Category Archives: General Philosophy
History Repeats
“If you have the power to put a stop to subjugation, yet look the other way while it happens, then you have done it yourselves,” ― Thucydides, On Justice, Power, and Human Nature: Selections from The History of the Peloponnesian War “It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged […]
Liberty
” It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” ~Samuel Adams
The Legal Pursuit-Evidence, Rules, Argument, Judgment
It is rare that an aspiring law student or lawyer has not heard of the movie, “The Paper Chase.” For it is instructive to both law school and life. In one scene with the study group one member, neurotic and fumbling, has a massive outline, multi hundreds of pages, that ultimately blows apart as it falls […]
Bureaucratic Logic and Catch 22
First rule of any negotiation is to know who is who, which is also a necessity of political competition. A corollary might come from Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.” And, “The enemy, … is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no […]
The Goal
At the end of the day the goal is to make the world a better place. Always a plurality.
Wizard of Oz, Hegel, Eco, and Sherlock Holmes
Sometimes the greatest dialectical problem is that heroes and villains are not pure characters anymore than Kansas is a utopia. The scariest thing about the past is that it may not have been a result as Hegelian as a storyline, and so neither will be the future. It turns out, if one follows the story, […]
Shakespeare and the Law
Of course Shakespeare did write, “kill all the lawyers,” maybe, more or less. All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.
Another Pope and the Hidden King
John Paul II was a student of Phenomenology. Husserl established phenomenology. Martin Heidegger was a seminal thinker in existential phenomenology. Heidegger entered a Jesuit seminary, then broke with Catholicism. He had many famous students including Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, amongst others. Heidegger wrote extensively on Being trying to capture the origins of the philosophic […]
