Readit NewsStoicism had a lot going for it, but it was also full of a lot of crazy nonsense - there's a reason you've never met a Stoic who was fully on board with Stoic natural philosophy or "physics." The logic eventually made a comeback (via Frege, possibly due to plagiarism!), and the virtue ethics got absorbed into Christian moral philosophy by about the 13th century (by way of neo-platonists who influenced Dominican philosopher theologians like Aquinas). It's not surprising that it ran out of steam.
And the lawyer would be able to present hundreds of cases covering billions of dollars of federal grants, cancelled since Trump issued EO 14151 setting in black and white the Administration's broad crusade against funding anything with contact with DEI and declaring the DEI prohibition a policy for all federal grants and contracts, under different grant programs, many of which were originally awarded before Trump came back to office and which would not have had DEI terms in the original grant language. They'd also be able to point out that some of the cancellations had been litigated to the Supreme Court and allowed, other clawbacks had been struck down by lower courts and were still in appeals.
https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...
But if the concern is about the provision allowing NSF to claw back funds that have been spent by the organization then the question remains: has that happened? Right now if you search for terms related to NSF clawbacks, most of the top results refer to the PSF's statement or forum discussions about it (like this one). I can't find any instances of a federal clawback related to DEI. If that had happened I would assume that the response from the awardee would have been noisy.
Interestingly, they may get more in donations than they would have from this grant, so maybe that needs to be including in the risk estimate as well...
(Emphasis mine)
I'm curious if any lawyer folks could weigh in as to whether this language means that the entire sentence requires the mentioned programs to be "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws." If so, one might argue that a "DEI program" was not in violation of a Federal anti-discrimination law.
Obviously no one would want to have to go to court and this likely would be an unacceptable risk.
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
A "prohibited boycott" is apparently a legal term aimed specifically at boycotting Israel/Israeli companies, so unless PSF intended to violate federal law or do an Israel boycott, they probably weren't at risk. They mention they talked to other nonprofits, but don't mention talking to their lawyers. I would hope they did consult counsel, because it would be a shame to turn down that much money solely on the basis of word of mouth from non-attorneys.
Heraclitus was before Parmenides and said that everything changes. Parmenides said that nothing changes, and then the atomists, most prominently Democritus, synthesised these two points of view by saying that there are atoms which don't change, but all apparent change is explained by the relative motions of the different basic atoms. Plato was influenced by all of these. But I would say the theory of forms accounts more for constancy or regularity more than change, no?
Btw, the central concept of Parmenides' philosophy is always translated as "Being", but I couldn't find the original Greek word. It isn't "ousia"?
I'm not sure about Plato, but the Aristotelian analysis is something like this: every thing that exists has the potential to exist in certain ways and not others, and it's said that the thing is "in potency" to exist in those potential ways. When something could exist in a certain way but right now doesn't, that's called a "privation." And the ways that the thing currently does exist are the "form" of the thing. So a substance changes when it goes from being in potency to being actual, and it does that by losing a privation. Aquinas follows Aristotle in giving the example: "For example, when a statue is made from bronze, the bronze which is in potency to the form of the statue is the matter; the shapeless or undisposed something is the privation; and the shape because of which it is called a statue is the form." Incidentally, Aquinas's short On the Principles of Nature (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~DePrinNat) is a good overview of this theory, which is spread all over Aristotle (in the Categories, the Physics, and the Metaphysics).
As far as οὐσία is concerned, I think this is the complete Greek for Parmenides's poem: http://philoctetes.free.fr/parmenidesunicode.htm. In the places where that translation uses "being" you get slightly different words like γενέσθαι (to come into a new state of being) or εἶναι (just the infinitive "to be"). And looking at the definition of οὐσία (https://lsj.gr/wiki/%CE%BF%E1%BD%90%CF%83%CE%AF%CE%B1) it looks like most of the uses of that term specifically come well after Parmenides.
"Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them."
Tao is observing the consequences of a society that increasingly has abandoned subsidiarity as an operating principle. (I had hoped that crypto might be able to bring subsidiarity back, but so far the opposite has happened in practice.)