The answer to this question is that one is obliged to do what one believes is right only if it is objectively right. If it is objectively wrong, one is not only not obliged to do it, but is obliged not to do it. Of course, most people will think this claim nonsensical. The automatic, common-sense [...]
On the Discovery Channel Dr David Suzuki endlessly incants, “Question everything!” Everything, of course, except Dr Suzuki’s pet orthodoxies. Dr Suzuki belongs to the High Sanhedrin of those who are in a perpetual state of incredulous outrage that anyone should question the club certainty of their Chicken Little Scientists’ Sodality that disastrous human-caused global warming [...]
My friend, Tempe Harvey of Brisbane, passed this amusing but thought-provoking piece onto me. It clearly originated in the U.S. – here in Australia, as in England, the head of a university department is not called a Dean – so I’m returning it to its country of origin. Of course, it expresses a simplistic view of [...]
I am grateful, and am certainly the wiser, for the excellent discussion which my comments under the heading, “The Lethal Influence of the Sub-Humanities”, has provoked regarding psychology. I thank Paul Adam, Dena, Kevin O’Brien, Jim Sekerak, and Paulo. I shall, however, take the liberty of making a few further remarks. I call an academic discipline [...]
Joseph Pearce’s current comments in this forum on distributism, a subject on which he is an internationally respected scholar (I first heard his name in an address in Sydney on the theme), has brought to my mind a fact about Shakespeare which seems to have escaped scholarly notice. In King Lear the dramatist shows us how [...]
If you take a poll of genuine academics with proven credentials in substantive disciplines where there is still much genuine engagement with fact to get at truth – I am speaking not only of the empirical sciences and mathematics, but of many or most History, Philosophy, Languages and Law departments, and even of some English Literature [...]
On Tuesday (17th) my wife Paula and I had an evening with friends here in Canberra we've known for a long time. We were discussing The Lord of the Rings, and they mentioned that they had heard a radio interview with (Sir) Peter Jackson's wife, (Lady) Frances Walsh, who co-wrote the screenplay with him and Philippa [...]
