Dedicated to my father, Lee, on his 96th birthday—my first philosophy teacher “By speculating upon causes, we could solve no difficulty about origin and purpose. Our real business is to analyze accurately the circumstances of phenomena, and to connect them by the natural relations of succession and resemblance.” Comte, Positive Philosophy (tr. Martineau, 1858) “Most […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on March 25, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. A specter is haunting capitalism – the specter of “higher” things. Or so an increasing number of thinkers among the New Right, the National Conservatives, or the Economic Nationalists might say. They insist that the “neoliberal” order of free enterprise and […]
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When Reason Goes on Holiday is a new book with a distressingly familiar theme: intellectuals who preached reason and research while glorifying romantic ideals of revolution and the ideas of Lenin, Mao and Castro. The author, Neven Sesardic, deals with some big names in modern philosophy and shows that the wooly-headed politics associated with the […]
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At research universities in the United States, most departments in the humanities have a travel budget that supports professional activities for their faculty members. Most of it goes to help professors attend academic conferences and deliver a paper to colleagues and attend sessions as an audience member as well. For a department of 30 people, the amount […]
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The many surveys backing up what those of us in the academy know only too well—that liberals vastly outnumber conservatives—are used to bolster the idealistic argument for “intellectual diversity.” But a viewing of an incident at the recent CPAC conference and a video of a philosophy professor further confirmed my beliefs that it is not […]
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The University of Texas at Austin has just approved the formation of a field of study for the recently-established Program In Western Civilization and American Institutions. This enables the center to begin offering great books-based classes on Greek and Roman Philosophy, literature, and the American founding, among other topics. It’s a broad step forward for […]
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