Nothing about money or trading or buying or selling or competition or interest or inflation or taxes or … the list goes on and on. None of it makes any sense unless people own stuff. And people own stuff if… Read More ›
philosophy
MUCH ADO ABOUT SOMETHING
Occam’s Razor advises us never to multiply entities beyond what’s needed to explain what needs explaining. Is this because the simpler explanation is more likely to be the correct one? If so, what would explain that? So no. Rather it’s… Read More ›
IT’S A LITTLE KNOWN FACT THAT …
When someone initiates a conversation with “It’s a little known fact that …”, what he typically means is that there’s something he knows, but his interlocutor probably does not. But I want to bring our attention to another use of… Read More ›
Guest Post. And now for something completely different …
Complementing an academic’s freedom to dissent is the maximal removal of impediments to her pursuit of hypotheses and matters of fact about the stuff that furnishes the universe and of the universe itself. This stuff undergirds the core investigations of… Read More ›
Guest Post: Dissoi Logoi (cf Aristotle), the Devil’s Advocate (Mill), and comments.
Guest Post by Pamela Lindsay. Way, way back in the day — a couple millennia ago — students receiving a classical education would have learned the necessity of Dissoi Logoi to constructing their arguments. That is, they’d throw themselves full… Read More ›
FLY SOUP
Man dining in a high-end French restaurant. “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.” “Mais non, Monsieur, zis iz vly zoup!” Why does it matter? Because if it’s a fly in my soup I’m entitled to an apology and dinner… Read More ›
OF VIAGRA AND MIDOL
No socialist believes the state should cover even our discretionary expenses, like dinners out; and no libertarian believes the state shouldn’t provide us with police, the courts, and national defence. But everything other than police and courts and national defence… Read More ›
INTRODUCTION TO MY INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY
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 ›
STUPIDITY DEFINED
Philosophers are in the business of either drawing distinctions or collapsing them. A case of the latter is David Hume’s observation that, all this palaver to the contrary notwithstanding, causation just is correlation. A case of the former is the… Read More ›
THE TRUE MEANING OF LIFE
In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger asked, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It’s a stupid question only in the sense that the answer is so self-evident. Of all the nigh-infinite worlds that could be, there’s only one… Read More ›
Paulosophical Vimplications 