Here is an interesting article by Laura Miller in Salon about Obama’s refreshingly broad interest in reading, including the following observation: Obama himself went through a period of “devouring” the work of Nietzsche while living in New York. It’s difficult to say what Obama might have absorbed from the German philosopher, mostly because Nietzsche himself… Continue reading

Mike has created the perfect image to go on our übermenschen t-shirts, mugs, etc: Continue reading

(That’s Supreme Court Of The United States). Apropos of the discussion over at usuphilosophy.com, here is a NYT review of the decisions handed down over the last term. A leftish-leaning president cannot come fast enough! (There aren’t any genuine leftists in the field; we’re limited to extreme-right, not-so-extreme right, and drifting from time to time… Continue reading

… sure hurts. On Sunday I joined Darrick, Tim, and Janet for a bike ride from Franklin, ID to the summit of Immigration Canyon. Turned out to be about 72 miles round trip, with 4400 feet of climbing in all. I’m proud to say I made it to the top — the hardest ride I’ve… Continue reading

Watch it here. And it will teach you to love classical music, even if you already do. Continue reading

Just returned from a Liberty Fund conference in Indianapolis. The topic was religion, freedom of speech, and politics in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. These folks really know how to run a show. Three 1.5-hour sessions in the morning, lunch, 4-hour down-time, a fourth session, cocktails, dinner, cocktails. Repeat. Discussion was at a consistently high level, with… Continue reading

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Leslak Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial, pp. 135-6: “My general attitude may be thus expressed: What philosophy is about is not Truth. Philosophy can never discover any universally admissible truths; and if a philosopher happened to have made a genuine contribution to science (one thinks, say, of the mathematical works of Descartes, Leibniz, or Pascal),… Continue reading

After the last post on incommensurability, Mike provided a link to a more theoretical discussion of Lakatos’s and MacIntyre’s objections to Kuhn. In my opinion, the linked article is too abstract to provide any guidance. The author favors MacIntyre’s idea that a scientist moves from one paradigm to another when the old paradigm fails to… Continue reading

T. P. M. Barnett’s take on the need for Blackwater-type companies here, along with a link to a NYT article. What I find interesting is his remark that Blackwater is today’s Pinkerton’s. Continue reading

I learned this lesson intellectually some time ago, but it was driven home to me over the last week: philosophers with different paradigms will find no central question, no decisive claim, that will provide an objective ruling in favor of one paradigm or the other. The lesson was taught most famously by Thomas Kuhn in… Continue reading

… in southern Utah: Continue reading

I’m going to assume that if some kind of contemporary pantheism is plausible, then it has to have more going for it than merely intellectual or emotional support. What I mean is this. If the only reason you have for being a pantheist is that you can’t think of reality except as a single unified… Continue reading

Lately I have been thinking about Spinoza’s attitude toward God. Many contemporary scholars put Spinoza’s metaphysics in the center of his vision: he thinks there is one substance, and all particular things are expressions of its unchanging essence. That one thing can be called “God,” since it has many of the core features attributed to… Continue reading

What is it to be poor? A first answer might be along the lines of “Not having much money.” But money is just a measurement of wealth or poverty, and not a very meaningful one. Imagine someone who doesn’t have any money or property, but society feeds them and houses them and lets them borrow… Continue reading

This situation is sickening. 200k dead, maybe 300k; surely more if no one gets in there soon. A BBC interview today with a UN spokesperson revealed that the UN people cannot even get hold of the Burmese leaders on the telephone — no one picks up! Not even an answering machine. The UN says access… Continue reading

Last fall I was teaching a big class surveying the humanities. At some point we came to the topic of democracy, and I wanted to express the idea that democracy can be something more than merely the notion of “majority rules.” “How many of you listen to jazz?” I asked. Two or three hands went… Continue reading

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.” NYT article here. Continue reading

Over on usuphilosophy.com (another blog I manage), an interesting discussion came up over whether blogs are useful for philosophical discussions. One contributor doesn’t think so, for the following line of reasoning (in my words, not his): A philosophical discussion requires (1) a large overlap of agreement, (2) a focus on a particular unresolved question, with… Continue reading

The Economist has an interesting essay here about the future of American “exceptionalism” (the way America takes its global role as special). The discussion is prompted by a book: Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation, edited by Peter Schuck and James Q. Wilson. The question is whether America will move past Bush’s own… Continue reading

What is life like when all effective law enforcement breaks down? Hobbes had an answer: life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. And all empirical evidence suggests he was right. When the police go on holiday, the nasties come out to play. Hobbes then set himself the task of explaining why it is that… Continue reading

Thanks for all the comments in the “Philosophy 2.0” post — they are really helping to give form to the sludge in my mind! I think the credibility problem (raised in the comments) has less to do with the label “philosophy” and more to do with “academic” or “professional.” Generally, when I tell folks I… Continue reading

You might sort out two different kinds of important change. The first kind is the sort of change that happens all the time – perennial change. You are born. You grow. You get sick. You get better. Empires rise. Empires fall. Friends come. Friends go. These are the sorts of changes, along with a few… Continue reading

In his new book, “The Post-American World,” Mr. Zakaria writes that America remains a politico-military superpower, but “in every other dimension — industrial, financial, educational, social, cultural — the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance.” With the rise of China, India and other emerging markets, with economic growth sweeping much of… Continue reading

I was banging along with my thoughts about the new global changes (I really need a new term for this; “the coming revolutions”? … “new world order” (barf)? … “Philosophy 2.0”? That I like!), and I asked myself, “Self, what role will religion play throughout these massive changes?” And Self answered, “Religion will play the… Continue reading