My Stuff

https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





Total Pageviews

Thursday, February 23, 2017

BIG NEWS

A story appeared yesterday in the TIMES with this headline:

7 Earth-Size Planets Orbit Dwarf Star, NASA and European Astronomers Say


You can read the entire story here.  This is enormously exciting news, and serves to put in perspective the horrendous stories appearing daily about the current Administration.  If life can be found elsewhere in the universe, that fact will dwarf everything now happening in our corner of this “fourth rock from the sun.”   Please God let our sister planet not be inhabited by Jar Jar Binks!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here's an artist's rendering of the puppy: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170223.html. (N.B. - If you subscribe to the site, you'll get something that'll make your day, nearly every day.)

Chris said...

Wonder if Christ will appear on these planets to convert the primordial heathens?

s. wallerstein said...

Given the amount of oppression and violence that marks human history and that the kind of pacific and rational way of relating to one another that most of us in this blog represent seems to be a brief interlude in a lengthy story of brutality and stupidity (as we see supposed progress revert back to who knows when with Trump in charge), I wouldn't expect to run into Noam Chomsky or Professor Wolff or Simone de Beauvoir as the typical inhabitant of another planet like the earth or even very many creatures who are in any way worthy of admiration.

Tom Cathcart said...

What is going on on the 4th rock from the sun? Isn't that Mars? : )

Robert Paul Wolff said...

Good grief. I think you are right. So much for TV references! Rats.

Paul B said...

If they're there, they don't want nothing to do with us. Believe me.

s. wallerstein said...

Maybe they have the mentality of a Trump voter or a of Ted Cruz voter or a of Le Pen voter or of those who don't vote, but get drunk and break car windshields after football games.

Why do people always imagine that intelligent life on other planets is either especially wise or especially evil?

Robert Paul Wolff said...

Because all science fiction is projection, not exploration.

s. wallerstein said...

I guess that's why science fiction is a minor genre. There's no Anna Karenina, no
Oresteia, no King Lear, no Crime and Punishment, no Middlemarch in science fiction.