Tomorrow morning I’ll be on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s “The Current” radio program, which according to its website is “Canada’s Most Listened-to Radio Program.” Our topic is whether power corrupts. The journalistic context is the recent FIFA scandal, scandals in the Canadian Senate, and the ongoing scandals in politics, business, and so on around the
CBC discussion of corruption and power Read More »
To reason is to integrate perceptual evidence into concepts, propositions, and theories. By contrast, what is faith? Below are seven definitions of faith. The definitions are in my words, but they are taken from my readings of seven philosophers of religion: William James, Søren Kierkegaard, C. S. Lewis, George H. Smith, Basil Mitchell, R. M.
What Is Faith? Seven definitions Read More »
Three men who died recently are brought before the throne of God and told that they may each have one wish. The Briton asks for an end to war. The American asks for an end to hunger. The Russian smiles slyly and says, “In my village, I have a neighbor who has a cow. I
A Russian joke about petty envy Read More »
The gall of some people. Apparently Malcolm Gladwell has gone after John Paulson for giving $400 million to Harvard University. It takes a special kind of immorality to feel comfortable doing any of the following: (a) bossily telling other people how to spend their own money, (b) telling them how to spend their philanthropic dollars,
On Gladwell’s chastising Paulson Read More »
For use in my courses, additions to my Texts in Philosophy page. All files are PDFs. “Arachne and Athena.” James Buchanan, “Public Choice: Politics without Romance,” Policy Magazine (2003). Martin Heidegger, “Reunion Speech” (1934). HTML version here. Heinrich Himmler, “Speech at Posen” (1943). John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926). HTML version here. John
Texts in Philosophy — early 2015 additions Read More »
I was struck by this reflection on the history of philosophy, made by Adolf Hitler, who read voraciously when young and especially during his prison time in the 1920s: “In the Great Hall of the Linz Library are the busts of Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the greatest of our thinkers, in comparison with whom the
On Hitler’s degree of intellectualism Read More »
Will Altman: “It is perfectly natural to feel loyalty to the thinker who set you to thinking, to the writer whose writings first made you a careful and devoted reader, and whose example inspired your own way of life as a philosopher.” Altman’s words appear in the concluding chapter of his book on Martin Heidegger,
Loyalty to your first great intellectual love Read More »
[I wrote the following in 1999 in response to several people who wrote to me with objections to my and others’ use of The Will to Power in interpreting Nietzsche.] Dear [ ]: Every word in The Will to Power was written by Nietzsche in his notebooks of 1883-1888. Some of the notes were his
On the legitimacy of Nietzsche’s *The Will to Power* Read More »