I have long known who Mischa Elman was: one of the great violinists of the last century (1891–1967). But only last month did I finally manage to listen to him. He is dead, of course. But there are available recordings of his playing that date back to the 1920s. These are a bit scratchy, . . . . Continue Reading »
What makes a Great Book? When one considers the many Great Books curricula in the United States, one notices an abundance of poets and a smattering of philosophers. Sadly missing from the list at most classically inflected schools are the works of such great mathematical minds as Euclid, Archimedes, . . . . Continue Reading »
Liberals and conservatives disagree less about principles than we often imagine. (It’s common for intellectually inclined, theory-informed people to interpret disagreements about policy as matters of principle.) For example, aside from full-bore revolutionaries, everyone endorses the rule of law, . . . . Continue Reading »
The coronation of King Charles III made for great television: horsemen in breastplates and plumes; a bejeweled aristocracy and the emissaries of empire; a whiff of scandal over the royals who did and didn’t show; and a liturgy as high-church as can be. There were golden copes galore; trumpet . . . . Continue Reading »
In his book God, Philosophy, Universities, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that “neither the university nor philosophy is any longer seen as engaging the questions” of “plain persons.” These questions include: “What is our place in the order of things? Of what powers in the natural and . . . . Continue Reading »
One way of telling the story of Western philosophy over the last few centuries is to present it as the rise and fall of a particular view of language. Gradually, piecemeal, the idea of language as primarily a matter of accurate naming and information-sharing has yielded to a recognition of language . . . . Continue Reading »
A century ago, the most potent moral figure in the West was Jesus Christ. Believers and unbelievers alike accepted him as an ethical exemplar. Not to do so was to make oneself an outcast. But now, our most potent moral figure is Adolf Hitler. In our relativist, pluralist age, he is our one . . . . Continue Reading »
In the fall of 1970, a year after Yale welcomed its first female freshmen and six months after it descended into the vortex of a Black Panther trial and a university-wide strike, Gloria Steinem came to the college to speak. She wasn’t yet a household name—the launch of Ms. magazine . . . . Continue Reading »
Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed. It rested on an essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction. The state-society distinction reached its apogee in the mid-twentieth century, when the triumph and challenges of the postwar moment clarified the importance of . . . . Continue Reading »
Sally: Did you notice, Harry, how positive that pro-life speaker was about IVF? I was amazed. Granted, he saw some problems with it, but overall he obviously thought it is a great blessing for would-be parents. Harry: Well, after all, every baby is a . . . . Continue Reading »
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