Author Archives

I'm a philosophy professor at the University of Lethbridge in Southern Alberta, Canada. I specialize in philosophy of war, game theory, contractarianism, and theodicy (the Problem of Evil). I am bald, fat, and ugly, but my wife loves me, so I don't care.

• THE LIBERAL CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM

  By paulosophicalvimplications on October 4, 2026 • ( 0 )

  There’s a pattern to public misperception. Arrangements that are very local are often taken to be universal, and those that are quite recent are taken to have always been. A case in point – I won’t say an obvious case… Read More ›

• FUN WITH QUANTIFIERS

  By paulosophicalvimplications on October 2, 2026 • ( 0 )

  Syntactically, Black Lives Matter is a complete sentence in English, but it’s only (what Rudolf Carnap has called) a pseudo-sentence. It’s not a real sentence because mattering is a two-place relation. If something is to matter, it has to matter… Read More ›

• WHY PHILOSOPHY MATTERS

  By paulosophicalvimplications on October 2, 2026 • ( 0 )

  When people say, “The time has come to …”, what they’re implying is that until now it hadn’t. Come, that is. So apparently sexual violence was okay until this morning. The rote politician response to a tragedy is, “Our hearts… Read More ›

• MY RACIST BONA FIDES

  By paulosophicalvimplications on September 24, 2026 • ( 0 )

  If I’m going to be a racist – and yer damn rights I am! – I want to establish my bona fides. This is going to take some work. So bear with me. To start, full disclosure: Back in the… Read More ›

• MY WIFE IS SCARY

  By paulosophicalvimplications on September 21, 2026 • ( 1 )

  My wife is an inveterate researcher. She hears about something and then can’t stop herself from heading head down down the rabbit hole. This morning it was broody hens. Huh? Why? Because she immediately had a suspicion that the phenomenon… Read More ›

• UKRAINE AND IRAN

  By paulosophicalvimplications on September 21, 2026 • ( 0 )

  The offensive with which the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, would have ended the matter had the attack not petered out within days. Was it poor planning by the Russian command, or pure brilliance by the… Read More ›

• A SMALL VICTORY, BUT A VICTORY NONETHELESS

  By paulosophicalvimplications on September 18, 2026 • ( 0 )

  In 2021, Dr. Frances Widdowson was fired from Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, for rather impolitically criticising the indigenisation of the university. She sued for wrongful dismissal, and five years later she won, though such victories tend to be… Read More ›

• FROM THE MINDLESS MANTRA FILES: DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH

  By paulosophicalvimplications on September 18, 2026 • ( 0 )

  Diversity is our strength. Well yeah, if we’re talking about an evolutionary strategy for the perdurance of a species. And yeah, to some extent if we’re talking about the perdurance of a polity. We need some people who are good… Read More ›

• WHITE SUPREMACY REINTERPRETED

  By paulosophicalvimplications on September 18, 2026 • ( 0 )

  Hate speech and hate crime have nothing to do with hate. So since words no longer have to mean what they intuitively do, let’s take a look at white supremacy. Does a white supremacist have to believe that whites are… Read More ›

• PLUS C’EST LA MEME CHOSE

  By paulosophicalvimplications on September 18, 2026 • ( 0 )

  First came the bomb. Then came the power plant. So if ever there was a case of beating swords into plowshares … But usually it’s the other way around. Is that what the Chicken Little-ers are worried about? That AI… Read More ›