Abandoned Footnotes

A couple of months ago, there was a very interesting debate between Jim Manzi and others on the question of whether social science knowledge...

Adrian Vermeule, Law and the Limits of Reason (2009). I read this book for somewhat hazy reasons; perhaps I found the title in a footnote...

Apologies to my (very few) readers for the lack of blogging. Last week we got the flu - first my daughter, then me, then my wife - and we ha...

I recently rediscovered CiteULike , a free web service for bibliography management. I know I had used it in the past (I still had an account...

ARMAN archaea, orange circles, with an arcaheon of the thermoplasma order, below them. The small orange particles are viruses. Nobody know...

Elections in modern democracies function as mechanisms of both  selection  and  discipline . With a multiplicity of candidates competing for...

(Warning: some complaints about the neglect of ancient concepts by classical scholars).  I just read a nice piece by W. Jeffrey Tatum on ...

From Aristotle, Politics   V.1310a9-11 : at present in some oligarchies they [the oligarchs] swear "And I will be hostile to the peopl...

Not exactly extremophiles tonight. But I found a really neat article about a lovely sea slug , Elysia Chlorotica, which "steals" t...

...while philosophers mandated self-control for kings in regard to both alcohol and sex, the Antigonid king Demetrius the Besieger appropria...

Consider the problem of virtuous leadership in politics. It would seem to be pretty uncontroversial to say that a government is better the ...

Things that caught my eye in the last week or so: I had not known that in some societies, paternity is thought to be "partible" ,...

(Warning: A very long footnote – 2,500 words - about Polybius, human moral psychology, and the use of “models” in the Classical World, writt...