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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.

• DIVERSITY AND ORTHODOXY (Repost from Nov 28, 2020)

  By paulosophicalvimplications on April 13, 2023 • ( 1 )

  Scene One: Five friends walk into a bar. Each is a fundamentalist pro-Life Trump-supporting Republican who’s never disagreed with the other four about anything. But one is white, another black, one brown, one yellow, and one red. Scene Two: Five … Read More ›

• NEVER RETRACT

  By paulosophicalvimplications on April 11, 2023 • ( 1 )

  The cost of saying something false or stupid is usually minor. But the cost of retraction can be bankrupting. We’ve already seen this with Dean Letts’ and Jagmeet Singh’s going off half-cocked over the Kamloops ‘revelations’. But the Linda Beardy… Read More ›

• THE BANALITY OF …

  By paulosophicalvimplications on April 10, 2023 • ( 0 )

  I’m a hypocrite. I criticise others for opining on what they merely hear-tell someone has said or written, and I’ve been doing the same vis a vis Critical Race Theory. So the other day I girded my loins and actually… Read More ›

• INTRODUCTION TO MY INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY

  By paulosophicalvimplications on April 10, 2023 • ( 0 )

  When we had to spend 24/7 defending the mouth of our cave, we didn’t have a whole lot of time to wonder about anything, save where the next predator, be it man or beast, might be readying to pounce. And… Read More ›

• WHAT GOES AROUND …

  By paulosophicalvimplications on April 9, 2023 • ( 2 )

  People like Caroline Hodes like to complain about people complaining about “the indoctrination of their children in our schools”. But school just is indoctrination. There’s no such thing as value-free education. So what she really means is she likes the… Read More ›

• YOU CAN’T TRUST YOUR FEELINGS

  By paulosophicalvimplications on April 5, 2023 • ( 3 )

  Apparently I harbour a whole lot of hate I didn’t know about. I’d have thought hatred is a sufficiently powerful emotion that I’d feel it. But the fact that I don’t feel it doesn’t mean it’s not there. For example,… Read More ›

• ATLANTIS

  By paulosophicalvimplications on April 5, 2023 • ( 0 )

  In the year 731 BCE, a flotilla of eight fishing boats, each with about 6 people, men and women, on board, set sail from a village near present-day Cadiz in southern Spain, and, by a freak anomaly of wind and… Read More ›

• THE MANDATORY EDI LETTER (Repost from Feb 13, 2022)

  By paulosophicalvimplications on April 3, 2023 • ( 10 )

  What I’ve been discovering is that the woke-ness one espouses in public, and the opinion of it one holds in private, are often two very different things. Why is this? Others may not put it as eloquently as did my… Read More ›

• UNWOKE U

  By paulosophicalvimplications on April 3, 2023 • ( 1 )

  Jonathan Haidt has argued that a university can seek truth, or it can pursue justice, but not both. He’s right about the dichotomy, but I’m not sure he’s best identified the two choices. Getting the truth is far above anyone’s… Read More ›

• FANTASIES

  By paulosophicalvimplications on April 3, 2023 • ( 1 )

  If you think about it – my advice is don’t – the lion’s share of our lives are lived not in the world but in our heads. By this I don’t mean the now banal observation that our experiences of… Read More ›