Three more blasts from the past (all a bit more recent than my blast from Oscarville): First, two papers I wrote for a science course in college: “The Temptation of Ludwig Boltzmann” (a short sf story exploring the implications of Boltzmannian probability theory – though Amazon thinks it’s something else) and “Evolution: Chance or Teleology?” [...]
I recently had reason to link to my 2006 Mises philosophy seminar files, and saw that the relevant page on the Mises site looks somewhat confusing these days, so I made my own page of links.
Historians Locate King Arthur’s Round Table, blares the headline. (CHT LRC.) And despite the fact that the very existence of Arthur has yet to be established, a so-called “Camelot historian” confidently opines that the discovery of some old Roman amphitheatre “means” that “Chester was the site of Arthur’s court and his legendary Round Table.” This [...]
Larry Arnhart has a blog post about my article (original draft here, revised but shorter version here) on libertarian themes in Confucian thought. A caveat: as you’ll see, Larry seems more sympathetic to the Burkean side of Confucianism than I am; on the issue of tradition I think the Confucians take a genuine piece of [...]
Going through a box of old papers, I found this letter I wrote to the Chapel Hill News back in my North Carolina days; I don’t recall whether it was published. 18 May 1994 To the Editor: The current debate over gun control is the latest, and perhaps the last, skirmish in a centuries-old conflict [...]
“I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe, but to make you do something you won’t do.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein “Over and over, you’re falling, and then catching yourself from falling. And this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time.” — Laurie Anderson I’ve written before about [...]
Descartes’s philosophical anthropology is widely thought to mark a radical break from the preceding Aristotelean tradition. But Paul Hoffman has been arguing for the past quarter-century that, despite various differences, Descartes is actually far closer to the Aristotelean conception of the embodied human being as a hylomorphic unity than to the popular textbook “Cartesian” stereotype [...]
On Friday the 12th I’m off to Prague for the PCPE (which means I’ll unfortunately miss most of the ASC here in Auburn, though I do plan to drop in on the first day, the 11th). The PCPE doesn’t actually start until the 19th, but its coinciding with my spring break means I can spend [...]
Over at Cato Unbound, the Rand symposium has wrapped up with posts from Neera, Doug, me, and a final one from Neera. A quick reply to Neera’s last, on the pyramid of ability: I certainly don’t doubt that “in every area of human endeavor a few people stand out above others and benefit others much [...]
Two more Cato Unbound posts from me, one a reply to Mike’s latest on whether it’s conceptually incoherent to be indifferent to one’s own interests, and one a belated response to Doug’s earlier question about religion.
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
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