For use in my courses, additions to my Texts in Philosophy page. Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850). Charles Darwin, “On Evolution” (1859). Darwin summarizes the evidence for evolution by natural selection. Carl Hempel, “Semmelweis and Childbed Fever” (1966). How Dr. Semmelweis discovered the cause of childbed fever. Murdoch Pencil, “Salt Passage Research: The State of […]
Texts in Philosophy — mid-2018 additions Read More »
“Why is it that skeptical and relativistic arguments have the cultural power that they now do? Why do they have that power in the humanities but not in the sciences? Why have themes of exhaustion, nihilism, and cynicism come to have the cultural dominance they do? And how can those intellectual themes coexist with a
The puzzling prominence of postmodernism [Explaining Postmodernism] Read More »
Michel Foucault said: “All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence.” And philosopher Todd May summarizes Foucault’s conclusion this way: “It is meaningless to speak in the name of—or against—Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.” For more on Foucault’s contributions to postmodernism, see p. 11 of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism from Rousseau
Michel Foucault in *Explaining Postmodernism* Read More »
Counter-Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed that in moral society, one “coalesces with all, in this each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of society’s leaders.” And: A “citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.” Further:
A Russian translation of my “The Battle for the Soul of the University is Raging” has been published by a source unknown to me. “The protesters and disrupters may be angry, but they are adults who know what they are doing. ‘Cry-bullies’ is half-right, as the tears are a tactic.” Read more here in English, Hebrew,
Russian translation of *Battle for the Soul of the University* Read More »
My Savvy Street article, “The Battle for the Soul of the University is Raging,” was translated into Hebrew by Shahar Shlush and published here. “The protesters and disrupters may be angry, but they are adults who know what they are doing. ‘Cry-bullies’ is half-right, as the tears are a tactic.”
Hebrew translation of *The Battle for the Soul of the University is Raging* Read More »
My “How to Tame Religious Terrorists” is now republished at Britain’s Church and State site: “Any fight is triggered by short-term, local disagreements. But long-term, generalized conflicts are always about abstract principles in collision. As with neo-Nazis, Communist revolutionaries, violent environmentalists, bomb-the-government anarchists and others – our conflicts with them are intellectual in origin. “Terrorism
“How to Tame Religious Terrorists” [CHURCH and STATE] Read More »
Some feminists (and pretty much everyone else, by the way) are sensitive to old-fashioned sexism. We believe that women are and can be as competent as men. But as a corrective to the historical record and the remaining elements of sexism, we celebrate stories of accomplished women and highlight that yes, indeed, a woman did
Having your feminist cake and eating it too Read More »