by David P. Gontar "The Owl of Minerva Takes Wing Only with the Coming of Dusk" --  Hegel What has happened to the sturdy realism of philosophy? The tidy array of perceived objects celebrated by Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore in the early 20th century has vanished in vertiginous swirls of ...Read More...

by David P. Gontar It is hardly an exaggeration to observe that the exclusive focus of the American media these days is the new President and his alleged foibles. Substantive matters like law, national policy, war, trade, immigration and economic development are taken up, if at all, only to the ...Read More...

David Smith writes in The Guardian: A handsomely bound complete works of William Shakespeare stands upright beside opera glasses, a blue lace handkerchief and a single rose. On the wall is a picture of President Thomas Jefferson’s house Monticello and an article torn from a newspaper about an “All-American ...Read More...

Something from The New Statesman by Auberon Waugh (1975):   Not far from where I live in Southern France there runs a small canal called La Rigole. It is a tributary of the great Canal du Midi linking the Atlantic with the Mediterranean, and its pine fringed towpaths make an ideal place ...Read More...

Recently a young American woman announced her intention to marry her father. As we were digesting this curiosity there appeared on AOL News a story entitled "My Strange Addiction:  Florida Woman marries a carnival ride," a brief narrative worth reading (there is a video interview). That marriage was ...Read More...

The comedy of modern "atheism" takes a merry twist lately in the jottings of Mr. Phil Zuckerman, professional unbeliever and counselor of those-with-nowhere-else-to-turn. Unwilling to be regarded as an atheist of common stamp, Mr. Zuckerman pedals a warm and fuzzy variety called (ugh!) "aweism." Readers ...Read More...