I haven't made my deep dive yet, but this looks like a promising series: Philosophising in... For instance, Philosophising in Sakha (that's Yakut to old-schoolers). Or you could try the posts on Syriac, Amharic, Cuneiform and more.

 Via Languagehat (of course, because is anyone else even attempting to put anything interesting on the internet anymore?)

 More Hegel discovered. Just what we need?

I spent a fairly pleasant winter a couple decades ago 'working' at around 12,000 ft., mostly just reading Phenomenology of Spirit in a small shelter with a propane heater that had a minor leak--which only enhanced the hypoxic environment. I still have my notes but they look like marginalia from Miskatonic University.

A grim but interesting read on architectural theory and urban warfare.

Contemporary urban operations play themselves out within a constructed, real or imaginary, architecture, and through the destruction, construction, reorganization and subversion of space. As such the urban environment must be understood not simply as the backdrop to conflict, nor as its mere consequence, but as trapped in a complex and dynamic feedbackbased relation with the forces operating within it – be they a diverse local population, soldiers, guerrilla, media or humanitarian agents. Indicative of the emergent relationship between conflict and space are urban warfare tactics that redefine a relation to the physical/architectural element of the wall.

It's worth considering that warfare may not simply require the destruction of the social and legal boundaries made manifest in our public and private spaces, but consist as such.

MENO: I should say that in so far as they are bees, they don't differ from one another at all.

Plato, Meno, 72b, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie

If philosophers were cooks
I was always a lackluster philosophy student, so this is a challenge better suited to Odious' talents. I'll merely note that the, oh let's say, chile relleno greater than which no chile relleno can be conceived obviously exists, inasmuch as an existent relleno is clearly greater than a non-existent one.

XKCD does Plato.

God is a bad god because he makes bad food.

This is very difficult to refute convincingly.

Some rather--unusual--fallacies over at Siris.

Argumentum fistulatorium means, roughly, 'argument by piping'. Ad verecundiam, ex absurdo, and ex Fortiori are, respectively, argument from authority, from the absurdity of the position, and from the truth of a stronger conclusion. They would have been found in real lists of argument-types at the time. All the rest are jokes, but argumentum baculinum was an old one by Sterne's time; it occurs when you resolve an argument by beating your opponent with a club or a stick.

I'm not sure that the baculinum is always a fallacy, however; there are obviously times (for example, if your interlocuter argues that you are incapable of striking him) when it answers quite well; and in any case no less a philosopher than Duns Scotus employs it in his Ordinatio:

And so too, those who deny that some being is contigent should be exposed to torments until they concede that it is possible for them not to be tormented.

Both understandable and effective, I imagine. The Scotch, of course, were noted for combining the fistulatorium and baculinum with great success.

Thought in the car: the difference between snowmen and snow angels is totally thomistic. Wait. No it isn't. Never mind.

Frivolous, timewasting nonsense, but rather excellent.

The Nietzsche Family Circus: a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote. Always perverse, occasionally uncanny.

Similarly, check out (if you're not already aware of it) Garfield Minus Garfield, "a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression [and I believe the synopsis originally added meth addiction, which seems apt] in a quiet American suburb."

This one's especially for Odious: Kant and Kierkegaard attack ads.

Brandon on Arguments from Evil and from Design.

...The two types of arguments make use of the same basic processes of reasoning and similar views of design as relatively obvious to spot if it's there; they just reach different conclusions because one says that this or that is obviously good enough that it has to be designed, and the other says that that or this is obviously bad enough that it couldn't possibly be designed. And both tend to be locked into the view that it is design or nothing.

Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking's a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That's why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they're arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you've got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself another to take its place.

--the Dain Curse, Dashiell Hammett

The nice thing about having friends stay with you is staying up late sorting philosophers into the four houses (Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, Slytherin), and then eating cinnamon rolls in the morning.

Peculiar! We forgot Archimedes!

Brandon over at Siris has (had, for I am slow) a post about a number of things, but the one closest to my heart is the rough treatment Xenophon receives. I think the reasons he gives are accurate, but not complete. I think that one major reason Xenophon is disparaged as Plato is praised is that Xenophon's Socrates is much more human--and that he dies a more human death, for a more human reason.

Preface: I wish I had my books. This is from hazy memory. But Xenophon's Socrates is very far from a Platonist. He goes so far as to claim that nothing is "good", but that things are only good for something. And in his death he remains far from the unyieldingly philosophic, truth-seeking Socrates of the Phaedo.

In the Phaedo, we see an unrepentant Socrates declaring that the philosopher is constantly practising death, and so should not fear it when it comes. He has chosen to die rather than to cease his eternal questioning, and his last words, "Crito, we must sacrifice a cock to Asclepius; see to it, and do not forget," are positively heroic. I will here admit that I get choked up every time I read it, and indeed whenever I think about it.*

This is the philosopher at his best, facing death, unafraid and cheerful and resolute. And I think the myth has especial resonance for lovers of philosophy, since so few philosopher were anything like heroic in this same manner. Who else in the history of philosophy dies this way? To whom shall we look for another such example of living the philosophic life? Whether from lack of need or opportunity (charitably), or courage or conviction (un-), no one else has made so clear a choice between such stark alternatives. When we consider the... less respectable life of a Nietzsche or a Heidegger or even a Kant, it becomes obvious just how far above these lives Socrates' was. And so philosophers, not otherwise noted for living well (however fairly or unfairly), can always point to Socrates.

Xenophon, however, rips this story away. His Socrates chooses death not because of some refusal to compromise his skeptic's integrity (although his innocence is a confort to him), but because he is old. His faculties are failing, and to avoid this he thinks it better to die than to suffer this indignation. The heroic Socrates of the Phaedo is replaced with the merely human Socrates of the Memorabilia, and the only really philosophic death among the great philosophers is replaces with an early form of euthanasia.

The anatomy of a modern idealism:

1. Assertion that all experience is inevitably mediated (where's Hegel when you need him?)? Check.

Most of these comprehensive theories are no more than stories that fail to take into account one crucial factor: we are creating them. It is the biological creature that makes observations, names what it observes, and creates stories. Science has not succeeded in confronting the element of existence that is at once most familiar and most mysterious—conscious experience. As Emerson wrote in “Experience,” an essay that confronted the facile positivism of his age: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subjectlenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.”

2. Invocation of philosophers without concern for their agreement with one's position? Check. And bonus points for ending the list with "to name a few"!

Ever since the remotest of times philosophers have acknowledged the primacy of consciousness—that all truths and principles of being must begin with the individual mind and self. Thus Descartes’s adage: “Cogito, ergo sum.” (I think, therefore I am.) In addition to Descartes, who brought philosophy into its modern era, there were many other philosophers who argued along these lines: Kant, Leibniz, Bishop Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Henri Bergson, to name a few.

3. Refusal to acknowledge the Anthropic Principle (with which I disagree, too, but it ought to be addressed beyond a brief mention towards the end of one's work)? Check.

Modern science cannot explain why the laws of physics are exactly balanced for animal life to exist. For example, if the big bang had been one-part-in-a billion more powerful, it would have rushed out too fast for the galaxies to form and for life to begin. If the strong nuclear force were decreased by two percent, atomic nuclei wouldn’t hold together. Hydrogen would be the only atom in the universe. If the gravitational force were decreased, stars (including the sun) would not ignite. These are just three of more than 200 physical parameters within the solar system and universe so exact that they cannot be random. Indeed, the lack of a scientific explanation has allowed these facts to be hijacked as a defense of intelligent design.

4. Use of Kantian terms inaccurately and without attribution? Check plus!

All of this makes sense from a biocentric perspective: time is the inner form of animal sense that animates events—the still frames—of the spatial world. The mind animates the world like the motor and gears of a projector. Each weaves a series of still pictures into an order, into the “current” of life. Motion is created in our minds by running “film cells” together. Remember that everything you perceive, even this page, is being reconstructed inside your head. It’s happening to you right now. All of experience is an organized whirl of information in your brain.

5. Quantum physics? Indeed.

Science has been grappling with the implications of the wave-particle duality ever since its discovery in the first half of the 20th century. But few people accept this principle at face value. The Copenhagen interpretation, put in place by Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and Born in the 1920s, set out to do just that. But it was too unsettling a shift in worldview to accept in full. At present, the implications of these experiments are conveniently ignored by limiting the notion of quantum behavior to the microscopic world. But doing this has no basis in reason, and it is being challenged in laboratories around the world. New experiments carried out with huge molecules called buckyballs show that quantum reality extends into the macroscopic world as well. Experiments make it clear that another weird quantum phenomenon known as entanglement, which is usually associated with the micro world, is also relevant on macro scales. An exciting experiment, recently proposed (so-called scaled-up superposition), would furnish the most powerful evidence to date that the biocentric view of the world is correct at the level of living organisms.

6. Hindoo myths? Check.

What I would question, with respect to solipsism, is the assumption that our individual separateness is an absolute reality. Bell’s experiment implies the existence of linkages that transcend our ordinary way of thinking. An old Hindu poem says, “Know in thyself and all one self-same soul; banish the dream that sunders part from whole.” If time is only a stubbornly persistent illusion, as we have seen, then the same can be said about space. The distinction between here and there is also not an absolute reality. Without consciousness, we can take any person as our new frame of reference. It is not my consciousness or yours alone, but ours.

7. The old "are you awake or asleep" pseudo-conundrum? Please.

You may question whether the brain can really create physical reality. However, remember that dreams and schizophrenia (consider the movie A Beautiful Mind) prove the capacity of the mind to construct a spatial-temporal reality as real as the one you are experiencing now. The visions and sounds schizophrenic patients see and hear are just as real to them as this page or the chair you’re sitting on.

In truth, I would love to see more of this sort of thing, if only to get the occasional alternative to materialism that seems to be the popular order of the day. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that idealism, and dualism too (and things less easily classified) are live theories; each with its problems, but none wholly disproven. I just wish it were done better.

Quote of the day:

More convincing would be an argument that religious ideas are somehow uniquely impervious to reason. Is this true? From the fact that I almost never change anyone's mind (and nor does any other pundit I can identify) on any contentious issue, I infer that almost all beliefs are impervious to reason, religious or not.