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…
Getting Alasdair MacIntyre Very, Very Wrong
A title for nonfiction creates clear expectations. Fail to live up to it, and the reader will find fault where none may be. When I first picked…
How Far Do I Reach? Utilitarianism Through Another Lens
I create an Instagram post, upload it, and send it into the void. It’s appropriate that the network of servers making up the Internet is called the…
Kant’s Enlightenment
*Note: This was originally a paper presented at the 2023 APSA Immanuel Kant is associated with the Enlightenment.[1] Moreover, he self-identified with the Enlightenment and answered…
Remembering Ellis Sandoz
My Doktorvater is dead. G. Ellis Sandoz went to the Great Beyond on September 19th. I met Ellis 31 years ago and indeed the German word Doktorvater captures well the relationship…
What We Get Wrong About Nietzsche’s Nihilism
Friedrich Nietzsche’s name is often associated with the term “nihilism.” For many, Nietzsche provides a particularly acute articulation of the nihilistic perspective. For these interpreters, Nietzsche rips…
Does the Renaissance Matter?
There are only a few epochs of revolutionary philosophical change in the standard presentation of the history of philosophy. One was where it all began: Athens in…
The Crisis of Modern Philosophy: Authenticity, Powerlessness, and the Struggle for Humanization
To say there is a crisis in philosophy could be the understatement of the past few centuries. Ever since Kant, and especially since Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the…
Hegel and Heidegger on Nature
In Hegel and Heidegger On Nature and World, Raoni Padui explains why these philosophers reject naturalism, subjective idealism, and dualism in their conjunction with nature and the…
Must Our Stories Come Out Right?
In my passage from childhood to young girlhood, there were two stories I relied on for clues about the life that lay ahead of me. The first…
Can Ideas Be Bad?
As forms of intelligibility, ideas disclose thought—as questions, doors to the understanding, to awakening, to “spiritual light.” In this respect all ideas are good. Can there then…
The Reprehensible Peter Singer
Liberals value harm avoidance (harmlessness) and equality. Conservatives can agree that harmlessness and equality are good things, but also value loyalty, sanctity, and authority as complements. These…
The “Runaway Horse”: Leisure in Montaigne’s Political Thought
Montaigne’s Essays, a product of the writer’s own time spent in leisure, seeks to teach the contemporary reader to take a step back and reflect. As someone…
The Great Forgetting and the Crisis of Modernity
Many years ago, a man, who was hiking along the arduous path of life’s journey to reach the high summit behind which the sun cast its bright…
The Future of Innocence, Beauty, and Dissent
At the core of the cycle of life, corruption of innocence and beauty followed by the necessary corrective that makes life whole again, we encounter the self,…