Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

Katherine and I will be visiting Scotland this summer. If you've been to Scotland and have a recommendation for us (something to see or do), please post a comment! Click the map to enlarge it. One place I want to visit is Thurso (at the northernmost point of the country), which is the birthplace of one of my favorite philosophers: Sir William David Ross (1877-1971).

To the Editor:

It will be fun to watch whoever wins the Republican nomination stumble and spin as he tries to backtrack from his extreme opinions when he realizes that he needs to be more centrist to win the presidency. Then people will have to wonder which are the lies: the extreme opinions expressed to win the nomination, or the more moderate opinions expressed to win the Oval Office. Either way, the candidate will appear to be a weather vane that spins whichever way the political winds blow.

RICHARD WAGNER

Lancaster, Mass.

Note from KBJ: Thank goodness Hillary Clinton is not a weather vane.

If you like thinking, talking, and writing about language (as I do), you'll love this interview of Bryan Garner by Jesse Pearson.

Martin Luther King Jr is one of my heroes. He was born on this date in 1929. If you haven't read his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," please do so now. You won't regret it.

Hair of the Dog (1975). I was 18 years old when this album was released. My friends and I loved it.

Late in Aquinas' career as a professor in Paris, a quodlibetal question was put to him: Should professors of theology settle these or any other disputed questions by reason or by authority? His response indicates why his work remains relevant to non-believers. Here it is in full:

Any activity is to be pursued in a way appropriate to its purpose. Disputations have one or other of two purposes.

One sort is designed {ordinatur} to remove doubts about whether such-and-such is so. In disputations of this sort you should above all use authorities acceptable to those with whom you are disputing; with Jews, for example, you should appeal to the authority of the Old Testament; with Manichees, who reject the Old Testament, you should use only the New; with Christians who have split off from us, e.g. the Greek [Orthodox], who accept both Testaments but reject the teaching of our [Catholic] saints, you should rely on the authority of the Old and New Testaments and of those church teachers {doctores} they do accept. And if you are disputing with people who accept no authority, you must resort to natural reasons.

Then there is the professorial academic disputation, designed not for removing error but for teaching, so that those listening may be led to an understanding of the truth with which the professor {magister} is concerned. And here you must rely upon reasons, reasons which track down the root of the truth and create a real knowledge of how it is that your assertions are true. Otherwise, if professors settle questions by bare authorities, listeners are indeed told that such-and-such is so, but gain nothing in the way of knowledge or understanding {scientiae vel intellectus}, and go away empty.

(John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 11-2 [brackets in original; footnotes and Finnis's italics omitted])

Here.

Here.

Life is good.