His life of crime started early. “Stalin’s Bank Robbery of 1907: A Tale of Blood and Murder.” Speaking of bank robbers, Bonnie and Clyde were killed by police on this day in 1934. Too bad the Tiflis police weren’t as successful in 1907.
Josef Stalin, bank robber Read More »
My concluding video lecture on abstracting the principles in the business ethics cases we’ve covered so far: Minimum Wages, Rent Control, the Tragedy of the Commons, Laetrile (pharmaceuticals), and the F.C.C.’s “Fairness Doctrine” (telecomm). This lecture is part of the Business Ethics Cases series. Contents: Summary abstraction: comparing the cases. Supplement: Summary chart. Go to
Conclusion: abstracting the principles [Business Ethics Cases series] Read More »
From May 23-25, I’ll be participating in a colloquium on “Virtues and Entrepreneurship,” organized by Sweden’s Ratio Institute. My talk will be an extension of the theme of my “What Business Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship,” arguing that the success traits of entrepreneurship map onto an updated Aristotelian virtue set. The conference will include keynote
Upcoming talk in Stockholm Read More »
This is the fifth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube] [74 minutes total] Marx and waiting for Godot [mp3] [YouTube] Three failed predictions [mp3] [YouTube] Socialism needs an aristocracy: Lenin, Mao, and the lesson of the German Social
The Crisis of Socialism [EP audiobook] Read More »
Robert Salvino (Economics, Coastal Carolina University) spoke at Rockford College on “Entrepreneurship and Public Policy.” In this follow-up interview, Salvino and I discuss entrepreneurial success traits, the institutional framework within which entrepreneurship best flourishes, the relative success of market-friendly versus government-chosen entrepreneurship policies (including examples such as Google, Apple, Solyndra, etc.), the effect of employer-provided
Interview with Robert Salvino Read More »
This is the fourth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes] From postmodern epistemology to postmodern politics [mp3] [YouTube] The argument of the next three chapters [mp3] [YouTube] Responding to socialism’s crisis of theory and evidence [mp3]
The Climate of Collectivism [EP audiobook] Read More »
Philosophers David Bourget & David J. Chalmers have a paper forthcoming in Philosophical Studies that presents the results of a survey of 1,972 contemporary philosophers, most of them in the Anglo-American world. The survey’s main results on thirty issues: 1. A priori knowledge: yes 71.1%; no 18.4%; other 10.5%. 2. Abstract objects: Platonism 39.3%; nominalism
What philosophers believe today Read More »
In an earlier post on Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, I offered two explanations for why the 1848 Marx held that communism could only come about by violent revolution. In response to that post, Tibor Machan pointed me to this passage from an 1872 speech Marx gave in Amsterdam: “We are aware of the
More on Marx and violent revolution Read More »