[lit-ideas] Re: Peace Mystics
- From: Andy <min.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2008 19:25:34 -0800 (PST)
Stalin's mother thought Stalin would be a great priest. Stalin even went to
seminary. Not comparing Strauss to Stalin mind you, although from what I can
see of Strauss's beliefs Strauss rather appreciated Machiavelli. All I'm
saying is that family members are hardly the best judges of each other. None
of what she says refutes that his was the foundation for neoconism, only that
her daddy was a nice man and would never hurt anybody. A face only a mother
could love, a philosophy only a daughter could love. Well, okay, a daughter
and a lot of politicians
Just finished watching a National Geographic show on global warming. 2
degrees is the tipping point. We're at .8. The most interesting thing they
said is that the fossils fuels that we're burning today were nature's way of
sequestering the tremendous CO2 that was in the air from the cretaceous period
that extinguished life on earth at the time. Over millions of years nature
took that CO2 and converted it to oil and coal. Now humans are digging up
those carbon sinks, the oil and coal, and dumping it all back in the air again,
and at an accelerated rate. I think that qualifies as post modern irony, don't
you?
Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Lawrence wrote
I recently ran across a quote from Leo Strauss who described people who
either missed or were unwilling to grapple with the main points of
argument as becoming "confused by the 'blind scholastic pedantry' that
exhausts itself and its audience in the 'clarification of meanings' so
that it never meets the nonverbal issues."
--------------
Of course, now I don't dare ask what 'the nonverbal issues' (of an
argument) MEANS. 'Issues' that aren't mentioned in the argument?
Argumentum ad baculum?
The very best argument is one such that if you accept the premises but
don't accept the conclusion you die. A pretty good argument is one such
that if you accept the premises but not the conclusion you get very,
very sick. Maybe that's what Strauss meant.
For those interested in his daughter's impressions of Strauss, here's a
link to a NY Times opinion piece by Jenny Strauss Clay, a professor of
classics at the University of Virginia.
--------------
Recent news articles have portrayed my father, Leo Strauss, as the
mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United
States foreign policy. He reaches out from his 30-year-old grave, we are
told, to direct a ''cabal'' (a word with distinct anti-Semitic
overtones) of Bush administration figures hoping to subject the American
people to rule by a ruthless elite. I do not recognize the Leo Strauss
presented in these articles.
[continued at]
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E1D61639F934A35755C0A9659C8B63
Robert Paul
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