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Free Will Hiding In Plain Sight

1qq`Some authors tend to deny the existence of free will because we are not Epicurean atoms or Nietzschean Ubermen with unconstrained freedom. We’re unable to defy the physical and social world in which we’re indelibly embedded. We…

Acceptance, Rejection, and Otters

In Chapter 4 of my book, I explore a subtle but important distinction between a person having decisive reason to accept or endorse some view (“acceptability”) versus lacking decisive reason to reject it (“rejectability”). I have in…

The Self & Sympathy: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

David Hume conceives the mind in metaphors. The mind is a theater, a republic, a stringed instrument. These metaphors suggest that an individual has multiple selves, whose relations resemble social interactions.

Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning

It may seem strange to those this side of the Enlightenment that “the advancement of learning” should need any defense. If anything, we today are plagued with fears of misunderstanding rapidly advancing science, or of standing on…

The Complaint of Peace

“As Peace, am I not praised by both men and gods as the very source and defender of all good things?...Though nothing is more odious to God and harmful to man, yet it is incredible to see the tremendous expenditure of work and…

David Hume’s Great Work on Religion Is Banned, Along with All His Books

The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.—David Hume The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that…

Hume on Love of Glory, not Usury

It’s probably not a major surprise that prompted by the first three volumes of the Italian translation of Hume’s History of England, the Vatican placed all of Hume’s writings on the Index Librorum prohibitorum in 1827. [1] After…

What if everyone did that? Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Ethics (1785)

“The categorical imperative is therefore single and one: ‘Act from that maxim only which thou canst will law universal.’”—Immanuel Kant, Groundwork, Chapter II

Nicolas de Condorcet’s Sketch of Unlimited Human Progress—Published 1801, Banned Worldwide 1827

It was a tiny room in the home of Madame Vernet on rue Servandoni in Paris. Marquis Nicolas de Condorcet sat writing by candlelight, the candle shaded for added security. He was writing a fragment of a much longer piece eventually…

The Praise of Folly

“If someone should attempt to take off the masks and costumes of the actors in a play and show to the audience their real appearances, would he not ruin the whole play?… For what else is the life of man but a kind of play in which…

The Enlightenment as Method: Rebirth, Science, Humanism, Reformation

On the long runway to take-off of the Enlightenment—and the modern world as we know it—were the intellectual movements of humanism, including the scientific revolution (late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the Renaissance…

John Locke Foments Revolution in the Name of “The Rights of Man”

In his years as physician to and political collaborator with Shaftesbury, leader of the English Whigs, John Locke had many roles, among them as a fellow of the New Royal Society, conducting medical research, and as Shaftesbury's…

John Locke and the New Course of Enlightenment Reason: Empiricism

The world hardly needs another brief introduction to the giant of English philosophy, John Locke. He could be called the author of the Western mind. And has been called the quintessential man of the Enlightenment, the “father of…

What “Irish Enlightenment”? The Case of George Berkeley

In earlier posts on John Toland and Jonathan Swift, I pointed out that champions of the Irish Enlightenment seem to elude being identified with specifically Irish aspects of that European movement. George Berkeley, born in Dysart…

Doing Justice to John Wick

The John Wick franchise is better known for its award-winning stunts than its screenplays. The plots seem thin as a garotte, while the dialogue focuses on guns and Wick's ability to kill with a mere pencil. Yet the March release of…

In The Reading Room with Aristotle

In several previous columns, I have talked about why we might continue to find value in Plato.  But all the reasons why it’s worth taking seriously some of Plato’s insights apply as well to his pupil Aristotle.  Aristotle…

In the Reading Room with Plato and Feminism

In previous columns I’ve discussed some reasons why there are insightful contributions from Plato that contemporary audiences might benefit from thinking about. Here’s another: his feminism. For the most part we don’t think of the…

When Liberals Behave Illiberally

Attempts to reach a liberal utopia are likely to fail. I claim this not as a Burkean conservative but as a classical liberal and ardent defender of individualism. People should be free to live and interact by their own conscience…

Envy and Inequality

Is a desire to reduce inequality largely motivated by envy? In his pioneering work Envy, sociologist Helmut Schoeck explores the ramifications of what he claims is our indelible human tendency to compare ourselves with others. He…

God, Grotius, and Moral Truth: Part I

My previous contributions to the Reading Room describe some striking, proto-liberal strands in Hugo Grotius’s early essay, The Free Sea (1609). This two-part entry begins a series of discussions of remarkable contentions about the…

A Postscript to Property & Justice: A Liberal Theory of Natural Rights

I am grateful to the Online Library of Liberty for hosting this discussion of my book, and of course the discussants, Aeon Skoble, Jacob Levy, and Sarah Skwire, for graciously reading and engaging with my work.
 In those…

Three Ways of Looking at Individualism: Freedom in Responsibility

Defending the supreme importance of individual freedom is not about endorsing license – it’s not about doing whatever you want like a self-centered immature kid. Although sometimes accused of such, individualists need not be…

Three Ways of Looking at Individualism: Freedom in Association

Sometimes defenders of individualism are accused of “atomism”. I’m not really sure what that term means because skeptics, if they define it at all, rarely define it in a way that reflects what serious defenders of individualism…

Three Ways of Looking at Individualism: Freedom in Agency

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia Robert Nozick asks readers to imagine that we could connect ourselves to “experience machines”. These devices could manipulate our brains into believing an entirely virtual reality where we can vividly…

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Mahabharata

 

Source: Translator's Epilogue to the Maha-bharata, The Ramayana and the Mahabharata condensed into English Verse by Romesh C. Dutt (London: J.M. Dent, 1917).

TRANSLATOR’S EPILOGUE

 

ANCIENT India, like ancient…

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Montaigne: A Sketch

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Montaigne

Source: Life and Letters of Montaigne with Notes and Index, vol. 10, trans. Charles Cotton, revised by William Carew Hazlett (New York: Edwin C. Hill, 1910).

  SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF MONTAIGNE BY…
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On Being a Conservative Philosopher: Tensions in the Work of Michael Oakeshott

Elaine Sternberg (author)

Michael Oakeshott has often been considered to be a conservative philosopher.  This essay will explore what that might mean and highlight some of the tensions between conservatism and philosophy in Oakeshott’s writings.*

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