Author: Rufus F.

Allow me to disagree with those who agree that the disagreement between Jason and me, which was more an agreement, was not useful or instructive. Ahem! (Note: I can’t promise this will be interesting…)...

For our friends celebrating Easter today, Le Monde has a brief slideshow of Easter events around the world. Aside from lacking captions, it’s a nice collection.

First off, I’m not sure we can say the philosophy of Parmenides exactly “works”. That is, I don’t think we can take his ideas as precepts. Because, essentially, Parmenides speaks of the impossibility of...

Sarah Palin: “Stall, baby, stall“. This is, of course, a variation on, “Drill, baby, drill!” That seems to be a variation of “Burn, baby, burn!” which has always struck me as strange, since the...

The pre-Socratic philosophers are, to be blunt, intensely fucking exciting. They really are. And I think it’s because they’re trying to answer, in an understandably limited way, the same questions we’re still addressing, for...

Sappho is one of the first and greatest poetic singers of romantic longing and the ‘bittersweet’, an image she apparently coined. Along with the Greek lyric poets (Archilochus, Sappho, Mimnermus, Alcaeus) of the Archaic...

Personally, I’m a Palin agnostic, but this line in an article in the recent Catholic Register cracked me up: “(T)he American-born professor also warns that a close association between conservative, reactionary politics and religion...

Oedipus Rex is an extraordinarily cruel play. Oedipus has seemingly done nothing wrong and lacks the fatal flaw that would justify the way that coincidences and events align against him. The punishment is completely...

In a really crackerjack post, Mr. Dierkes, writes: “The hallmark of the liberal procedural republic according to Sandel is that citizens are treated as consumers. The market becomes the dominant form of thought and...

Thinking of the Kuhn discussion, I’d like to look at how a mythical culture understands an innovation of techné/craft; here treated as both a divinely revealed gift and the ground of human tragedy. We...

Via email, I’ve been asked my thoughts on tenure and the troubles it can cause, so I’d like to wade into that very heated debate. Hopefully, the piranhas aren’t biting today. Okay, the argument...

Update: I’ve been asked to link to some translations. Here is the Perseus Project Symposium English translation which includes the Greek linked at the right. There is also the Internet Classics Archive Benjamin Jowett...

Via Rogue Classicism comes a truly awesome project at Leeds: The Herodotus Encoded Space-Text Image Archive (HESTIA). Using digital technologies like Google Earth, they’ve mapped out all the spatial information in Herodotus. You’ve got...

Something’s in the air: over at the Front Porch Republic, Jason Peters rails mightily against universities as “diploma retailers” turning young people into “idiots”. It’s well worth reading.

Taking a breather from celebrity nudity and Rob Reiner’s thoughts on health care, the Huffington Post is currently on a tear about college tuition rates. Angry undergrads are protesting tuition hikes across California and...

An old joke holds that historians are gossips with footnotes. This often seems true of Herodotus, the “father of history”. Curious about everything anyone tells him, at times, he can be a bit credulous...

In keeping with Mr. Kain’s suggestion for more interaction at this party (less sitting in the corner of the room, glumly sipping a whiskey sour) and pivoting off of Mr. Schaengold’s great post about...

If you’re in Paris, you absolutely must go see “sans objet” at Théâtre des Abbesses. As Le Monde explains, it is “a piece for a robot and two interpretive-acrobats” dancing together. The robot is...

Living in a Canadian/American household, the tension is pretty high right now as Canada leads 2-1 in the third period of the last match of the Olympics. No matter who wins, however, this has...