Did Steve Jobs fail to adapt himself to the system, or did the school system fail to fit Steve Jobs? A Japanese team of investigators recently came to the United States to study its school system. Japan is a successful nation, prosperous and dynamic in many areas. But the team had a question: Why does our country have so few innovators?
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Intellectual battles are the cognitive lifeblood of a healthy society. Life is complicated and the stakes are high, so thoughtful and passionate people have lots of arguments. Only by argument can we sort out the facts about complicated matters, however postmodernists seem not to fight by the same rules as the rest of society.
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It can seem like entrepreneurs are a breed apart. But they’re not. All of us are born with the ability to take risks, think creatively and challenge the everyday way of doing things. That is to say, we’re all born with the entrepreneurial capacity.
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The argument claims, Socialism is motivated by anti-rich, anti-success envy, and that’s simply an illegitimate motivation. The envy-charge against socialism is that it institutionalizes envy. How does this compare with liberal capitalist countries? Is there more or less potential for envy to flourish in a liberal capitalist society?
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Bhopal is a city in central India, and late in 1984 chemicals in large quantities spilled out of an industrial plant there, killing, maiming, and damaging tens of thousands of people.
The long-term estimated death toll from the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India is about 16,000 people, making it the worst human-caused environmental disaster in history.
In the high-tech society we strive to be, it is essential that we learn the causes of disasters so that we can correct our mistakes. Technology lessens many of life’s risks, but handled badly it can add other serious risks.
The puzzle of envy and how it impacts our lives. Why does envy cause some of us to do destructive things? How do envy differ from jealousy?
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Did government contribute to one of America’s greatest environmental disasters? What is eminent domain? Were any politicians or government officials prosecuted for criminal neglect?
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The story of the The Will to Power has the makings of a dramatic documentary film. It has a tormented genius, Friedrich Nietzsche, already recognized as one of the great minds of his generation, but forced to retire early for health problems. Living an itinerant life wandering Europe on a meager pension, he nonetheless working vigorously on his iconoclastic philosophy, to culminate in a work he suggested would be his greatest. But he collapses on the streets of Turin — only 44 years old — losing his mental faculties and most of his grip on reality. It’s speculated that he caught syphilis from consorting with prostitutes, but more likely he has a slow-developing brain tumor. Nonetheless, the damaged philosopher is confined to an institution for the last decade of his life. But what of his final work, the unfinished manuscript he’d been working on — maybe his magnum opus? What would be its fate?
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It’s a faux pas in some intellectual circles — mostly conservative ones — to say that there was a Dark Ages in European history.
But the mainstream view has been that the Middle Ages were a dark period in Western history. What were the “Middle Ages” in the middle of? Between the Greco-Roman era and the Renaissance. Roughly a millennium. The evaluative claim is that the glories of Greece and Rome and the achievements of the Renaissance and early Modernity were outstanding. By contrast, the Middle Ages look dimmer or actually dark.
The post modernist British thinker John Gray wrote in his book, Enlightenment’s Wake: “We live today amid the dim ruins of the Enlightenment project, which was the ruling project of the modern period.” Our culture as a failure, ruins, nadir. Did the enlightenment not live up to its promises? What is the standard for this claim? What does the data show us? Are we indeed living amongst dim ruins?
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