The signature of MaimonidesMarch’s OLL birthday essay is in honor of the great Jewish rabbi, legal scholar, philosopher, community leader, and physician Moses ben Maimon, better known by the Hellenized version of his name, Maimonides. In Hebrew he is often called “Rambam,” an abbreviation of “Our Rabbi Moses, son of Maimon” and occasionally as “the Great Eagle” (haNesher haGadol). Although he made his living as a physician, he is mostly famous for his enduring contribution to the development of Jewish law and the crucial role his works subsequently played in medieval Scholastic philosophy.
In both poetry and prose Walt Whitman envisions an America in which men and women are seen as equals. In an early draft (1847) of Leaves of Grass he wrote, “I am the poet of women as well as men / The woman is not less than the man.…
Setting: Present-day Notre Dame Cathedral. It is nightfall.
The great, long-silent bells toll, their resonant voices echoing across the Paris sky. Now, a lone figure moves among the towering spires, the freshly restored stonework,…
February’s OLL Birthday essay is dedicated to Anthony Ashley Cooper, better known to history as the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, or sometimes just Shaftesbury. He was an important statesman and Whig politician during the turbulent…
While one idly day-dreams, one frequently imagines how the world and all within it might be different. What if the clouds were red? What if I won a million dollars, tax-free? What if I did not have to wake up at 5 a.m. during the…
The Great Gatsby ends on a sad note. The book's namesake, Gatsby, lies dead in a pool. He experiences a second death when his funeral is sparsely attended. The house that was so full when he was alive lies empty in his death. George…
“I ask: which of the two, civil or natural life, is more likely to become insufferable to those who live it? We see about us practically no people who do not complain about their existence...[but] has anyone ever heard of a savage…
Professor Alan Kors explains that the young Rousseau did not trust the Paris philosophes. He met with them in the cafes but did not like their deism. He had known and argued with atheists. The philosophes seemed to him to seize upon…
November’s OLL Birthday Essay is in honor of François Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire. A playwright, poet, historian, philosopher, and satirist, Voltaire literally defined the Age of Enlightenment,…
Spend much time in discussion of ethics and you’ll likely hear standard objections to various utilitarian theories. In their single-minded drive to maximize some version of the good (e.g., desirable conscious states like pleasure),…
A previous essay suggested ways in which preference-satisfaction utilitarianism (“preferentism”) is superior to forms of utilitarianism that focus on promoting or maximizing desirable states of consciousness (such as pleasure).…
October’s OLL Birthday Essay is in honor of the French polymath Denis Diderot. Most famous as the editor and inspiration of the Encyclopédie, Diderot also published works on philosophy and art, as well as novels, and plays,…
