Published by the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas (founded in 1990 by Mortimer J. Adler and Max Weismann)
In association with the The Adler-Aquinas Institute and Aquinas School of Leadership
A Founding Member of the Alliance for Liberal Learning

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Black Hole Firewalls Confound Theoretical Physicists

Jennifer Ouellette and Simons Science News report at Scientific American on a new hypothesis of the result of jumping into a black hole (involving Alice of 'Alice and Bob, beloved characters of various thought experiments in quantum mechanics'.
"Conventionally, physicists have assumed that if the black hole is large enough, Alice won’t notice anything unusual as she crosses the [black hole's event] horizon. In this scenario, colorfully dubbed 'No Drama,' the gravitational forces won’t become extreme until she approaches a point inside the black hole called the singularity. There, the gravitational pull will be so much stronger on her feet than on her head that Alice will be 'spaghettified.'

Now a new hypothesis is giving poor Alice even more drama than she bargained for. If this alternative is correct, as the unsuspecting Alice crosses the event horizon, she will encounter a massive wall of fire that will incinerate her on the spot. ..."
Physicists have dubbed this wall of fire a 'firewall', more or less the opposite of what you might expected that term to mean.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

'Proust is important for everyone'

At Eurozine,
"In conversation with the sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky, novelist and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa discusses the relative merits of 'high' and 'mass' culture in the contemporary world and defends the ideas explored in his recent book La civilización del espectáculo."
(via Arts & Letters Daily)

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Liberal arts colleges emphasizing practical experience

Karen Herzog reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
"The line between preparing students to lead fulfilling lives, and preparing them for jobs, is a fine one for liberal arts colleges.

"'We're like a lot of liberal arts colleges,' said Ken Anselment, dean of admissions and financial aid at Lawrence University in Appleton [Wisconsin]. 'We don't want to be careerists, but when you have families saying, What are you going to do to prepare my son or daughter for a job? we have to respond.'"

Sunday, November 18, 2012

A harvest of new moons

The Economist reported,
"...a few astronomers are indeed beginning the search for satellites around some of the thousands of known and suspected exoplanets. ... For there is reason to suspect that if life does exist elsewhere than on Earth, then the moon of an alien planet might not be a bad place to search for it."

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Live and Let Die

Christopher Caldwell reviews 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith, by Sonia Arrison, Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2012

Friday, October 26, 2012

Jacques Barzun Dies at 104; Cultural Critic Saw the Sun Setting on the West

Edward Rothstein reports at The New York Times.
"He published his most ambitious and encyclopedic book at the age of 92 (and credited his productivity in part to chronic insomnia). That work, From Dawn to Decadence, is an 877-page survey of 500 years of Western culture in which he argued that Western civilization itself had entered a period of decline."
The Bibliography of Additional Readings in Great Books of the Western World (2nd Ed. 1990) includes Barzun's Clio and the doctors : psycho-history, quanto-history, & history (1974). The Bibliography of Additional Readings in Great Books of the Western World (1st Ed. 1952) includes his Teacher in America (1945).

Update: Jacques Barzun, 1907–2012, by Brian P. Kelly, Arma Virumque, and The Achievement of Jacques Barzun, by Gerald J. Russello, On the Square (via Arts & Letters Daily)

Sunday, October 14, 2012

A Philosopher Defends Religion

Thomas Nagel reviews Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, by Alvin Plantinga
"...even those who cannot accept the theist alternative should admit that Plantinga’s criticisms of naturalism are directed at the deepest problem with that view—how it can account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves, capable of discovering those laws and understanding the universe that they govern. Defenders of naturalism have not ignored this problem, but I believe that so far, even with the aid of evolutionary theory, they have not proposed a credible solution. ..."

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Right-side Up

Michael M. Uhlmann reviews The Upside-Down Constitution, by Michael S. Greve, Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2012

Sunday, September 23, 2012

The human element

Emily Esfahani Smith reviews The Social Conquest of Earth, by Edward O. Wilson

Sunday, September 16, 2012

An Innocent in the Ivy League

Hanna Rosin reviews Sex and God at Yale: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad, by Nathan Harden, in The New York Times

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Academic Battleground

Andrew Delbanco reviews The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind, by Bruce Bawer, in The New York Times

Sunday, August 26, 2012

What Is a Constitution?

A recent United States Supreme Court decision was the occasion for an essay by James V. Schall, S.J., on What Is a Constitution?.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Has the Meaning of Nothing Changed?

At Slate, Ron Rosenbaum reviews Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt.

In the book, Holt claims "a precise definition of nothingness: a closed spacetime of zero radius. This is the most complete and utter nothingness that scientific concepts can capture. It is mathematically devoid not only of stuff but also of location and duration.”

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Have It Your Way

Daniel Menaker reviews Free Will, by Sam Harris.
His absolutist position, I should add, because, as he puts it near the beginning of the book: 'Free will is an illusion. ...'

...

...if you want to acquaint yourself with the chapbook basics of this essential argument, Free Will is a good, cogent and readable . . . um, choice.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

The power politics of George R. R. Martin's 'Game of Thrones'

"A Song of Ice and Fire is intensely political. Martin asks the most serious questions about the nature of power: Who governs? By what right? To what end? He is fascinated by the subtle effects power can have on ruler and subject alike. 'You can have the power to destroy,' he told New York magazine's Vulture blog last year, 'but it doesn't give you the power to reform, or improve, or build.' Quite unexpectedly, Martin has emerged as the Machiavelli of the modern novel." --Matthew Continetti, Dungeons and Dragons, review essay, Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2012

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Much more ado

Not Understanding Nothing, by Edward Feser, review of A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, by Lawrence M. Krauss

Science and Scientism, by Edward Feser, review of On Being: A Scientist's Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence, by Peter Atkins, and The Tyranny of Science, by Paul Feyerabend

Friday, May 18, 2012

Drive time philosophy

What Man Has Made of Man, by Mortimer Adler, came up this morning on Morning Air, with Sean Herriott, on Relevant Radio, a Catholic radio network. Mr. Herriott posted on Facebook,
"Thanks to Brandon Vogt for motivating me to start reading "What Man has Made of Man," by Mortimer Adler. I talked about the book (well, really just the introduction) with Dr. Tim Weldon this morning (check it out in hour 2 of today's Morning Air audio archives). ..."
The archive is here.

The book consists of lectures delivered by Dr. Adler before the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Chicago in 1936. Mr. Herriott's focus on the book's Introduction was a result of Dr. Adler having Dr. Franz Alexander write it. Dr. Alexander begins,
"It is unusual to write an introduction to a book of an author whose conclusions, approach to his problems and whole outlook are diametrically opposite to those of the author of the introduction."

Monday, March 19, 2012

Encyclopedia Britannica to stop printing books

CNN Money reports that the publisher's Encyclopaedia Britannica, at least, has gone "out of print" in the literal sense.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Socratic Backfire?

Kaustuv Basu reports at Inside Higher Ed on Professor Steven Maranville’s lawsuit for being denied tenure at Utah Valley University, allegedly because students' evaluations complained that he used the Socratic method. (via Dad29)