Two Quotes on Excess

The mother of excess is not joy, but joylessness.
–Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
–William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Space, Dwelling…Microwaves?

Maybe. Video of Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk at Harvard available here.
(Link happily discovered on http://www.anthem-group.net/, so thanks to the intriguing hivemind that runs things over there!)

Two Quotes on the Law

In this sphere, in contract law that is, the moral conceptual world “guilt,” “conscience,” “duty,” “sacredness of duty” has its genesis—its beginning, like the beginning of everything great on earth, was thoroughly and prolongedly drenched in blood. And might one not add that this world has in essence never again entirely lost a certain [...]

Wild, wacky stuff

Video of a 2005 discussion between Cornel West and Slavoj Zizek has been posted on youtube.

Just in time to disrupt my final exam flow. Awesome.

Two Quotes on Politics

…there was a conviction—a well-founded one, moreover—of the futility of rationalizations and ratiocinations. In 1982 or 1983, in Foucault’s apartment, we were watching a televised report on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; at one point one of the combatants (which side he was on is utterly unimportant) was invited to speak. Now this man spoke in terms [...]

Question for the religious, non-religious defenders of religious belief, and people who just really dislike Richard Dawkins…

If you knew an intelligent, open-minded young admirer of the New Atheism heroes (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris…), and could only give them one book to help them develop a more sophisticated appreciation of religion/God/etc., what would you choose?
I should probably point out that this isn’t for me — I’m not religious and I find the arguments [...]

Saletan on Singer, or Are you stupider than a monkey?

Link : Slate – Animal-Rights Farm
Animal-Rights Farm

Ape rights and the myth of animal equality.
By William Saletan
Should apes be treated like people?
Under a resolution headed for passage in the Spanish parliament, respecting the personal rights of “our non-human brothers” won’t just be a good idea. It’ll be the law.
The resolution, approved last week by a parliamentary [...]

Of Philosophy, Friendship and Youtube

I
When I was a freshman at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, I had the good fortune of befriending an unusual upperclassmen named George Wolfe. George was 24, with silver-speckled red hair and slight remnants of a Russian accent. He first became visible to me on account of an unbecoming tendency to insert himself into discussions [...]

The Ethical Substance of Self-Help Culture

I
I’m currently working through Michel Foucault’s three-part History of Sexuality. In the introduction to the second volume, he tells us that his labors therein will be
“devoted to the manner in which sexual activity was problematized by philosophers and doctors in classical Greek culture of the fourth century B.C. [...] The domain I will be analyzing [...]