Author name: Editor

Carolyn Suchy-Dicey considers the dilemma of teaching moral autonomy. Last night while working for a wedding, a girl I will call Sarah seemed her normal, bubbly self. She was given a simple task, one we do for every event, but had some difficulties performing it properly. Her response was to yell, blame, shove, and walk […]

Stuart Greenstreet on why global warming won’t be stopped. Plato was deeply pessimistic about the ability of the human race to govern itself. In The Republic he has Socrates say: “Unless either philosophers rule in our cities or those whom now we call rulers and potentates engage genuinely and adequately in philosophy, and political power

John Capps argues that Senator McCarthy’s anti-Communist purges helped positivism to triumph over pragmatism in American universities in the 1950’s. The McCarthy era still casts a long shadow over American politics and culture. From 1953 to 1954 Senator Joseph McCarthy summoned hundreds of witnesses before the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations with the stated intention

Walter Ott doesn’t think so. Mrs White devoted much of her working life to her business, a small laundromat. Upon her death, her son Jimmy wonders what to do with it. Would he be harming Mrs White if he were to sell it? Does he have some kind of duty to keep it going, no

Peter Cave discusses the idea that not existing has never hurt anyone. Permit me to introduce Mademoiselle Gazelle, a desirable and desired young woman, so named because of her gazellish sleek glidings through Soho’s streets – Mademoiselle Gazelle, with hair cascading, red lipstick a-glowing, radiating youth and beauty. An unlikely candidate for deathly discussions, she

Paul Warwick considers Hume’s argument against testimony concerning miracles. I have a friend who was once deeply immersed in the occult. Now he’s a Pentecostal Christian who has renounced his former beliefs and broken with the practices of that way of life. Even so, I can’t help thinking that there is at least one common

Marc Bobro scrutinizes how Hume thinks about thought. David Hume believed that the mind represents the world by having contents that resemble it, such as having images of it. This way of thinking about thinking has been called imagism. But, as Bertrand Russell and his friend Ludwig Wittgenstein noted much later, the same images can

Howard Darmstadter looks at the life and legacy of the incendiary tercentenarian. In 1734, David Hume, a bookish 23-year-old Scotsman, abandoned conventional career options and went off to France to Think Things Over. Living frugally and devoting himself to study and writing, he returned after three years with a hefty manuscript under his arm. Published

Grahame Lockey writes pithy observations to make you think about pithy observations to make you think. I once sat down to write a poem. Four words into it, I realised it was complete. It didn’t want a title, it wanted to be left alone: Absence begins at home. I didn’t know what it was that