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Peter LosinI retired in December 2023 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, where I had worked since 1989. For many years (1992-2013) my late friend Michael L. Hall and I taught in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, College Park. We taught two courses together until he retired in 2009, and I continued for some years afterward:
Prior to coming to DC and Maryland I taught philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, the College of Charleston, and Gonzaga University. Most of my teaching and writing dealt with Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle. Some of it is available elsewhere on this website. I'm also a discographer. Since early 1995 I have maintained a website called Miles Ahead, focused on the music of Miles Davis. If you're interested in Miles Davis, especially his pre-1980s music, take a look. You'll find a discography, a session list, a query form to search the database, cover art, what's new?, a bibliography with links to other Miles Davis websites, among other things. You'll also find a separate Charlie Parker session list and a rudimentary discography. And I maintain a few other jazz-related pages that some might be interested in. My other interests you can probably infer from the links at the top of this page. The result of a consistent and total substitution of lie for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world -- and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end -- is being destroyed. (Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism," 1951) [H.G. Wells] was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them. The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves. A crude book like The Iron Heel, written nearly thirty years ago, is a truer prophecy of the future than either Brave New World or The Shape of Things to Come. If one had to choose among Wells's own contemporaries a writer who could stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil voices of power and military glory. Kipling would have understood the appeal of Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells is too sane to understand the modern world... (George Orwell, "Wells, Hitler and the World State," Horizon, August 1941) |
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