Free Republic

On the 15th of July, 1606, Golden Age artist Rembrandt was born. He looked back for wisdom to the ancient Greeks. The Greek ideas of society are a crucial part of the foundations of The West. In 1951, also on the 15th of July, Jesse Ventura was born in Minneapolis. He is a modern part of the Western Tradition of freedom. A man whose words show that he is appalled by the horrors big government can create” “I want to make government more directly accountable to the people.” “I believe in the American people’s ability to govern themselves. If government...

Why his repulsiveness may have been exaggerated. Posted April 25, 2023 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk -His students Plato and Xenophon described Socrates as ugly and made much out of this. -His supposed repulsiveness did not prevent Socrates from leading a rich and remarkable love life. -Plato and Xenophon may have had good reasons for inventing or exaggerating their teacher's ugliness. Socrates was remarkably full-blooded for an ascetic philosopher. In Xenophon’s Symposium, he says, “For myself I cannot name the time at which I have not been in love with someone.” By all accounts, Socrates’s greatest love was with the...

The Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras, who lived 2,500 years ago, applied his genius to music as well throughout his brilliant career, creating the Pythagorean comma as part of music theory, and his brilliance is still recognized to this day. The Pythagorean Theorem remains one of the fundamental concepts in the realm of mathematics and is still taught in schools across the world. The influence of the Ancient Greek thinker, who was born on the island of Samos in the year 570 BC, remains strong today in many realms—but, unfortunately, so do the mysteries surrounding the great Greek philosopher. Pythagoras’...

I mentioned in my last piece that the standard (mis)interpretation of Oedipus Rex—that Oedipus got what he deserved thanks to a moral shortcoming he couldn't or wouldn't correct—traces back to an earlier misinterpretation of Aristotle's comments on tragedy. That provides a nice segue, because what Aristotle actually says in his Poetics (and his Politics) provides further insight into our current problems. What Aristotle actually points out in Chapter 13 of Poetics is that great tragedies revolve around hamartia (ἁμαρτία) inherent in, or committed by, a protagonist. All this Greek word refers to is error. It does not necessarily imply moral...

No, this isn’t a joke.Edward Luttwak, the distinguished Israeli-American strategist and public intellectual, tweeted the following this morning:11 Chinese universities teach Greek and Latin. Another 20 seek staff to so as well. Back in the US, the Princeton CLASSICS department has just eliminated the Latin or Greek requirement “to address systemic racism”. Truly racist say I. Why not just end it ? Jobs await in 中国The Chinese characters at the end mean “Middle Kingdom.”Princeton created an uproar by ditching the requirement for classics majors to learn Greek or Latin. That shouldn’t be a surprise: In 2017 Harvard eliminated the music...

Halley's comet portrayed on ancient coin Heather Catchpole ABC Science Online Wednesday, 19 May 2004 Could the star shape on the king's crown be Halley's comet? A rare ancient coin may feature an early record of Halley's comet, researchers say. The coin features the head of the Armenian king Tigranes II the Great, who reigned from 95 to 55 BC. A symbol on his crown that features a star with a curved tail may represent the passage of Halley's comet in 87 BC, say the Armenian and Italian researchers. Their research will be published in Astronomy & Geophysics, a journal...

The Uranus reversal begins a backward journey that will carry through early January 2021. Our surprises are about to get more baffling, random, disparate and mysterious. This is also very thrilling, as it provides the sort of work that requires making sense of the nonsense. Life is a puzzle, the solving of which will be extremely satisfying....

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” said 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. “Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” He was wrong on both counts. Zeal for liberty can be (and sometimes is) taken way too far, and without moderation, even the noblest of goals is easily turned into something evil. A great example of this: the French Revolution. The revolution began with some long-overdue reforms. It abolished the special privileges of nobles and clergy and guaranteed Frenchmen fundamental rights similar to those promised in our own Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights....

Is the United States headed for a civil war? Every new partisan battle feels like the battle to end all battles. But contemplating apocalyptic violence and massive upheaval brings doubt: even with all the current acrimony, could it really be the case that the most successful nation on earth is spiraling towards internal war? Isn’t intense partisanship a hallmark of American democracy? At what point does intense partisanship threaten to devolve into civil war? And how would we know—especially when so many of our intuitions are bolstered by unfounded hopes and the assumption that things can’t change? Let’s step away...

In the early 17th century, the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon envisioned a bold, multiphase program to accumulate knowledge of the natural world. A critical part of this plan was Novum Organum, which celebrates its 400th anniversary this year. In this work, Bacon attempted to undo the centuries-old dominance of Aristotelian forms of inquiry, encouraging readers to instead apply inductive reasoning to carefully curated observations of the natural world. “Book One” of Novum Organum addressed why so little progress had thus far been made in understanding nature. Here, Bacon cautioned against “idols and false notions” that can interfere with...

REASON #8: PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY IS A DEEP SUBJECT THAT CAN BE QUITE INTIMIDATING. MODERN PHILOSOPHY IS SO ESOTERIC THAT FEW CAN UNDERSTAND OR RELATE TO IT, BUT CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY IS DIFFERENT. As with so many things, if you go back to the beginning and learn first principles, you can develop a deep and satisfying understanding of a subject that is baffling in its modern form. While philosophy may seem abstract and unrelated to the real world, quite the opposite is true. In fact, we are all philosophers; we all have a view of reality, a worldview, as we say today....

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Aristotle. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He is considered one of the classic architects of Western Civilization, of which the Democrat Party and the Deep State are attmepting to destroy. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the...

“I am a friend of Plato, and a friend of Aristotle, but truth is my greater friend.” These are words from a personal notebook of Sir Isaac Newton, written when he was around 20 years old. With these words, he was proclaiming a revolutionary decision to search beyond the boundaries of classical teachings to understand the biggest questions about the world and universe. Proverbs 25 in the Bible says it is the honor of kings to search out the things that God has concealed. In Newton’s search to understand various baffling aspects of the Creation, he proved to be regal....

I have felt while writing these new chapters a fresh realization of the refuge and strength the past can be to us in the troubled present. “Let us keep our silent sanctuaries,” Senancour wrote, “for in them the eternal perspectives are preserved.” Religion is the great stronghold for the untroubled vision of the eternal; but there are others too. We have many silent sanctuaries in which we can find a breathing space to free ourselves from the personal, to rise above our harassed and perplexed minds and catch sight of values that are stable, which no selfish and timorous preoccupations...

On this episode of "YOUR WELCOME" Michael Malice is joined by author and historian Arthur Herman. Arthur has written a number of books including The Idea of Decline in Western History, How the Scots Invented the Modern World about the Scottish enlightenment and Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Listen as he talks to Michael about Plato and Aristotle, Douglas MacArthur, Joe McCarthy and his forthcoming book about the Vikings...

A Greek archaeologist believes he has discovered the tomb of Aristotle. Konstantinos Sismanidis, who has been painstakingly excavating the ruins of Stagira since 1990, told CNN his team has very strong evidence the 2,400-year-old tomb belongs to the great philosopher. Sismanidis said the structure, about 40 miles east of Thessaloniki, was built to honor Aristotle's death in 322 B.C.

In the 1980 t.v. mini-series Shogun, Dutch navigator Richard Chamberlain shipwrecked in 17th century Japan, hangs a piece of meat on a tree to rot. An elderly servant gladly accepts the penalty of execution to give the poor carcass a decent burial. The original goodness of the game animal, that made it desirable to eat, rotten or not, was that it had once been alive, vital and desirable, useful even in death because of its latent vitality. Trailer youtube.com/watch?v=CoTGQffgifoThe same principle, the vitality of a once-alive thing, applies to the fact that our "terrible" American civilization, which Obama must punish in...

The Inclination to the Truth Msgr. Charles Pope • March 14, 2016 • In a recent post (Is There a Way Back to Undeniable Reality and Universally Binding Norms?) I discussed how we today tend to “live in our heads” a lot more so than did the people living in biblical times and even those who lived up to and including the High Middle Ages and the Scholastic Period. Prior to that time, the “real world” was taken to be largely self-evident. But in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, a school of thought later called “nominalism” began...

Aristotle once said, “Men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.” Is there a link to Karl Marx and his own abysmal failure as a family man and the all-out assault on the traditional family today? Yes, says New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Paul Kengor, in his brand new book called Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage. If you saw Dinesh D’Souza’s first movie on Obama, then you have seen a cameo of Paul Kengor. He was discussing his book The Communist, which documents that President Obama as a...