by Daniel A. Kaufman These last few days, I have been in NY – Long Island to be precise – staying with my mother, while my father is traveling. This has become something of a ritual. My parents are elderly – my father will be ninety in June and my mother just turned eighty-six, last August – and have reacted […]
by Mark English Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman It is no secret that my friend and colleague, Massimo Pigliucci, is a practicing modern Stoic. Indeed, working within and promoting the modern Stoic form of life has become one of his chief projects, including a blog devoted exclusively to the topic – How To Be a Stoic – and a very well-received and popular book […]
by Daniel Tippens Every decision is a moral decision. Every dollar you spend on yourself is a dollar that could instead be donated to a good cause. Every minute you spend is a minute you could have done something more kind or helpful than what you actually did. Every person you see, you could greet warmly or grumpily, give them […]
E. John Winner Although the Italian Renaissance produced important works prefatory to the arrival of Modernity, three texts actually announce it. Surprisingly, given modern biases, none of them are works of science or philosophy. Instead, they are literary fictions, and notably, each had a profound effect on the very structures of the languages in which they were written. In Don […]
by Mark English Writer’s block it is not. The problem – if it is a problem – is more along the lines that the sorts of topics and themes I know best are not (for various reasons) all that interesting to me, or only in a negative way. And most of the topics that I am interested in exploring I […]
by David Ottlinger We should have known something was seriously wrong when Oxford dictionaries declared ‘post-truth’ the word of the year for 2016. (1) It was a sign that a deep confusion had taken root in the fertile soil of our public’s widespread philosophical illiteracy. “The nature of reality is an open question in the age of Donald Trump,” declares […]
by Daniel Tippens In 2016, University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson garnered a good deal of attention in the press after he decried – and refused to comply with – Canadian legislation (Bill C-16) that would make “gender identity” and “gender expression” protected categories under their human rights act. Among other things, the Bill made the failure to use a […]
by Mark English I’m probably more contrarian than conservative, though I freely admit that my views on some issues might be seen as conservative. Whatever that means. Many views which would now be classed as conservative would have been seen as liberal not too long ago. Moreover there is a big divide between those who see recent societal changes as […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman Lately, I’ve been having a certain kind of argument, over and over again. I feel compelled to defend something that I really like – and which I would have thought it quite normal to like – against rather emphatic moral criticisms from various quarters. Eating food, for instance (well, food that includes meat or dairy), and […]
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