Adding philosophical depth to anything and everything
From time-to-time, news items remind me of a conversation from years ago. I was with a group of fellow university students discussing a recent outbreak of armed conflict somewhere in the world. Being curious students, we talked about why the conflict had started. “Because the ___ are proud to […]
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Hannah Arendt is a philosopher who is very well known in continental philosophical circles. She remains fairly unfairly unknown outside of continental philosophy circles. Arendt is of course most famous for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil. That book was her report of the […]
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Behold The Memeocene. Dialogue and politics are dead and we killed them. As human population and technology grows, there is increasing talk that we have entered a new epoch — the Anthropocene or epoch of humans. The idea behind the appellation is that the Earth–its biology and geology–is being altered by human […]
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One of the few philosophers who is a household name, Socrates is famous for being a gadfly who was condemned to death. A citizen jury of Athens decided that Socrates deserved to die. Why? We must rely on Plato’s account in Apology to try to understand what happened and why. […]
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I heard there was some spectacle on one of the 24-hour “news” channels last night. It was some show where they handed Donald Trump a microphone and turned a camera on him. “Tortuous” was the description in one headline covering the ensuing car crash. As predictable as was Trump spewing […]
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I lived in the UK from 2012 to 2018. It was long enough to get a strong sense of what makes the Brits tick. It was also long enough to learn what are the goods and bads of Britain. As a place to live, it’s not too bad, all things […]
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Government at the consent of the governed. It is a principle we assume today and demand. It was not always so. For centuries in the medieval and early modern era the dominant European philosophy of government was the “divine right of kings”—the idea dating back to Augustine that the monarch […]
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One year ago, yesterday, I did the initial episode of this podcast, entitled “Why This Podcast.” And yet, I don’t feel much like celebrating the one-year anniversary of the podcast because of events that happened then and now. Life is something that you plan, but other things happen, and I […]
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Excerpts from How We Are and How We Got Here: A Practical History of Western Philosophy. British Reform Movement Significant developments in social philosophy and social reform took place in the United Kingdom in the 1800s. The Parliament of the United Kingdom passed a progressive series of laws beginning in […]
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The words “woke” and “wokeness” have recently entered the political lexicon. These words puzzle me as to what they mean and why people use them. “Woke” and “wokeness” are used mostly, if not exclusively, as an insult. They are used mostly, if not exclusively, by the Right. In our current […]
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