'Criticism' instructs currently innumerate people that acquiring mathematical skills is an excellent cultural goal; 'critique' recognizes that they will achieve this knowledge quickly enough if their wage negotiations are at stake. -- Terry Eagleton

Ronald Reagan (1966)

The unwritten maxims of the Constitution, in other words, the positive political morality of the country, is what we must look to, if we would know in whom the really supreme power in the Constitution resides. -- John Stuart Mill

To his dismay, the library turned out to be in chaotic disarray and consisted largely of theological books, the rarest of them already 'half eaten by beetle larvae.'

Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live. -- Hannah Arendt

What is most needed in confronting the official abuse of power is the sense that the certification of something as legally valid is not conclusive of the question of obedience, and however great its aura of authority its demands must be submitted to moral scrutiny. -- HLA Hart

Angela Davis & Elena Lagadinova (1972), an agrobiologist who, at age 11 in 1941, had risked her young life as a partisan running food and information to guerrilla fighters in the Pirin mountains in Bulgaria.

Trump's rambling, interminable, unhinged speech at the WH Correspondents Dinner is each minute becoming increasingly a self-indictment, apart from literally torturing the captive audience in the room.

David Lewis

Aw, now we'll never know who they are

Says Seyla Benhabib, CJ Roberts' use of Arendt's phrase "the right to have rights" is a bitter irony, given the court's failures to limit the Admin's efforts to reengineer the population by excluding migrants of color, "borrowing a page from past totalitarian regimes." medium.com/@arendt_cent...

Hannah Arendt v. The Roberts Court

by Seyla Benhabib

medium.com

Forced out of all political communities, those with mere existence under the general human condition have left only the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or the incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, "Volo ut sis" (I want to be you). -- Hannah Arendt

Edmund Burke says here "human rights" is an "abstraction," better to rely on "entailed inheritance" of rights transmitted to one's children and derived "from within the nation," rather than from nature, divine command, natural law, or a concept of humanity.

The Viscaynes (1961) (the guitarist went on to become someone you've undoubtedly heard and perhaps know very well)

Those who exercise ruling power grasp the political advantages of rule with law and embrace it publicly -- as long as they are not bound by it. -- Gerald Postema

When lawyers are asked to define what they do, they string together long sentences in which they unfailingly use the adjective "legal" to qualify everything they say, without troubling to explain, without even realizing that they are caught up in a tautology! -- Bruno Latour

Hannah Arendt opined in 1963 that, although "very high calibre" conceptual thinking propelled the American revolution, America's post-revolution aversion to conceptual thought devolved into its "ready receptivity to far-fetched ideas and grotesque notions."

Albeit without citing her work, Chief Justice Earl Warren borrowed from Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism in his dissent in Perez v Brownwell (US 1958), insisting that citizenship is a basic right, "for it is nothing less than the right to have rights."

Ronald Dworkin argued states have a prima facie obligation to follow international law, not based on consent, but on their obligation to enhance their own political legitimacy, beyond what's possible just via state sovereignty.

Totalitarianism abolishes the right of asylum, embodied in the medieval principle that quid quid est in territorio est de territorio, but which dates back to ancient times and protects people forced to become outlaws through circumstances beyond their control. -- Hannah Arendt

One is tempted to measure the degree of totalitarian infection by the extent to which the concerned government uses its sovereign right of denationalization of refugees. -- Hannah Arendt

The ACLU has just detailed hundreds of cases of misconduct by immig agents: -kneeling on necks 52x -Agents choking people 10x -smashing car windows 47x -ramming cars 14x -Hit people w/ car 6x Report repeatedly cites ProPublica's reporting B/c transparency takes a village--when the govt blocks it

Love this. His modus operandi is bribery. His indictment is on bribery charges. Trump boasts about his bribe investment. Sullivan & Cromwell is trump's law firm. But no, the $10 billion promise "ultimately played no role" in abandoning the prosecution of him.

Hans Kelsen wrote that ideas of causation animistically originated in the norm of retribution, the Greek word for cause (aitia) originally meaning guilt, the cause being guilty of the effect.

A central task of democratic politics is to provide the institutions which will permit conflicts to take an 'agonistic' form, where the opponents are not enemies but adversaries among whom exists a conflictual consensus. -- Chantal Mouffe

This gorgeous essay from the social-media-less Lily Hu is everything: on what it means to "do" philosophy amidst pressure to automate it (with lessons that travel much more broadly). Rhymes with brilliant insights from @biblioracle.bsky.social @janerosenzweig.bsky.social Ted Chiang & others

Lily Hu · Un-Doing Philosophy

Analytic philosophers in the United States are increasingly embracing AI, both by taking advisory positions at tech companies and by using large language models for their own research and writing. Som...

blnreview.de

The power of banishing was exercised only every fifth year: and, indeed, as the ostracism was designed against none but great personages who threatened the state with danger, it ought not to have been the transaction of every day. -- Montesquieu

Ronald Dworkin is, if he and Shakespeare will allow me to say so, the noblest dreamer of them all, with a wider and more expert philosophical base than his predecessors, and he concentrates formidable powers of argument on the defence of his theory. -- HLA Hart

Theorist riffing on conceptions of law, ideology, and the rule of law in the Iranian context acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:...

Socrates on the case