What Was the Scottish Enlightenment?
Statue of David Hume on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh The “Really Real” Rorty, Frozen in Amber
Richard Rorty, 2005Jacques Lacan: Conservative Icon?
In Trusts We Trust
Are tax havens immoral? The question is posed by Brooke Harrington’s extremely interesting book, Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent. Harrington teaches at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark but qualified in wealth management to “infiltrate” the secretive world of the super-rich and the advisors who shield their wealth.
Contesting the Re-Primitivism of the West
Does Catholicism expand civilization? Thinking of Thomas Aquinas, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Gregor Johann Mendel, and the Gothic, Baroque, and Rococo, the answer seems an obvious “yes.” However, it is also undoubtedly true that a snap survey on any street in the West would find a decent number of respondents either angered by the suggestion or just clueless. John M. Rist thinks the answer certainly “yes.” What’s more, he thinks that re-primitivism (to borrow a term Aurel Kolnai used in his 1938 War Against the West) threatens our civilization, and only Catholicism has the theoretical heft to ward it off. It is…
Beauty and the Beast
(Photo: Clearista/Facebook)Skincential Sciences is a small company and something of a curiosity: a significant portion of its capital comes from In-Q-Tel, the investment fund of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Tolkien’s Establishment
To those of us in the universities, the Left’s animus to Catholicism revealed by Wikileaks this past week is not news. What Podesta and the Clinton circle said might have been exposed, but such slights about Catholicism are heard around universities all the time. As the Wall Street Journal points out, if such things were said about Islam they would be denounced as bigotry.
Burke and Burkinis
Albert Camus adored swimming in the Mediterranean Sea. It would be fascinating to know how this great philosopher, who was acutely aware of France’s complicated relationship with the Arab world, would have reacted to the burkini ban on the French Riviera.
Dictator Games
Was he or wasn’t he? An enormous number of words have been written to contest the question of whether Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was an avid supporter of Hitlerism and totalitarianism.
The Rational Objectivity of a Man of Letters
When David Hume died at the age of 65 in the year of the American Revolution, he was rich, famous, and often misunderstood.
