During a fun (and long) question-and-answer session after a lecture at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania — some of us were still going strong after three hours — I was asked my view on the origins of the Enlightenment. The first questioner noted that Jordan Peterson had spoken at Lafayette the year before and had argued […]
A difference with Jordan Peterson on Enlightenment foundations Read More »
Audio links: iTunes Stitcher YouTube Topics: The “Dark” Ages or The “Brilliant” Ages? // Chronology // Was there a Dark Age? // Why did the activity pick up after the year 1000? // Roger Bacon and Thomas Aquinas // Why is the debate significant today? // The verdict on Christianity // The verdict on modernity and the Enlightenment // Why
Conservatives: Get Over the Dark Ages [Open College series] Read More »
Defeating an enemy such as politicized Islam is a multi-front battle—police, military, diplomatic, cultural, and philosophical. Any fight is triggered by short-term, local disagreements. But long-term, generalized conflicts are always about abstract principles in collision. As with neo-Nazis, Communist revolutionaries, violent environmentalists, bomb-the-government anarchists, and others—our conflicts with them are intellectual in origin. Terrorism is
How to Tame Religious Terrorists [Good Life series] Read More »
[We are reading The Fountainhead this week in my Introduction to Philosophy course, so this is a re-post for new readers this semester.] The ethics of altruism holds that others are the standard of value. One is good to the extent one puts the interests of other first, acts to achieve their interests, and when
Toohey’s five strategies of altruism [repost] Read More »