Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Links of Note

* Richard Yetter Chappell on Querying vs. Dismissive Objections

* Joseph Keegin, Forgiveness -- Christian, and Otherwise

* Marcy Lascano, Early Modern Women on the Cosmological Argument (PDF)

* Marcel Weber, Darwinism as a Theory for Finite Beings (PDF)

* Frank Cabrera, Evidence and Explanation in Cicero's On Divination (PDF)

* Internet Archive Scholar is a treasure trove of archived online scholarly articles

* Maarten Steenhagen, Explaining the Ugly (PDF), on how ugliness might fit into Kant's theory of beauty

* Magdalene College Cambridge recently discovered Mary Astell's book collection, including many with her handwritten notes, in its collections. It had been hiding in plain sight; there was evidence that Astell had donated her book collection to a college, but the evidence had been interpreted as suggesting that she had donated it to Magdalen College, which is in Oxford, and there was no sign of it there. (The difference of the 'e' was only introduced later, when the Cambridge college adopted it so that people would stop confusing it with the Oxford college.) Nobody knows why the collection was given to Magdalene College, but the article (plausibly) suggests that it was partly because of shared intellectual interests between Astell and Daniel Waterland, the Master of Magdalene College for a period.

* Ashley Barnes, Toward an Incarnational Aesthetic

* Thomas Chatterton Williams, Encountering Thomas Sowell

* Ben Dickson, Why machine learning struggles with causality

* John Finnis, Abortion is unconstitutional
Josh Craddock, John Finnis is right

* Josh Carmony, Ground operations, on the adjunctification of higher education

* Churchill's Secret Army, on Churchill's project of training Auxiliary Units, civilian volunteers to fight, should the Nazis invade

* Texas Monthly had an interesting feature on car clubs with Austin, and the problems they have been having due to the massive expansion of newcomers to the city. One of the car clubs mentioned, Hands Full of Cash Car Club, I know something about, although I don't really move in car club circles; they are very active in local community-building, and beyond the direct good they do, they do a lot of indirect good by making the city one with strong community connections. On Twitter, unsurprisingly, there were attempts to treat this as primarily a racial issue, but the incoming population is mostly tech workers, who are a very diverse population; this is fundamentally a too-many-newcomers-swamps-local-communities-and-traditions problem. There was another feature in 2019 on HFC and the difficulties car clubs are having.