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Rand Unbound, Part 5

By on January 25, 2010 12

Neera Badhwar’s response to Doug Rasmussen’s Cato Unbound essay is online. Doug will post a response to all three of us later this week, and then there’ll be some back-and-forth discussion.

Alexander of Aphrodisias and Aristotle

Alexander of Aphrodisias and Aristotle

I’ll save detailed comments on Neera’s piece for the discussion – and I agree with most of it anyway – but just one quick point: if by the unity of virtue Neera means the thesis that one can’t have any one virtue to a significant degree without having them all, then I agree with her that that’s false (and I also agree that Rand seems, at least sometimes, to have held it). But if she means the thesis that one can’t have any one virtue completely without having them all, then I’d be willing to defend that thesis. In the words of Alexander of Aphrodisias (the leading Aristotelean of the 2nd century CE):

That the virtues are implied by one another might also be shown in the following way, in that it is impossible to have some one of them in its entirety if one does not have the others too. For it is not possible to have justice in isolation, if it belongs to the just person to act justly in all things that require virtue, but the licentious person will not act justly when something from the class of pleasant things leads him astray, nor the coward when something frightening is threatened against him if he does what is just, nor the lover of money where there is hope of gain; and in general every vice by the activity associated with it harms some aspect of justice. (“That the Virtues Are Implied By One Another,” On the Soul II. 18; trans. R. W. Sharples)

(See also section 9 of this piece.)

The Lost Chord

By on January 23, 2010 5

There’s an incredibly familiar musical piece at 1:22 of this trailer that I’m blanking on identifying. Please remind me what it is!

Rand Unbound, Part 4

By on January 22, 2010 29

Mike Huemer’s response to Doug Rasmussen’s essay is now online.

Since there’ll be some back-and-forth among the authors later on, I won’t comment on his piece now; at any rate, it should be obvious from my own piece where my disagreements with his will lie.

A Wonder How His Grace Should Glean It

By on January 22, 2010 20

There’s long been debate as to whether Shakespeare, a small-town commoner with “small Latin and less Greek” could have had the experience and erudition necessary to write the plays that are attributed to him.

I don’t find the “anti-Stratfordian” arguments terribly persuasive, but I’m not proposing to thrash all that out here. Rather, I was just struck by the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech about the king in Shakespeare’s Henry V reads like an anticipatory comment on the authorship controversy:

William ShakespeareHear him but reason in divinity,
and, all-admiring, with an inward wish
you would desire the King were made a prelate;
hear him debate of commonwealth affairs,
you would say it hath been all in all his study;
list his discourse of war, and you shall hear
a fearful battle rend’red you in music;
turn him to any cause of policy,
the Gordian knot of it he will unloose,
familiar as his garter; that, when he speaks,
the air, a charter’d libertine, is still,
and the mute wonder lurketh in men’s ears,
to steal his sweet and honey’d sentences;
so that the art and practice’d part of life
must be the mistress to this theoric:
which is a wonder how his Grace should glean it,
since his addiction was to courses vain,
his companies unletter’d, rude, and shallow,
his hours fill’d up with riots, banquets, sports,
and never noted in him any study,
any retirement, any sequestration
from open haunts and popularity.

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