Why is it that some truths have to be learned over and over and over again? I suppose it’s because they’re just too hard to believe. I learned about fifteen years ago that many of the people I work with… Read More ›
Social and Political Philosophy
THE HAIDT HYPOTHESIS
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, quite convincingly, that a university can dedicate itself to the search for truth, or to the promotion of social justice, but not both. Truth and justice are seldom about the same thing. But when… Read More ›
THINGS YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW
We all have things we’re better off not knowing. I don’t want to know how my meat gets from field to supermarket. Others don’t want to know just how fair Fair Trade coffee really isn’t. And I’m betting you don’t… Read More ›
TRUMP, VOLTAIRE, AND EDMUND BURKE
In real estate it all comes down to location, location, location. In comedy it’s all about timing. Put the two together and that’s all that can be said about one’s own take on the world. From the here and now,… Read More ›
AN ALIEN PERSPECTIVE
Three score and eight years ago I landed on this planet, but I think it might have been from another one. I say this because I understand so little of why humans think as they do, and they seem to… Read More ›
THINGS THAT DON’T BEAR THINKING ABOUT
There are certain thought experiments that ought not to be performed. Here’s one: Does the visceral reaction we all have about the Shoah – and by ‘all’ I mean we Jews and you Gentiles alike – have a best-before date?… Read More ›
MONIKA’S MOM AND PIUS XII
Monika Schaefer, a Jasper, Alberta woman, and daughter of post-war German immigrants, is currently in a German prison awaiting trial for Holocaust denial, a criminal offense in that and several other European countries, though not in Canada. The charge was… Read More ›
THE MIGRANT DILEMMA
By a human right, as distinct from a civil right, is meant, presumably, one one has independently of the polity to which she happens to belong. But a human right does not extend between sovereign jurisdictions. By this I mean… Read More ›
PEOPLE SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS
Correlation is not causation. Yes it is. In fact that’s all it is. Isn’t that exactly what Hume showed us? You can’t see a cause, you can only infer it. And you can only infer it from a correlation. Sheesh!… Read More ›
JURAL NULLIFICATION
What’s doing the work in justifying some political arrangement we’ve made is not whatever the official justification might be – as, for example, in the preamble to the Second Amendment to the American Constitution – but rather that in virtue… Read More ›
Paulosophical Vimplications 