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Saturday, March 21, 2020

Boccaccio's Typology of Plague Responses

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Completely coincidentally, I happened to be part of a Decameron reading group as the Coronavirus pandemic hit. We have managed to continue t...
Monday, March 16, 2020

John Stuart Mill on Tone Policing

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I had forgotten this argument from the final few pages of JS Mill's famous chapter, "Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion"...
Saturday, March 7, 2020

Necessary Capitalist Deceptions

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A professor recently brought to my attention this wonderful passage from Keynes' A Tract on Monetary Reform ': No man of spirit w...
Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Adam Smith's Disciplinary Capitalism

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I typically cringe at the language of "disciplinarity" in contemporary political theory (at least, in political theory tinged with...
Monday, January 6, 2020

Humean Utility: Good Enough

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A professor of mine is fond of this striking passage from Appendix III of David Hume's Enquiries :  All the laws of nature, which re...
Sunday, September 29, 2019

Do Great Ideas Sink or Float?

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It is commonplace to praise great ideas for having stood "the test of time." Implicit in that thought is that if an idea keeps kic...
Friday, March 8, 2019

Locke on Intellectual Inheritance and Progress

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From the fascinating fourteenth chapter of John Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity : When Truths are once known to us, though ...
Wednesday, March 6, 2019

John Locke and the Janitorial Theory of Philosophy

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From the wonderful "Epistle to the Readers" in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding : The commonwealth of learning is...
Friday, December 14, 2018

Two Visions (Or Two Assessments) of Democratic Freedom

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Plato on democratic man: He lives out his life from day to day, gratifying the desire of the moment. One day he drinks himself under the ta...
Friday, December 7, 2018

A Maryland Farmer on Popular Ignorance

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One of the Antifederalists' chief objections to the new constitution was its insufficient guarantee of the right to a local jury trials....