“Fact or Opinion?”: A False Dichotomy
“That’s just your opinion.” My students and my children have given vent to this phrase countless times during dinner table discussions and philosophical conversations, often in response…
“That’s just your opinion.” My students and my children have given vent to this phrase countless times during dinner table discussions and philosophical conversations, often in response…
“Stay true. Be you.” “Stay true to yourself.” “Be who you are.” “Just be yourself.” “You do you.” These slogans are part of the fundamental fabric of…
Liberal education is the distinctive educational tradition of the West; so, too, is liberty our distinctive political tradition. As Christopher Dawson observed, every society works to “enculturate”…
For the truth of knowledge is measured by the knowable object. For it is because a thing is so or is not so that a statement is…
"Spiritualism seems to me absolutely right on all its mystical side. The supernatural part of it seems to me quite natural. The incredible part of it seems…
Let me begin by citing two passages that graphically underscore the themes that I wish to consider here—the things of leisure and culture, of what is and…
Someone might say—and libertarians skeptics often do—that classes in philosophy and literature are given a quite an arbitrarily inflated value by according them credit. Do away with…
I’ve gotten several emails about this article by Joanne Lipman in the Wall Street Journal. The bottom line is that the teachers who get the best results are all about…
So here’s a funny article on the sheer silliness and passive-aggressive hostility of the jargon that dominates the worlds of management, consultants, marketing, and all that. That world, it…
One of the latest fads in the university is being “woke”: a recognition of one’s privilege and therefore the need to empathize with those groups who have…
I first watched this film in 2009 when I was taking Russian language classes at Rhode Island College. It was, in fact, the second Sergei Bodrov film…
In today’s world, when the topic of the defects of university teaching and curricula comes up, the most well-known alternative put forward is the “great books programs.” I…
What Villanova should be famous for is its well-funded and brilliantly staffed ”great books” gen-ed alternative program and a real surge in “great books” humanities majors. The…
Plenty of liberals—and not just liberal professors—think there is a conservative conspiracy to use online education and MOOCs, to destroy genuinely higher education in this country. I see…
One reason I can’t buy the claim that conservative intellectual has become an oxymoron is that on our campuses it’s so often the conservatives who defend “liberal…