William Flesch's blog

The New Criterion and the National Association of Scholars are at it again.

Some responses, hastily and inconsiderately set down.

When I was younger, in college and grad school, I'd read that someone my current age had won the lottery, and it just seemed so pointless. What would they do with twenty years of money coming in that could possibly make their, or anyone's, life better?

One modern incarnation of the debate between nominalism and realism is to be found in philosophical arguments about sets.  There are two ways of characterizing a set: intensionally, through description (e.g. the set of all inhabitants of London, to use an example of Russell's), and extensionally, which is just a list of the members of the set.

Errol Morris is famous for being an amazing interviewer. I think I know why, having seen him with Claude Lanzmann last Friday at Brandeis.

Teaching Milton this semester, I think I made a couple of connections that must be obvious, but that I'd never quite seen before (or maybe I had: these days I'm finding the obvious striking again, which I don't know whether that's a good or a bad thing).

The topic of our attachment to words is allegorical of our attachments to ourselves and to other persons.

In an earlier post I wrote a little about Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. The title of Browning's poem ought to include its sub-titular note, thus:

Some comments here, and also off-list, helped me think further about these issues.