodology is not over, and some lingering problems. ]
It is not easy to think of a proposition in economics that all reasonable economists agree to have been falsified by the evidence. It seems that no theory [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: October 16, 2006
By the end of Book 7 Augustine is approaching intellectual rapprochement with Christianity. He is convinced of the intellectual superiority of Christianity, and has decided to accept Christian beliefs. But, very paradoxically, he comes to this conclusion by reading, not Christian Scripture, but pagan philosophy. More specifically, by reading what he calls “the Platonist philosophers.”
He [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: May 1, 2006
Perhaps the most persistently misunderstood aspect of Leibniz’s thought is his principle of contingence. The theory is deeply rooted in Leibniz subject-predicate logic, and it is therefore not surprising, given the complexity of this philosophy, that he would be vulgarly misunderstood—most famously as Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire’s Candide. What I have tried to do in [...]
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