The scientific mind, according to Aristotle
One of my all-time favorite passages from Aristotle is in his Parts of Animals (Book 1, Chapter 5).
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John Stuart Mill
Haters
I’m all confused. The hot-headed Nietzsche’s startling line from his 1887 Genealogy of Morals has always stuck with me: “the truly great haters in world history have always been priests.” That’s from the First Essay, Section 7, in the context of his analysis of slave morality born of ressentiment. But now I read that, according
The purpose of the university — C. Vann Woodward quotation
At the beginning of the academic year, reprising this aspiration from C. Vann Woodward, Yale historian and author of The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), which Martin Luther King, Jr. said was “the historical bible of the Civil Rights Movement.” The purpose of the university is not to make its members feel secure, content,
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Werner Sombart on heroes versus merchants
Those of us in the democratic-republican West often find it impossible to understand how the world could go to war so often in the 20th century. We were raised in a culture that had internalized Locke, Jefferson, Mill, and others—for whom the goal of peace and respect for others’ rights to life, liberty, and property
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Zeev Sternhell on the Nazis’ pillaging of Nietzsche
Refreshing this quotation from Zeev Sternhell’s The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (Yale University Press, 2010), a scholarly study of the most disturbing intellectual trend of the modern world — the ongoing lineage of intellectuals opposed to the Enlightenment tradition of reason, naturalism, individualism, and freedom. Along the way Sternhell asks, of Nietzsche’s place in the trend, an
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The constant decline of civilization?
Reprising this series of quotations, collected over the years, on the theme of pessimism about the present in relation to the past: Plato, 360 BCE: “In that country [Egypt] arithmetical games have been invented for the use of mere children, which they learn as pleasure and amusement. I have late in life heard with amazement
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John and John on liberal psychology
Locke and Mill, that is. Locke on freedom of choice for students: “great care is to be taken, that [education] be never made as a business to him, nor he look on it as a task. We naturally, as I said, even from our cradles, love liberty, and have therefore an aversion to many things,
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Justifying liberal capitalism — flowchart
Reprising this chart which integrates the major answers to the question: What makes liberal capitalism good? The chart diagrams the positive claims about liberal capitalism by its defenders — John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others. For elaboration, see my book Liberalism Pro and
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