Kant According to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the moral evaluation of our actions has nothing to do with our feelings, inclinations, and selfish preferences. It also has nothing to do with the actual consequences of our acts. Rather, it is a… Read more ›
Here is a formal presentation of Sartre’s argument for human freedom by Jeffrey Gordon in the book Just the Arguments (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011): P1: In order for a given state of affairs deterministically to cause a human action, the causal efficacy… Read more ›
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for nine minutes and twenty nine seconds while he was lying face down handcuffed on the street. His death, and many other… Read more ›
Here are some notes on Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1905-1980) Being and Nothingness that continue, on some level, to apply to the world around me more than any other set of philosophical propositions. Sartre argued freedom is a defining characteristic of human… Read more ›
It is a great misfortune and embarrassment that the history of Western philosophy has little to say about why racism—the belief that different races have different qualities and abilities, and that some races are inherently superior or inferior—occurs. One of… Read more ›
When it comes to sexual morality many hold the liberal view that consent between adults is everything. Once we have consenting adults then sexual activity is moral. Violations of consent are immoral. This short and entertaining video presents a helpful… Read more ›
Martha Nussbaum, in her book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, 2011), observes that “The humanities and the arts are being cut away, in both primary/secondary and college/university education, in virtually every nation of the world. Seen… Read more ›
In the last post (go here) we saw what President Biden meant by unity in his inauguration speech, how his call for unity led to widespread criticism, and how there is evidence of Americans seeing each other as bad people… Read more ›
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for nine minutes and twenty nine seconds while he was lying face down handcuffed on the street. His death, and many other… Read more ›
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for nine minutes and twenty nine seconds while he was lying face down handcuffed on the street. His death, and many other… Read more ›
Determinism is the view that, given the laws of nature, all events are the necessary effects of previous events. When applying this to systems, one can say that a system is deterministic if there is only one way the system… Read more ›
R.D. Laing In his book The Divided Self (Penguin: 1969) the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927-1989) attempts to existentially and phenomenologically, rather than biologically and clinically, understand “the schizoid individual” or “an individual the totality of whose experience is split… Read more ›
Lloyd Alexander Lloyd Alexander (1924-2007) was one the greatest authors of novels for young people. His five book series Chronicles of Prydain is one of the most entertaining and profound fantasy epics of all time. Before becoming an author of… Read more ›
In Plato’s Symposium we learn that love is the desire for the continued possession of the Good (206a-b) and that the Good is ultimately eternal Being that is timeless and always “the same in every way” (208b). Thus the goal… Read more ›
René Descartes had three fundamental goals in his philosophy: (1) he wanted to find something certain—a goal which flows from his modern agenda to sweep away the mistakes of the past and find a new method to reach the truth… Read more ›