A Con Law Classroom in Orange County By Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D. Professor, you have this ability to make both sides sound plausible and …good. Like, I can’t tell which side you’re seriously on. [The professor smiled and then furrowed his brow, and gently grunted. It was a gentle grunt. His eye sparkled, like Santa].… Read more »
Just after the Election of 2016 By Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D. “And now I’m going to tell you about a recent Logic class and Donald Trump. The past week I had students present their papers on fallacies they found in the media and popular culture. They didn’t realize I was going to have them present… Read more »
January 11, 1989 My fellow Americans: This is the 34th time I’ll speak to you from the Oval Office and the last. We’ve been together 8 years now, and soon it’ll be time for me to go. But before I do, I wanted to share some thoughts, some of which I’ve been saving for a… Read more »
Friends of mine selling their home hosted a final small get together with close friends. It was a convenient reason to get together and also to put on display, not only the final results of a lot of hard work they were proud of but also to advertise the contractors they’d used, in an effort… Read more »
A good friend of mine and I were talking the other day and he began telling me about his daughter’s struggle with the tension of feeling compelled, on the one hand, to become a missionary, while feeling compelled on the other hand to become an activist. I was struck by my friend’s very economic and… Read more »
Most people think they are good people, who believe good things for good reasons. Even bad people might believe this most sincerely. Because people disagree on “the good”, it means that – logically – they can’t all be right. It can’t be the case that murder is both acceptable and unacceptable, just like it cannot… Read more »
I’m a people person and averse to confrontation…until something happens that doesn’t make sense to me. I begin to ask questions and evaluate explanations. When explanations don’t make sense, I default to the uncommon position of common sense: think for yourself, make a conclusion, act accordingly. So I tend to go along when it makes… Read more »
Western culture operates according scientism, which is to say we rely on “science” to answer any and all questions. This is short sighted to say the least. Science is unable to answer many questions, most notably the question, “What is science?” The facts discovered by science are never problematic. It is the philosophical conclusions and… Read more »
Teaching the Kids to Listen Well By Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D. Here’s a funny story: A student asked to make up a quiz he missed due to his absence . He said he lost his keys. I referred him to the syllabus, which says no matter what the reason for the absence , quizzes aren’t… Read more »
A Classroom in Lost Angeles By Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D. From Facebook , Monday March 14, 2014 at 5:41 pm PST “Feel free to twit this lecture out on your Tweeter accounts,” I said, making a combination of bird-chirp noises with gastro-intestinal/sheep bleating sounds. [Which if i may say so myself, I do perfectly after… Read more »