Nihilism, Ethics, and the Trolley Car Dilemma
The Trolley Problem is a potentially morally corrupting piece of pro-murder propaganda with nihilistic tendencies. It imagines a scenario where a runaway trolley can be diverted by…
Elite Power and the Politics of Division: Neema Parvini’s “The Populist Delusion”
Neema Parvini. The Populist Delusion. Perth, Australia: Imperium Press, 2022. What entails the backlash against populist politics, a political ideology that once held respectable admiration in…
The Determinists Strike Back: A Social Media Dialogue
What follows is a real dialogue exchange. Names have been altered except for Richard Cocks. “If determinism is true, it makes no sense to speak of someone…
Does Individualism Promote Ugliness?
Beauty is communal. We know what beautiful architecture looks like. Tourists travel from all over the world to see the buildings of Italy, the Baptistry in Florence,…
Can Medieval Wisdom Cure Modern Insanity? A Review of Rémi Brague’s “Curing Mad Truths”
Rémi Brague. Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. In this collection of lectures, Brague begins…
Annihilation: A Failed Sci-Fi Adaptation of René Girard
Based on a book by Jeff VanderMeer, the movie Annihilation[1] is a fairly straightforward presentation of the ideas of René Girard. The book is more nuanced and…
Mystery and Order in the Human Brain
In The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist writes that a bird, as with the rest of us, needs two types of consciousness simultaneously. It must be…
Epistemic Nihilism Leaves Only Brute Force
Some modern proponents of identity politics causes, influenced a little by Marxism and a lot by postmodernism, claim that power is what matters, not truth. What we…
The Personal is Philosophical: Plato, Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Tarkovsky
“What I love very much is your being yourself style, and I wish that you keep this skill and manage to share it with all around, and…
How to Differentiate Virtue Signaling from a Genuine Defense of the Scapegoat
Ruth Gilmore Wilson, a prison abolitionist, states: “Instead of asking whether anyone should be locked up or go free, why don’t we think about why we solve…
Hegemons of the Bankrupt
During the Middle Ages in England, the poor had babies, but they mostly died. Neither did they have the income to feed a lot of them if…
Social Justice for Business Ethics: Social Justice, Libraries, and Postmodernism
SUNY Oswego describes itself as a “social justice institution.” In doing so, it follows the lead of much more prestigious Ivy League institutions like Harvard, Yale, and…
Evolution, Sexual Politics, and the Crisis of Community
Men have evolved to be disposable protectors of women. Little boys will instinctively pick up sticks and use them as swords and rifles. They will even practice…
The Religious Instinct: Fact, Fiction, and Plato
Anamnesis is a key feature of Platonic philosophy. It means “to remember.” Plato thought that eternal truths concerning justice, truth, and beauty were present in the human…
What Constitutes “Genius”? Beyond IQ and the Importance of Creative Individualism
What constitutes genius? Who is a genius? The Genius Famine, by Bruce Charlton and Edward Dutton, answered many burning questions that have arisen for me over the…