If you are averse to puns, I warn you: TURN BACK NOW! Still reading? All right then. So, who's Jason? Only one of the niftiest, most intelligent and decent people I know. Jason and I enjoyed philosophy homework parties at my house every Friday night for nearly seven years. And notwithstanding that our homework days…
Scapegoat.
A SCAPEGOAT is (usually) a person or group of people unjustly blamed for some set of circumstances arising from the actions of others. Scapegoats bear the brunt of crowd hostility and, once identified by an angry mob, find themselves in no-win, dangerous -- even lethal -- situations. Scapegoating is as old as humankind. In The Annals,…
Just a thought. 12. Redux.
Resistance is not raising up an army and trading fire, by that time too many have needlessly suffered -- as will many more. Resistance is inviting someone you've been taught (and are expected) to hate to your table and treating her as a friend. The people you need to resist, to this end, are your…
Just a thought. 11.
"Which is the more pitiful I cannot decide -- being accused because of a friendship, or accusing a friend." Tacitus. The Annals: The Reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero. Oxford World's Classics. Translated by J.C. Yardley. Introduction and notes by Anthony A. Barrett. Oxford University Press Inc.: New York. 2008. (Book Six, Chapter 6, p 182)…
Just a thought. 10.
"Perhaps there is a sort of cycle in all things, with changes of morality coming around again like seasonal changes." Tacitus. The Annals: The Reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero. Oxford World's Classics. Translated by J.C. Yardley. Introduction and notes by Anthony A. Barrett. Oxford University Press Inc.: New York. 2008. (Book 3, chapter 55, p.…
Pam-Toons. It’s all your fault.
Just a thought. 9.
Lurking somewhere in the back of our adult brains is every mother’s admonition If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you? Don’t blindly follow your friends. Sometimes this warning is made explicit. When I went to university in my 40s, my seventy-five-year-old Dad worried that I would cease to think for myself. And so he gave…
Just a thought. 8.
'Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy. -- David Hume. Ed. Ernest C. Mossner. A Treatise of Human Nature. Penguin Classics: New York. 1985 (First published 1739 and 1740). p 153 See also: Aristotle. We are sensing things. Series 1.1.
Just a thought. 7.
Who said the following: "I wanted to dispel the fictions of hearsay, and to ask people into whose hands my book may come not to prefer widely circulated and eagerly accepted fantasies over truth uncorrupted by sensationalism."* Did you guess Tacitus? Tacitus, the renowned Roman historian, writes these words in the Annals sometime around 117 CE.…
Just a thought. 6.
But no one man’s reason, or the reason of any one number of men makes the certainty, no more than an account is therefore well cast up, because a great many men have unanimously approved it. (Hobbes, 28) Part : 1, Chapter 5; Paragraph 3 (Right reason where.) Thomas Hobbes. J.C.A. Gaskin, Ed. Leviathan. (1651) Oxford World's Classics.…
