How to Change Your Mind
How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan gives a history of psychedelics in the twentieth century. It covers the synthesis of LSD and utopian fantasies of…
Love in the Western World: René Girard vs Denis de Rougemont
Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World has many appealing features. It has a long discussion of Tristan and Iseult (“Tristan und Isolde” in German and…
The German Lesson (the Movie): Scapegoating for Peace
Before getting to the The German Lesson, extensive prefatory remarks are needed. All mythology is sacrificial and originates with a real-life scapegoat; a claim René Girard knew…
Artificial Super Intelligence and the AI Apocalypse
Apparently, there are competitions to see who is better at predicting the future. Normally, the answer is that no one is better at predicting the future. There…
Dostoevsky vs Musil: the Never-Ending Story
René Girard reread many of the classic novels of Western literature in preparation for a survey class he was about to teach. Girard’s insight, which he garnered…
Westworld Season 1: Philosophical Reflections
Postmodern architecture is supposed to be a medley of past styles and architectural ideas; a recombination rather than original or the result of a unified aesthetic vision…
Revisiting a Classic: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
After a friend mentioned reading The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov recently, not to be confused with the Silver Age Russian philosopher Sergei Bulgakov, who lived…
Crimes and Misdemeanors: Can A Bad Person Be Happy?
Woody Allen’s movie Crimes and Misdemeanors depicts Martin Landau’s character, Judah Rosenthal, as literally getting away with murder. The woman he has been having an affair with…
The Barbarism of Reflection
It is the nature of all developmental accounts that there will be fewer at the high end than at the base; in the case of morality, more…
An Introduction to the Thought of Owen Barfield
Owen Barfield was a member of the Inklings, the famous literary group that included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Barfield wrote the first “fey”…
Bread Alone
The left hemisphere of the brain is pragmatic and utilitarian. It has no emotion but language and logic. It deals with inanimate objects and manipulates them for…
Oh, For a Competent Elite
Samuel T. Francis claimed, adding to James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, that there are not only managers of government and managers of industry, as Burnham claimed, but…
Robert Sapolsky is Determined to be Wrong
Robert Sapolsky’s, Behave, published in 2017, provides evidence that when it comes to moral and social matters, the dorso lateral prefrontal cortex, the “decider” part of the…
A Philosopher Explains Moral Realism
An invited speaker asked me to explain moral realism to him. He said he had never really understood it. This is my attempt. Thomas Sowell wrote…
Will AI Technology Cause More Problems Than It Can Solve?
To any software engineers out there pondering this issue, there is no solution to the so-called “alignment problem.” This should be instantly obvious to anyone who spends…