Philosophy

An open question to me is whether the anti-liberals of both left and right are a noisy minority only or a numerous and well-entrenched many. We don’t have good demographics yet. From the reasonable left, Helen Pluckrose here offers her assessment and a strategy.

Remember who said this? “Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the state? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the

I’m in Texas for the Young Americans for Liberty conference, along with several high-profile speakers such as Ron Paul, Dave Rubin, and Cliff Maloney, in the middle of what is already a high-energy event. My afternoon talk on how younger socialists frame their thinking — and so how best to engage with them — is

Jason Brennan, a younger philosopher at Georgetown, has taken occasional swipes at me on Facebook and other forums. The last time he did so, I responded publicly, which led to some back and forth argument. Not happy with the direction of the discussion, Brennan then deleted the entire thread. So this time I’m posting his

During my SoHo Forum debate with Thaddeus Russell in New York, I offered to send sources for the quotations I used. My claims were that philosophy had fallen into an unusually skeptical place in the middle of the 20th century, and that the first-generation postmodernists absorbed and applied that skepticism. Thanks to the debate audience

For use in my courses, additions to my Texts in Philosophy page. Condorcet, “Reflections on Negro Slavery” (1781). Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” Chapter 7 of The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1991). W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951). James Rachels, “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism” (1999). Max Shulman, “Love Is