[I use Ayn Rand’s classic The Fountainhead in my Introduction to Philosophy course, analyzing the five major characters as moral-philosophical types. Here is a digest of the novel’s brilliant-manipulator villain, Ellsworth Toohey.] The ethics of altruism holds that others are the standard of value. One is good to the extent one puts the interests of […]
Ellsworth Toohey’s five strategies of altruism [repost] Read More »
James Orr is professor at Cambridge University, England. In conservative philosophical lineage, Orr is very much in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Roger Scruton. Prof. Orr and I did a one-hour oral debate in London last year, and a more detailed three-round written debate between us has been submitted for formal publication. Here is
James Orr and J.D. Vance Read More »
John Stuart Mill uses his crystal ball to predict our circumstance — and/or he learned from history: “When nobody, or only some small fraction, feels the degree of interest in the general affairs of the State necessary to the formation of public opinion, the electors seldom make any use of the right of suffrage but
John Stuart Mill on government capture Read More »
I did not know this about Priestley’s significance to two of the great American founding fathers: “In the 165 letters that passed between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the name Benjamin Franklin is mentioned five times, George Washington three times, Alexander Hamilton twice — and Joseph Priestley, a foreign immigrant, is cited no fewer than
Joseph Priestley’s significance Read More »
John Dewey was one of the top two most influential philosophers of education in the twentieth century. Maria Montessori was the other. Dewey’s influence has been most strongly felt in the American public school system. In America, Montessori’s influence has mostly been grassroots and in privately funded schools. Montessori’s approach is highly individualistic and individualized.
John Dewey on education as socialization Read More »
Episode 50 in my Open College with Dr. Stephen Hicks podcast series. Many rejections of objectivity assume from the outset an impossible standard for humans to achieve. Don’t do that. “It’s often said that we live in a ‘post-truth’ age, that nothing can be known with any certainty, and that we must give up notions
Objectivity for Actual Human Beings | Open College No. 50 | Stephen Hicks Read More »
Philosopher David Kelley (Ph.D., Princeton) is author of The Evidence of the Senses, A Realist Theory of Perception (LSU, 1986), a work on foundational issues in epistemology, and The Art of Reasoning: An Introduction to Logic (W.W. Norton, 1st edition 1990, 5th edition 2020), a widely used textbook. He has published a new essay, “Concepts
David Kelley new essay on Concepts, Propositions, and Truth Read More »
My video lecture on the Federal Communications Commission’s controversial “Fairness Doctrine,” part of the Business Ethics Cases series. Contents:1. The early days of radio and a tragedy of the commons.2. What is fairness? Two competing answers.3. The argument for the “Fairness Doctrine.”4. The argument against the “Fairness Doctrine.”5. Related issues: whether politics is special, whether
Telecommunications — the FCC’s ‘Fairness Doctrine’ [Business Ethics Cases series] Read More »