Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The case is bizarre, on a number of grounds. A New York court has sentenced the man pictured here, Raphael Golb, on misdemeanor criminal impersonation and forgery charges. If this were just another petty crook, it wouldn't be worth our notice at Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed . But this is the son of an important scholar, and the crimes were committed on behalf of the proper interpretation of certain ancient texts, the lifework of that paternal inspiration. Raphael's father, Norman Golb, is known as an advocate of the view that the Essenes had no especially close association with the Dead Sea Scrolls .  \ Why is that important? The Essenes, an ascetic sect of Judaism that disagreed firmly with both the Sadducees and the Pharisees, are mentioned by several ancient authors (Philo, Josephus, Pliny) and are widely thought to have withdrawn from the wicked world into the purer environment of Ein Gedi, near the shore of the Dead Sea. As ancient scrolls were discovered n...

Yesterday I discussed an incident from my teen years when a neighbor lady (NL) interrupted my effort to provide an impromptu exegesis of Dante's Divine Comedy. Today I'll see if I can finish that exegesis. Well, Dante was writing at a time when the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor were engaged in a struggle for power. He used the three afterlife destinations to suggest his own take.... That's when I was interrupted. I'm not sure where I would have gone from there, or how effectively, at 14: but here is my effort to finish the thought more than 40 years later. He used the three afterlife destinations to suggest his own take on the power struggle. His take, roughly, was that the Church should renounce any claim to temporal power and be a more purely spiritual organization. It could do this by making clear its subservience to the Holy Roman Emperors in temporal matters. On a related point, Dante was not happy with the behavior of the Italian city-state...