“Go back to the ovens!” shouted at Jews at a university in Canada, in the Toronto borough in which I was born. Quick thoughts: 1. Most Canadians are great people and will be appalled at this sub-human display. 2. The hostility was so bad that politicians from *both* sides of the major divide in Canadian
“Go back to the ovens!” shouted at Jews at a university in Canada Read More »
* An angry atheist shows up at a Catholic hospital needing treatment. * A sexist says he prefers not to have a woman doctor. * A surgeon realizes that his patient is a suspected pedophile. Medical ethics for professionals: Does one treat even blasphemers, misogynists, and perverts to the best of one’s abilities? And the
Should racists get medical care? Read More »
“I devoutly believe,” the philosopher William James said, “in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium.” What does that require of us as citizens? That we feel “conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army …” [emphasis in the original].
Wm. James on socialism and slavery Read More »
“The young man who has drunk for the first time from that spring is as happy as if he had found a treasure of wisdom; he is positively enraptured. He will pick up any discourse, draw all its ideas together to make them into one, then take them apart and pull them to pieces. He
On falling in love with philosophy — quotation from Plato Read More »
Read this WSJ article reporting on Attorney-General Bob Barr’s speech at the University of Notre Dame, and then ask: Are these the premises shared by both left and right? 1. People need morality. 2. Morality can come only from either Church or State. The current right then argues that the government’s doing a bad job,
Either God or the State?? Read More »
A cliché response to calls for a fully free society: But who will build the roads?!? Road networks seem an obvious case where only governments can (a) envision an infrastructure project of national scope, (b) tax millions of people to get the capital needed, and (c) compel or confiscate land from recalcitrant owners to put
Friedrich Engels answers: Who will build the roads? Read More »
Joanna and her son had a rough relationship, and both spoke their minds. From a letter she wrote to young Arthur Schopenhauer toward the end of 1807: Source is here. More letters from his parents here.
Letters from Schopenhauer’s parents Read More »
A New Yorker article explains “Why thinkers of every political persuasion keep finding inspiration in the philosopher.” That’s a long way to come for a philosopher who in his lifetime was dismissed as a non-philosopher by the official philosophers of the day. Biographer Marianne Cowen reports that Nietzsche’s colleagues told their students not to take
Nietzsche’s astonishing breadth of influence Read More »