Historical narratives will typically note that the Magna Carta was a result of struggles between an unpopular king and a group made up of secular lords and lords of the Catholic Church in England. It’s actually a pretty complicated story which played out over centuries and also had a long prologue, but the point is … [Read more…]
Realism, as the term is used in foreign policy, builds upon the same foundations as Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand analysis of economics. It is an empirical analysis at the level of human actors without necessarily making any explicit attempt to understand why it is that those actors behave as they do. Hence, the invisibility. And … [Read more…]
I’ve uploaded an update to the collection of my weblog writings: Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2015. Here is the text from the Preface for this new edition: I’ve added nearly 40 chapters to this Sixth Edition. All but this chapter are reformatted essays from my writings during 2015 which were … [Read more…]
Basic relationships and not complex things or ideas are the true Platonic Reals in the sense of being the basis of created being. So to write. So to speak, if I were discussing these matters with a like-interested friend over some good whiskey or stout or port. If we were to try to imagine a … [Read more…]
[There are typos in the essay I’m responding to. I think they are probably due to the site’s archiving since the Scientific American website is generally well-edited. I’ve kept the typos and avoided using the “(sic)” notation—the reader can make the corrections in his or her head.] In this essay posted several years back, Look … [Read more…]