The Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenathen invented the first historic monotheism, according to Freud’s Moses and Monotheismus (1939). Sensibly, the sun was the God, worshipped as the true generator of life in this planet. Everything we have depends on the constant flow… Read More ›
Society
On Genes and Memes
Fact: “Nobel Prizes have been awarded to over 850 individuals, of whom at least 22% (without peace prize over 24%) were Jews, although Jews comprise less than 0.2% of the world’s population.” (from this Wikipedia page) Explanation (Norbert Wiener): “He… Read More ›
A. Burgess: “Clockwork Condition”. A tale on Skinner and Free Will
The real polemic target of Anthony Burgess in The Clockwork Condition (The New Yorker) (here the Italian translation) was Skinner and behaviorism. It reminds me of some studies of José Delgado, the brilliant physiologist who implanted electrodes in animal brains to… Read More ›
The concept of limit
In the introduction to “Anarchism” by D. Guerin, Chomsky stresses the existence of a cultural tradition going back to Rousseau (“Discourse on Inequality, 1754), Von Humboldt, “The Limits of State Action” and chiefly Immanuel Kant on the French Revolution remarking that freedom… Read More ›
“What is the logical form of this?” on Sen, Gramsci, Sraffa and Wittgenstein
In a perceptive book, Ray Kurzweil, chief engineer at Google, and responsible for the Hidden Markov Model that stays behind much of today speech and text recognition software (like Siri), restates the position of the Logical Neopositivism as the following:… Read More ›
Dante and Islam
I recently attended a very interesting conference by Roger Scruton, the celebrated author of (among many titles) “A short History of Modern Philosophy”. After that, a discussion ensued where one of the points was the fact that European identity can… Read More ›
A German dictionary
“In an attempt to explain Russian Bolshevism to Lady Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell once remarked that, appalling though it was, it seemed the right sort of government for Russia: “If you ask yourself how Dostoevsky’s characters should be governed, you… Read More ›
Ratzinger and Habermas on “deus sive natura”
In 2004, two great figures of Europe’s Life of the Mind met to discuss the times of faith and secularization. This is the book containing their thoughts. Ratzinger has been extremely bold in trying to confront the implications of science… Read More ›
hoi polloi
Robert K. Merton, in Science Technology and Society in XVII Century England makes the point that Reformation, since it helped promote the idea that one had to follow his judgement as regards faith and not official doctrine, at the same time… Read More ›
Human and Horses
Human are not horses, says MIT economist Kenneth Rogoff and King Ludd is still dead. But Keynes thought differently, advancing the hypothesis of technological unemployment and another Nobel caliber academic, Leontieff, wrote an insightful article advancing the hypothesis that it… Read More ›