Philosophy

The Philosophical Chicken

Featured image Finally, some answers to the core question of all metaphysics: Why did the chicken cross the road? Plato: To get to the essence of good Marx: It was historically inevitable Machiavelli: To instill fear in other chickens Nietzsche: On the assertion of its will to power Sartre: The chicken was ordered to cross the road De Beauvoir: One is not born chicken, one becomes Samuel Beckett: Because he was tired »

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Featured image Here in America, we have a chief executive who is elderly, frail, and in declining health. Not so in Finland. Finland’s Prime Minister is Sanna Marin, 36 years old and pretty. Over the last week or so, Marin has been caught up in a series of scandals–or are they pseudo-scandals? What is clear is that she likes to party, while her husband apparently doesn’t. Two videos of Marin partying with »

Canceling David Hume

Featured image The skeptical philosopher David Hume is one of the giants not just of the Enlightenment, but of the whole history of philosophy. But that was not enough to save him from being canceled in his native Scotland. At the instance of “woke” students, who wallow in incorrigible ignorance, David Hume Tower at the University of Edinburgh was re-named “40 George Square.” Hume’s offense was that, while he opposed slavery, there »

Getting Right With Burke

Featured image Listeners to the 3WHH podcast will know that “Lucretia” and I have long divided on the question of Edmund Burke. To paraphrase something William F. Buckley once said about Harry Jaffa, if you think it is difficult to argue with Lucretia, just try agreeing with her—it’s nearly impossible. Back in our grad school days we liked to make fun of the leftist pop psychology popular at the time that everything »

Sandel’s just deserts

Featured image Provoked by Charles Murray’s laid-back admiration of Harvard Professor Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, I touched on the issues that seem to be raised by Sandel’s book in “The merit of meritocracy.” Sandel’s book is now out in paperback and the Washington Free Beacon has just published Peter Berkowitz’s review of Sandel’s book. Placing the book in the context of Sandel’s career and the tradition of political philosophy, Berkowitz’s »

A SOPHOMORIC ARGUMENT RESURFACES [WITH COMMENT BY JOHN AND REPONSE BY PAUL]

Featured image As college students, John and I both subscribed to the philosophical doctrine of determinism. We differed, though, on what implications, if any, the doctrine had for the issue of income distribution. I believed that because the traits that result in wealth are determined by causes beyond our control — the genetics lottery, for example — wealth is undeserved. Therefore, inequality is unjust and should be abolished John understood that my »

Podcast: The Three Whisky Happy Hour—Liberal Education and the Court

Featured image Freshly resupplied with a shipment of Laphraoig, Talisker, and “Murdered Out” dark roast from Black Rifle Coffee, “Lucretia” and I drink to the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court, smack around Biden a little (but only a little because otherwise it would be elder abuse), and then resume our discussion from two weeks about about liberal education and Leo Strauss’s famous lecture entitled “What Is Liberal »

Podcast—The Three Whisky Happy Hour: What Is Liberal Education? (Part 1)

Featured image Well now we’ve done it! This week Lucretia and I decided to take a break from downing whisky shots over the latest crazy news headlines and drag listeners back into the classroom for a new mini-series. I get lots of emails and comments from listeners and readers about why we surrender the term “liberal” to deep leftists who are profoundly illiberal. It’s a great question, and so Lucretia and I »

Phoenix’s republic

Featured image Watching the video highlights of the Oscar winners serving up their deep political thoughts this past Sunday evening, I wondered how anyone could top the lady who recited the revolutionary slogan from the Communist Manifesto.: “Workers of the world, unite.” She omitted: “You have nothing to lose but your chains!” I wonder why. I can’t answer that question, but I can suggest that Joaquin Phoenix topped her. He brought to »

The Power Line Show, Ep. 165: A Field Report from Wuhan on the Coronavirus

Featured image Just in time for your Sunday afternoon walk or Monday morning commute, an early edition of this week’s podcast. With the media hyping and perhaps overhyping the coronavirus epidemic that has broken out in China, I decided to check in with someone on the scene: Spencer Case. Spencer is a young philosopher currently on a postdoc fellowship at Wuhan University, observing the eerie scene from his 17th floor apartment building. He »

“Creating the New Ignorance”: A Christmas Day Idyll with C.S. Lewis

Featured image Christmas Day seems like a suitable occasion for a diversion from the political ephemera of the day with an extended reflection on the great C.S. Lewis (because repeating the self-evident arguments about why Die Hard is a Christmas movie is getting boring). I have previously quoted here the liberal grandee Arthur Schlesinger: “Ignorance is never any bar to certitude in the progressive dreamworld.” This remark appears in his best book, »

The Power Line Show, Special Bonus Episode: “Bronze Age Decius?,” and Scott on His Visit with the President

Featured image This special bonus double-episode tests the proposition that a good podcast format is a conversation among friends at a bar—because that’s exactly what the first segment of this show offers. Last week I was overseas on the joint cruise of the Claremont Institute and the Pacific Research Institute, both celebrating their 40th anniversary this fall. Following a day tromping around Florence taking in the scenes of various locales for Niccolò Machiavelli, »

Leninthink

Featured image I recently drew the attention of Power Line readers to Professor Gary Saul Morson’s essay “How the great truth dawned.” It leads off the September issue of The New Criterion. Beginning and ending with Solzhenitsyn, it takes up the Gulag, Communism, mass murder, Russian literature, the turn to God and much more. It is a great essay. The New Criterion invited Professor Morson back to deliver its inaugural Circle Lecture »

It’s Official: Philosophy Is Lost

Featured image Has academic philosophy become as hopelessly politicized as other humanities? That’s a question treated in a forthcoming paper in Philosophical Psychology entitled “Ideological Diversity, Hostility, and Discrimination in Philosophy.” From the abstract: “We found that survey participants clearly leaned left (75%), while right-leaning individuals (14%) and moderates (11%) were underrepresented. Moreover, and strikingly, across the political spectrum, from very left- leaning individuals and moderates to very right-leaning individuals, participants reported experiencing »

Multiculturalism vs. America

Featured image The Claremont Institute’s American Mind site is full of features, essays, podcasts and other material that repays your time with a deepened understanding of the most challenging political issues. American Mind podcasts are separately posted here. They offer a wealth of riches. In its most recent podcast, American Mind explores the intellectual roots, political and societal implications of, and the antidote to, what the Claremont Institute believes is the great »

Do We Still “Hold These Truths”?

Featured image On the first page of Natural Right and History (1953) Leo Strauss asks: Does this nation in its maturity still cherish the faith in which it was conceived and raised? Does it still hold those “truths to be self-evident”? About a generation ago, an American diplomat could still say that “the natural and the divine foundation of the rights of man . . . is self-evident to all Americans.” Well what »

Passings

Featured image Another busy, travel-heavy week, so I wasn’t able to post a proper obituary notice for John Lukacs, who passed away early this week at the age of 95. The first Lukacs book I read as an undergraduate way back in 1980 was The Passing of the Modern Age, followed shortly by 1945: Year Zero, and I was hooked. (Both of these books hold up extremely well after 40 years.) Lukacs »