A talk delivered to The Ethical Society at Conway Hall by George Walford. For our text this afternoon we have What Religion Does for Freethinking. Following the example set by other preachers, I should like to start by drawing your attention to the wording. Not ‘What Religion has Done’ for freethinking, but what it does…. read more »
More than one correspondent has brought against NIAT the counter-example of the velocity of light, held to be not merely an absolute but a scientific one. IC has responded by pointing out that this uses ‘absolute’ in a different sense from NIAT, a more limited sense which amounts to hardly more than ‘invariant.’ It now… read more »
The (A)-SP(GB), and many more orthodox anarchists too, think capitalism has gone beyond tolerance; we should abolish it and make a fresh, (anarcho)-socialist start. I do not now propose to bang heads with them over what they say but rather to draw attention to things they do not mention. They speak for the most part… read more »
Few professionals like having amateurs trespass on their territory, and L.S.Mair, an anthropologist, sets about one group of intruders. In her paper entitled The Growth of Economic Individualism in African Society [1] she mounts a strong attack on people advancing ideas, about the attitudes to property appearing in peasant communities, which do not agree with… read more »
Having (at more than one remove) a Protestant background, IC has paid insufficient attention to the less orthodox developments appearing in Catholicism. Alastair Hamilton, in Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth- century Spain, speaks of the alumbrados (literal meaning close to illuminati), saying they sought ‘an intenser and more personal form of religious experience than the… read more »
Under this head IC presents instances of the political divisiveness displayed by the eidodynamics. When possible we also offer, for contrast, examples of the emphasis on party loyalty, faith in the leader and ‘don’t rock the boat’ of the eidostatics. (Co-operation being less newsworthy than conflict, these come less readily to hand). We invite readers… read more »
HEGEL occasionally weakens, relaxing enough to become comprehensible. Then one can see that he’s usually talking good sense, as here: The necessity for education is present in children as their own feeling of dissatisfaction with themselves as they are, as the desire to belong to the adult world whose superiority they divine, as the longing… read more »
WHEN one major ideology succeeds in detaching itself, if only for a time, from the restraints exercised by the others, trouble invariably results. The Holocaust finds a better explanation in unrestrained practice of the ideology of domination, driving forward to a chosen end whatever horrors it may bring, than in evil tendencies peculiar to the… read more »
Herman Melville opened Moby Dick with quotations. He did not get them all quite right, and in 1979 Thomas G.Tanselle published an essay entitled ‘External Fact as an Editorial Problem,’ advocating that they be brought into agreement with their sources, even though some of Melville’s alterations seem to have been deliberate. John Worthen has taken… read more »
Mae West did not say ‘Come up and see me sometime,’ Humphrey Bogart did not say ‘Play it again, Sam,’ Voltaire did not say ‘I disagree with every word you say, but would fight to the death for your right to say it’ (the phrase first appeared in a biography of him published early this… read more »