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Parmenides’ Way of Truth, continued…

The Supremacy of Reason…

Being and Not-Being…

Parmenides’ Abolition of Movement, Change, and the World-Process…

Parmenides and Plato…

The Greeks’ habitual critique of sensory experience is already implicit in Heracleitus, who lamented that “eyes and ears are bad witnesses to men if they have souls that do not understand their language”.  Eyes and ears tell us that the world is multiform, but to the intellect, the “Logos is one and common to all”.  Parmenides carries the Heracleitean doctrine of the opposition between the subjectivity and particularity of experience, and the objective universality of the Logos (i.e., reason), to its inevitable conclusion.  If the rational intelligence alone can make sense of experience, then intelligence is supra-ordinate to it; and if the data of sense come into conflict with the conclusions of sovereign reason, the former must yield to the latter.

Continue reading “The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XXXIV” →

Parmenides…

His Philosophy as another Sacred Revelation…

His Rejection of Heracleitus…

His Absolute Rationalism…

For Heracleitus, the world is a one and a many.  As perceived by the senses, it is a chaotic spectacle of multiplicity, change, and decay.  As penetrated by the intellect, however, reality is eternal, immutable, and unitary.  The one, universal Logos-Fire undergoes a multiplicity of transformations under the sensible aspects of the elements, and yet, hidden beneath these superficial forms, it remains an immutable One. Continue reading “The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XXXIII” →

Having returned from three delightful weeks in Merrie Olde England, I am tempted to launch a new Priceton travelogue (“Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell:   A Chaucerian Pilgrimage through the Dis-United Kingdom”). But I won’t. Our English trip was far more paradisal and far less hellish to make for a decently harrowing memoir. In accordance with the principle that Milton’s Messiah is less interesting to readers than his Satan, there is no literary justification for it. Continue reading “England for the English” →

America’s Hope and Sex-Change President…

     While reassuring the world that “it has nothing to do with Islam” (Islam, remember, IS NOT THE ENEMY) whenever the Mullahs behead infidels, massacre Christians, stone immodestly dressed women, and castrate gays (in the Middle East, if you want a sex-change operation, your local shariah council will provide it free of charge), President Obama has finally drawn a line in the sand against intolerance and bigotry…in the bathrooms of America. After Indiana, North Carolina, and several other states passed legislation requiring men and women to use the bathroom that matches their anatomy–a suddenly controversial idea–, the Obama Justice Department vowed solemnly to overturn it all in court. There followed a thinly-veiled threat from the U.S. Department of Education to de-fund recalcitrant public schools; and finally, on May 11, a formal presidential directive to the effect that transgendered access to the bathrooms and locker-rooms of one’s choice was a “civil right”. Continue reading “Bathroom Apartheid, Self-Identified Gender, and Other Progressive Solecisms” →

In 1984, the late Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, his devastating critique of the intellectual and ideological conformity that then reigned on American campuses. In the thirty years since, the mind of the typical college professor and student has been padlocked, dead-bolted, sealed against threatening winds by the caulking guns of political correctness, shuttered against the light and shade of argument, and gone permanently on vacation. Today, the academic mind is so impervious to anything but progressive ideology that not even a team of world-champion oyster shuckers could pry it open. Continue reading “The Unshuckable Closing of the Academic Mind” →