Monday night, I went to a paper on Monstrosities of Nature: Demonic Possession, Ambiguous Gender and the Inquisition in the Early Modern Iberian World at Melbourne University which drwhacky had emailed me to tell me about. (It says interesting things about me that [1] she thought I would be interested and [2] I was, went and enjoyed it ( Read more... )

N and I spent much of Australia Day working on the global history we are co-writing, derived in large part from years of presenting history to thousands of students. We now have a complete draft of Part I, though I will have to rewrite the Conclusion after N has gone through my edits on the Foreword, Introduction and Chapters 1 to 5. But I am now ( Read more... )

Nice comedy skit on why meat-eating is ethical (and vegetarianism is not).

Nice discussion of the difference between fact and opinion.

An appreciation of philosophers Stephen Toulmin, a professor at the University of Southern California's Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies, and John Edwin Smith ( Read more... )

I have, ever since I first become aware of it, loathed the politics of Plato’s Republic with its all-controlling Guardians and everyone in their controlled place. It has always struck me as the ur-text of totalitarianism.

It was reading Etienne’ Gilson’s God and Philosophy which enabled to see how Plato’s loathsome politics flows from his ( Read more... )

Having coffee with bar_barra and Sam H at Seddon Deadly Sins, having bar_barra summarise F. Nietszche's philosophy as "I really wish I had a girlfriend".

bar_barra leading me to think I should look more into Daoism ( Read more... )

It is now possible to make a large income being active in the economy of a virtual reality ( Read more... )

Marriage is more than a publicly acknowledged relationship between two people. It is also the legal and social cap of a range of entitlements, legitimacies and decision-making rights ( Read more... )

The first premise of Catholic natural law theory regarding sex, coming from Plato, is that the sole natural function of sex is reproduction. This is false. The genitals have three functions-excretion, reproduction and pleasure. Pleasure is a function in its own right, incorporating both connection and catharsis. Hence sex in nature has a range ( Read more... )

My attempt to get my head around natural law theory continues ( Read more... )

I am rather keen on the notion of self-ownership. Both as a moral principle and because, as a matter of practical politics, it is usually disastrous for a free society to attempt to deny folk self-ownership because it is beyond its capacity to deny folk effective use rights in their own body, though it can cause much misery in attempting to do so ( Read more... )