Blogging will be light – Vacation time!

Hello dear readers, I always appreciate your time and comments, but blogging will be light over the next few weeks. Until then, you might want to check out some of my favorite blogs (look on the right side of this page). Have a great summer!

See you soon, Italy!

Poor lads, don't go too hard on them, after all they did what they could do... Arrivederci Italia!

Immoral moralists?

There is a quote I came across some time ago that says, “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, X, 16, AD 167). It fits well to a lot of people, except, at least to a certain extent, moralist philosophers—but Marcus Aurelius was one of them …—and theologians, but it certainly fits perfectly with politicians who play the moralist, such as,

Habermas and secularisation (part I)

By Angelo

Many thanks to Rob who has invited me to contribute to this blog.


Last week Jürgen Habermas visited Ireland and received a prize from University College Dublin, where I teach philosophy to adult classes.
Habermas is considered the most important European living philosopher and belongs to the second generation of the 'Frankfurt School'. This is a group of philosophers and sociologist

I am glad to inform you ...

I am pleased to welcome a new contributor to this blog, Angelo Bottone. Angelo is an associate lecturer at the School of Arts of the Dublin Business School, where he teaches Introduction to Philosophy, Critical Thinking, Theories of Knowledge and Philosophy of Science. He holds a PhD in philosophy at University College Dublin. He has published three books on John Henry Newman and several

Good News / Bad News (from Italy)

The good news for Italy, today, is that British bank Barclays is not worried about Italy’s public finances and will continue to invest in the euro zone country. Barclays chief executive John Varley told Il Sole-24 Ore newspaper,


We had strong growth in Italy in the last 10 years. We continue to consider it a strategic country in which to invest following our guidelines: in retail and wealth,

Turkey is rethinking its place in the world

Some fear the West has “lost” Turkey. The Mavi Marmara incident is seen as further proof of such a Turkish shift (The Economist).

Berlusconi's attack on a free press?

As all the word knows (we live in a global village, after all), Silvio Berlusconi is a controversial figure. There are those who love him and those who hate him, those who appreciate him and those who don’t. I’ve always tried to be as “objective” as possible regarding to him, but I don’t pretend to have succeeded, because—whether I like it or not—I agree with him on most issues. Let’s say that I

The Year of the (Conservative) Woman

~ “LETTERS FROM AMERICA” - by The Metaphysical Peregrine ~We had several primary elections this last Tuesday. Most notable was that Conservative women dominated.In California former eBay CEO Meg Whitman won her primary against a strong Republican field. She’s wasn’t the most conservative of the candidates, yet the Democrats are already painting her as a ‘right wing extremist’. Of course, to them

An Alien in the White House?

The distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed. Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal:


There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed

Flotilla inquiry? (Updated)

The flotilla affair: does the Israeli government owe anyone an inquiry over what went wrong in what looks to have been a seriously-botched operation? If the answer is Yes, then to whom does Israel owe an inquiry (and why), and to whom it doesn’t? Here is what Norman Geras has to say about this whole issue (an enlightening read).

UPDATE 7:30 pm
This is what may be written without a blush in the

It’s all Bush’s fault

It’s George Bush’s fault. Everything is George Bush’s fault. Why? Well, because it’s always someone else’s fault. “This is reaching the level of hilarity. Except it’s so sad,” says Steven at The Metaphysical Peregrine. And I think he is right. One might also say, yes, it would be funny, except it is happening to me, to us Americans. You have all my European solidarity—after all every country

'I killed Mgr. Padovese! Allah Akbar!'

Bishop Luigi Padovese, the apostolic vicar of Anatolia—that is the Vatican’s representative in Turkey—who was stabbed by his Turkish driver Thursday, besides being a high-level scholar and among the major experts on St. Paul, was a good and wise man. Just like another Italian priest, Father Andrea Santoro, who was killed in Turkey in 2006. And the man arrested in that case was also described as

Francesca, or When Nothing is Impossible

Her nose smudged with the red crushed-brick powder that tops the courts at Roland Garros, Francesca Schiavone, the first Italian woman to win a Grand Slam singles event, “clambered into the stands. She immersed herself into a section of Italian family and friends, some of whom drove to Paris overnight, wearing black T-shirts that read ‘Nothing is Impossible.’”

What I like most about this

Afghan MP calls for execution of Christians

The “Religion of Peace” strikes again. International Christian Concern (ICC)—a Washington-DC based human rights organization aimed to help persecuted Christians worldwide—has told the ASSIST News Service (ANS) that Abdul Sattar Khawasi, deputy secretary of the Afghan lower house in parliament, has called for the public execution of Christian converts. What occasioned Khawasi’s “irritation” was a

Hey, not to forget the Florentine secretary

Do you remember the famous Machiavellian “eulogy” of mankind in the seventeenth chapter of The Prince, entitled “Concerning cruelty and clemency, and whether it is better to be loved than feared?” If you don’t, here is how it goes—brace yourselves, it’s not exactly what we could call an optimistic perspective on human nature, nonetheless please read carefully the following passage (I’ll explain