December 16, 2024 – 12:38 pm
To argue productively requires some agreement on fundamentals. All theorems must rest on axioms. Oscar Wilde famously said “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” To harangue others about first principles can never be anything but tedious. (It will certainly never be productive, because arguments, to […]
December 10, 2024 – 6:49 pm
From time to time I get email alerts from Quora, a website where users post questions and others answer them. Occasionally the answers are of excellent quality. Here’s an example of a good one. The question, which vexed me all my adult life (though less so lately), was this: Does mathematics actually exist in the […]
October 20, 2024 – 12:08 am
In a pair of posts at Substack and his own website, Bill Vallicella revisits a conversation he and I had a couple of years ago about the shrinkage of circles of moral inclusion in periods of deep political strife. I had commented on this passage of his: …haven’t the barbarians forfeited their (normative) humanity to […]
October 14, 2024 – 5:12 pm
There was a time when human capabilities formed a continuous landscape. Rising from the plain were such towering prominences such as language, art, reason, literature, musical composition, science, mathematics, and so on. Now, however, artificial intelligence is like a rising tide, inundating the terrain. Even now, with AI only in its infancy, the lower elevations […]
The comment-thread to my recent post about Joe Biden’s fawning tribute to the deceased thug George Floyd turned in some interesting directions. Among them was the observation that Christianity was no longer able to serve as the scaffolding that once built, and braced up, Western civilization. Was this a failing of Christianity itself? I remarked […]
I note with sadness the death of Daniel Dennett — who, whether you agreed with him or not (I did some of each over the years), was a brilliant thinker, a tremendously gifted writer, and a man of insatiable curiosity and outsized personality. In five different areas — philosophy of mind, free will, scientific materialism, […]
February 5, 2024 – 11:12 pm
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has just posted an excellent essay at Substack on why he is inclined toward theism. Longtime readers of this blog will know that this is a topic I’ve been wrestling with for ages, so I’m always glad to find essays like this latest offering from Bill. Bill asks: why are […]
January 13, 2024 – 3:50 pm
I’ve just run across a Twitter (okay, “X”) thread so remarkable that I’m going to unroll it for you right here. The principals are Emmett Shear, a serial Internet entrepreneur who has just been selected as CEO of OpenAI, and a science-fiction author by the name of Devon Eriksen. How did I come across this? […]
December 20, 2023 – 12:41 pm
We live in a world of obvious lies. Magna est veritas, et praevalebit, goes the old saying — “the truth is mighty, and will prevail” — but “will prevail”, as should be apparent to all at this moment in our history, is clearly not the same thing as “does prevail”. I’m fond of quoting Theodore […]
September 10, 2023 – 10:57 pm
(Spoiler: I can’t.) Found here.
For years now I’ve been writing, in these pages, about a few points that I think are central to understanding the decline of American — and, more broadly, Western — society and culture. (I might as well have been yelling up a drainpipe, for all the good it’s done, but at least I’ve been trying.) […]
As we detach morality from a transcendent source — that is, a source that has an intrinsic moral authority that stands higher than our own subjective opinion — we necessarily diminish morality’s normative force.
March 26, 2022 – 12:35 pm
I’ve referred on several occasions to the old Chinese story about “calling a deer a horse”, which describes the scheming courtier Zhao Gao’s stratagem (this was way back in the third century BC) for testing the loyalty of potential political allies by seeing what lies they would assent to. I first read about this over […]
James Kalb stopped by to comment on yesterday’s post, and his remarks deserve a post of their own in reply. (I’ve known Jim for quite a few years now, and for those of you who don’t recognize his name, he is a lawyer and scholar who has written extensively on politics, religion, and culture, and […]
January 27, 2021 – 3:40 pm
A while back the New York Times mounted a direct assault on American patriotism called “The 1619 Project”, which sought to promote the idea that the founding of the American nation was nothing more than an act of organized evil, with its only basis and purpose the subjugation of other races by white, male, Europeans. […]
January 1, 2021 – 4:11 pm
Well, here we are. Happy New Year. I thank all of you who’ve visited in recent weeks; there hasn’t been a whole lot to see here for some time now. My shoulder injury kept me off the keyboard for a while, but that’s not a problem any longer. Mainly it’s been that we have entered […]
Just in (I have bolded the key passage): The Department of Justice today filed a statement of interest in Idaho federal court defending Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act against a challenge under the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. “Allowing biological males to compete in all-female sports is fundamentally unfair to female athletes” said Attorney General […]
January 4, 2020 – 8:13 pm
In a recent post, I wrote about my dissatisfaction with the answers that scientific materialism has offered for some difficult questions. One of these questions is about the astonishing fine-tuning of the physical constants of the natural world: To understand this it’s important to keep in mind what’s called the “Anthropic Principle”. This is the […]
December 17, 2019 – 2:30 pm
A theme of some recent posts here has been the limitations of reason. Reason is a machine: if properly maintained and frequently inspected, it does what it does well enough, but like any machine it can only do some things and not others. Moreover, it is in the nature of this machine not to deal […]
December 7, 2019 – 2:18 pm
Last spring I wrote a post in which I described my dissatisfaction with the atheist, fully materialistic world-model I had inhabited (and defended with vigor, sometimes even cruelty) all my life. I’d come to see that there were essential questions to which it provided no good answers — and that the “scientism” it was built […]
November 4, 2019 – 5:42 pm
I’ve been reading Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton. Reading in the Kindle makes it possible to highlight passages, and pick them up online (which saves a lot of copying by hand). Here are some of the ones I’ve selected so far: ‣ If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will […]
The novelist and podcaster Andrew Klavan has published an essay at City Journal making an eloquent defense of the position that, contra Steven Pinker and others, the hyper-rationalism of the Enlightenment is insufficient to sustain our civilization against moral, spiritual and philosophical exhaustion — and so he calls us back to the faith that built […]
As I get older (I will be sixty-three in a week or so) it becomes harder and harder for me to accept the Universe as a “brute fact”: a thing that just is, and that cannot, even in principle, be accounted for. It’s difficult for everyone, of course, not just me, and so people who […]
September 14, 2018 – 2:53 pm
Our friend Bill Vallicella explores the tension — which he believes is a fruitful one — between Athens and Jerusalem. Why is such a tension — an essential feature of Christianity, with its mysteries and paradoxes, that is conspicuously absent in Islam — fruitful? It is a fruitful tension in the West but also in […]
August 1, 2018 – 10:36 am
Here’s a fine meditation, by Bill Vallicella, on the tension between reason and faith, and what it means for the philosopher who is also a Christian.
I’ve just read a brief interview with Sir Roger Scruton over at National Review. (Hat-tip to our friend David Duff.) This caught my eye: [Interviewer Madeleine Kearns]: What is the difference between a reactionary and a conservative? SRS: A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to […]
With a hat-tip to the Maverick Philosopher, here’s an essay by Bruce Thornton arguing that we might as well give up on political debate with the cryptoreligious Left. The best recourse, he tells us, is ridicule. (Hume was right: reason is the slave of the passions.) I agree with Professor Thornton about the futility of […]
Bill Vallicella weighs in on the natural-rights question we’ve been discussing, here. We read: The problem is that the notion of a natural right is less than perspicuous. Part of what it means to say that a right is natural is that it is not conventional. We don’t have rights to life, liberty, and property […]
Two posts ago we read Michael Anton’s emailed reply to a collection of questions I’d posted in Part 1 of this series. I mailed back a response, and received another reply in return. (There the correspondence stands, for the moment, as I’ve been traveling and working the past couple of days. I’d also like to […]
Our commenter Jacques has replied, in an email to me, to Michael Anton’s response (published in our previous post). I am posting it below. Michael Anton (on the question of “natural rulers”): “One can raise all sorts of objections to this. For instance, if Trump is such a natural ruler, why did he lose the […]
My last two posts (here and here) were in response to an extensive review, by Michael Anton, of Thomas West’s new book on the American Founding, and to a comment by our reader Jacques. In Saturday’s post I laid out some questions that I thought the review, and Jacques’ comment, had raised. I did not […]
In my previous post I linked to a review, by Michael Anton, of a new book on the American Founding by Thomas G. West of Hillsdale College. I have a keen interest in the Founding, and in particular I am, like nearly everyone in the “neoreactionary” community, dogged by the question of just where things […]
I’ve just read a remarkable review, by Michael Anton, of a new book by Thomas G. West, who is a professor at Hillsdale College. (You may know Michael Anton as ‘Publius Decius Mus’, the author of the celebrated essay “The Flight 93 Election” that argued for the necessity of electing Donald Trump in 2016.) Professor […]
There’s been an interesting discussion over at Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website about the Constitution’s prohibition, in Article VI, of a “religious test” for public office. The discussion, with an anonymous Canadian philosopher (although, as was said once of Newton, “we recognize the lion by his claw”), spans several posts. In the first post in […]
December 8, 2017 – 11:55 pm
I have nothing prepared for publication tonight — I was too busy all day, and I went to the VDare Christmas party this evening — but I’d hate for you to go away empty-handed, so I’ll offer you this excerpt from Richard Weaver’s essay Up From Liberalism: The attempt to contemplate history in all its […]
October 24, 2017 – 3:47 pm
From Campus Reform: Prof: Algebra, geometry perpetuate white privilege The story is about one Rochelle Gutierrez, a professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois. We read: “On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of […]
October 8, 2017 – 1:04 pm
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s a long and detailed assessment of the claim that Donald Trump’s voter-base — middle- and working-class Americans — made an irrational choice that was contrary to their own interests. The author demonstrates that this view is unsupportable, and that those who make it are usually applying a standard […]
August 10, 2017 – 3:29 pm
Have a look at this time-looping defense of abortion, by Princeton professor Elizabeth Harman. Somewhere in the back of my mind I just can’t help forming a sneaking suspicion that Professor Harman arrived at her conclusion first, rather than being dragged to it by the irresistible force of her argument.
Our e-pal Bill Keezer has sent along an essay by Ian Hutchinson, a professor of nuclear science and engineering. Dr. Hutchinson is also a Christian, and his article is a riposte to people like Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins, who flatter themselves that the certainty of their atheism is grounded in truth, rather than their […]
Roger Scruton, speaking of the evolutionary origins of human morality: “Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers.”
January 31, 2017 – 12:49 pm
With concatenated hat-tips to our friends Horace Jeffery Hodges and Bill Vallicella, here is a superb essay on the Trumpian assault on the postmodernism that has had a death-grip on Western culture for some time now (and which, I have argued, has its roots in the radical skepsis that was born in the Enlightenment itself). […]
November 21, 2016 – 12:41 am
Sorry for the lack of substantial content here recently. I’ve felt it possible to have a bit of a breather after the election, and apparently the Muse has felt the same. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been much worth commenting about — the Left is writhing like a wounded serpent, but it is […]
October 3, 2016 – 1:41 pm
Late this morning our previous post attracted a sudden flurry of distasteful comments. I don’t usually moderate comments — life is too short — so I’ve just removed all comments from that post and shut it down. I’ve generally been very fortunate in this regard. I flirt with serious heresy here sometimes, and so far […]
September 30, 2016 – 1:56 pm
There’s a lively discussion on the “alt-right” underway over at The Maverick Philosopher, if you’d like to have a look.
September 1, 2016 – 6:28 pm
Our reader Robert, a.k.a. Whitewall, posted in the comment-thread to our previous post a link to an editorial piece from The New Criterion (by way of Instapundit; the original is here). It deserves promotion from comment to post. The piece, which is presumably by Roger Kimball, the editor of New Criterion, uses a beautiful phrase […]
You’ve probably heard of Bayes’s Theorem, but if you’ve yet to get your head around it, here’s a nice visual explanation, including a simple Bayesian explanation of the perplexing “Monty Hall problem” (which we last discussed in here way back in 2009). (Also, from the same website, here’s another Bayes tutorial.)
I’ve often mentioned a popular neoreactionary metaphor, the “red pill” (in fact I did so just two posts ago). Now, with a hat-tip to the latest edition of Nick Steves’ weekly roundup, we offer you an essay by Brett Stevens about another existential medicament: the black pill. What is the black pill? In a word, […]
April 25, 2016 – 10:51 pm
I’ve mentioned the fossil-fuels advocate Alex Epstein several times in these pages, most recently back on April 13th. Here he is making his case last week before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Note in particular the odious, and evidently wholly unlettered, Senator Barbara Boxer mocking Mr. Epstein (at 7:20, and again at the […]
Commenter “Jacques”, last seen (by me, at least) over at Maverick Philosopher, has joined our recent thread on consciousness and intentionality. (Discussions on older posts can often go on unsuspected by other readers, so I thought I’d mention it. Also, it’s a nice change from the grim topics we usually handle around here these days.)
A recent post by our friend Bill Vallicella exposes the philosophical ineptitude of militant atheists such as, in this case, Richard Dawkins. Here his target is the hidden axiom scientists (and I use the term in the sense of “those who practice scientism”) must rely on in order to deny the possible role of a […]