Philosophy

On March 13, I gave my talk “‘No Substitute for Victory’: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism” to an audience of about forty at Georgia Institute of Technology. In the talk, based on my article in The Objective Standard, I rejected all forms of theocracy, but emphasized the danger posed by…

Examines key aspects of Newton’s discoveries, shows how he embraced and employed the scientific context established by giants who came before him (such as Galileo and Kepler), and indicates how he rose to even greater heights of explanation through a breathtaking unity of observation, experimentation, conceptual expansion, concept formation, generalization, induction.

Nick Provenzo of the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism reports that members of the City Council of Berkeley have decided to use their guns to keep U.S. Marine Corps recruiters out of the commune. Would that the U.S. military could cease defending Berkeley. It would make for a great…

Yaron Brook has an excellent article in Forbes titled “The Right Vision of Health Care.” Here’s an excerpt: Prior to the government's entrance into the medical field, health care was regarded as a product to be traded voluntarily on a free market—no different from food, clothing, or any other important…

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has published a first-rate piece on the meaning of jihad: “Jihad Today” by Menahem Milson (Inquiry and Analysis Series, No. 411 , December 20, 2007). The topic of this piece is the concept of jihad—but the author’s abstract theme is that ideas matter. He…

During the question period of the otherwise unremarkable debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza on the question of “Is Christianity the Problem?” the following two questions were posed to Hitchens: 1) “What [does atheism] have to offer us as an ethics?” and 2) “What standard [of value] can you…

Roger Scruton challenges Ayn Rand’s concept of selfishness—by committing the very fallacy Rand identified as the cause of confusion on this issue.

There is a good article in Forbes today, titled “Atlas Shrugs Again,” by Marc Babej and Tim Pollack, focusing on the recent swell of interest in Ayn Rand’s ideas and on what it takes to “market something as amorphous as a [philosophical] movement.” After citing some of the recent items…

In case the relativist “principle” guiding Lee Bollinger’s choice to invite Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia was not clear enough in his earlier statement, here is a brief video of him making it even clearer. The “principle” is that anyone willing to “debate”—regardless of his complicity in the torture and…

That the Bush administration is permitting Ahmadinejad to enter America for any reason other than to kill him on sight is a moral travesty. But, then, given that Bush and company’s philosophy counsels us to “resist not evil” and “turn the other cheek” and “judge not that ye be not…