Two Proposals to Foster Autonomy, Renew Democracy and Exit Post-Truth Politics
By: Marco Senatore In a world where money is the only universal means of exchange, how different would society be if racists had economic incentives to embrace human rights, and the average citizen...
View ArticleAll Generalizations are False. Including this One
By: Anurup Doshi Racial profiling techniques have been at the heart of debates about crime-fighting for a very long time. The application of such techniques has generally been followed by accounts of...
View ArticleTrump’s Banality of Evil
By: Jared Marcel Pollen What does fascism smell like? It’s a question the late Christopher Hitchens used to ask, and one that’s worth revisiting. In 1945 it might have smelled like Zyklon B, whose...
View ArticlePenelope’s Choice
By: Michael Grenke The Odyssey’s Penelope is a Thinker, a person who is effective in facing her world and its problems by thinking her way out of them. She is, perhaps, even more of a thinker than her...
View ArticleThe Libertarian Error
By: Richard Oxenberg I. Introduction As Congress gears up for another round of massive tax cuts whose benefits will primarily go to the wealthiest, it might be worthwhile to consider the underlying...
View ArticleHarvey Weinstein and the Aims and Structure of Hollywood
Howl of the Day: Oct 13, 2017 Political scientist Corey Robin has an interesting take on the current Harvey Weinstein debacle. Robin observes that power relationships leave little room for morality: In...
View ArticleJohn Dewey and Art
By: Alaina Hammond John Dewey (1859-1952) was perhaps the leading educational philosopher of the early twentieth century, and viewed humanity as a creative force when interacting with its environment....
View ArticleOn Forcing Your Religion via Canada’s Transgender Rights Bill
By using the force of law to require others to use preferred pronouns when they disagree with those pronouns, you are in effect pushing your religion onto those others.
View ArticleWhy Computers are not Intelligent: An Argument
By: Richard Oxenberg I. Two Positions The strong AI advocate who wants to defend the position that the human mind is like a computer often waffles between two points of view that are never clearly...
View ArticleDeconstructing Karl Popper’s Paradox of Intolerance
Tolerance is not a cure for racism or sexism. It’s only a bandage masks the underlying tensions. Instead of tolerance give me respect. See me as your equal, just another human being.
View ArticleCanada’s Transgender Rights Bill is incoherent—and that’s a concern
By: Hendrik van der Breggen Canada’s Bill C16, a.k.a. Transgender Rights Bill, attempts to add gender identity and expression to human rights and hate-crime laws. Below I argue (with Jordan B....
View ArticlePerfect Storm
By: Hendrik van der Breggen I think our culture is facing a convergence of three popular philosophical theses which threatens to undo us. I’ll set out the three theses and then I’ll set out the storm....
View ArticleDoes the Conservative Brand Need a Reset?
Do American Conservatives--and more specifically Republicans--need a rebrand to distance themselves from Trump.
View ArticleThe Woman Question in Plato’s Republic
Mary Townsend, the author of The Woman Question in Plato’s Republic, discusses philosopher-queens, Socrates' radical solution to the question of women's place in society.
View Article“To Art Its Freedom”: Right-Wing Arts Policy in the New Austria
Art can be a challenge to power, or be power’s instrument. Sometimes it can even end up being both. This last is what happened recently in Austria, where a new, right-wing government has adopted the...
View ArticleThe Malaise of Liberalism
Liberals need to be able to answer the question: Why liberalism today? What kind of life does liberalism help to enable, and why is it desirable?
View ArticleTrump & the Politics of Conscience
A politician should enter office saying, “we will not compromise on this, this, and this,” only to find themselves, by force of circumstance and political education, compromising on many of them. To be...
View ArticleTolerance
“Be tolerant” is today’s oft-heard moral imperative. This principle of tolerance sounds good, but careful thinkers should ask: Is it sound?
View ArticleOn the Biblical God: A Brief ‘Transreligious’ Reflection
The God of the Bible – or, better, God as he is literally depicted in the Bible – does not exist. The evidence for this is overwhelming. Perhaps the most telling is, simply, that if such an entity...
View ArticleWhich Way, Kenya: Presidential, Parliamentary, or Hybrid System of Government?
The recent proposal to reform the constitutional framework in Kenya with the introduction of a one-term ceremonial president and creation of an executive Prime Minister raises the question about...
View Article