classics digests, reflections and reviews
On June 30, 2023, the last day of the court’s term, the Supreme Court of the United Status issued its ruling in the case of 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. The ruling was the same as I had predicted six months ago. The opinions are a little disappointing, however. Both the majority and dissent seem to have difficulties reconciling rights to free speech and rights to equal access. The majority […]
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Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963 When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words […]
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Four years after Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, there is another case (again originated in Colorado) pending before the Supreme Court of the United States, which seems to pit First Amendment rights against rights of people with protected traits, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. Like Masterpiece Cakeshop, the petitioner, a web designer, argues that her First Amendment right is violated when she is required by law to […]
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Opinion of the Court 1. The Constitution of the United States does not protect a right to (obtain) abortion, neither explicitly nor implicitly. 2. There are other rights not mentioned in the Constitution, but the Court has judged them to be protected by the Constitution, such as the right to obtain contraceptives and right to same-sex marriage. 3. Abortion is fundamentally different from those rights. It concerns not only a […]
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The Architecture of Reason When reading Critique of Pure Reason, I get the sense that Kant has a penchant for visualization and architecture, so it seems appropriate to represent his system of Reason, as I understand it, with a diagram (shown above). Although I’m using his own terms (translated from German into English), I cannot be certain that I understand them the same way Kant does, partly because he has […]
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Preface The Prolegomena is a preface to (and summary of) the Critique of Pure Reason. I’ll be publishing a series of posts on these books, as I work through them. Kant acknowledges in the Prolegomena that he has been roused by Davi Hume from “dogmatic slumber”. Hume argues that concepts such as cause and effect are invalid as they not based on experience, and so the study of metaphysics and […]
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As a great humanist and artist, Tolstoy was deeply aware of and sympathetic to the prevailing feelings of the common people, although he was an eminent member of the Russian aristocracy. In these essays written between 1890 and 1910, the year of his death, the constant theme is the struggle between his conscience and pacifist convictions, and the society of violence from which he could not extricate himself, and for […]
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