Interesting exploration of whether Hume’s views on personal identity might have been influenced by reports from Jesuit missionaries about Buddhist teachings. (CHT Walter Grinder.)
Tag Archives | Online Texts
It’s a Shame the Way She Makes Me Scrub the Floor
You wanna live fancy?
Live in a big mansion?
Party in France?
You better work, bitch.
– Hesiod (translated freely)
My latest Libertarianism.org column, this one on Hesiod, is online.
The two most famous images of Hesiod.
The one on the left suits the tone of his poems rather better.
Two Vast and Trunkless Columns of Stone
My second column on Homer – this one focusing on the character of Thersites – is up at Libertarianism.org.
Anarchy in the U.K.: Two Blasts From the Past
Added to the Molinari Institute’s online library: two 19th-century British individualist anarchist texts – Henry Seymour’s Anarchy: Theory and Practice (1888) and Albert Tarn’s The State: Its Origin, Its Nature, and Its Abolition (1895). Thanks to Jonathan Martindale for locating and transcribing these texts!
Both Seymour and Tarn occasionally appeared in the pages of Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty. Curiously, there’s currently an institute named after Tarn; but its website doesn’t have much information.
Godkin’s Law
The Nation turns 150 this year. (Specifically in July, but they’re celebrating it this week; see also Jesse Walker’s piece on the topic.)
In the 19th century, The Nation was, broadly, a classical liberal magazine, and a successor to anarchist William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist paper The Liberator. Its founder and editor, E. L. Godkin, was a mixed bag; here he is in Jekyll mode and here he is in Hyde mode.
Godkin’s hysterical condemnation of anarchists in the second piece is rather ironic, given both his magazine’s anarchist origins and his praise, in the first piece, for France’s “select group of orthodox economists that still reverence the principles of Turgot and Say” – a group whose leader at that time was Molinari.
Secret Origin of the Austro-Athenian Empire
I’ve written before about the 1979 Starlog article “The Science Fiction of Ayn Rand” that introduced me to Ayn Rand – and thereby, ultimately, to philosophy in general, and Aristoteleanism and libertarianism in particular. So, one of the defining moments of my life, really.
Anyway, the first page of the article is now online as an image file here, including the (not especially good) painting of John Galt by the then-less-famous Boris Vallejo; and the rest of the article can be found in ASCII form here.
It all started here, folks.