Bryan Wandel A couple of months ago, Hadley Arkes and Matthew O’Brien had a debate in Public Discourse about what kind of reasoning is admissible in, well, public discourse. O’Brien denounced Arkes’s Kantianism, which was effective since everyone loves to hate the Enlightenment (except Jürgen Habermas – you keep fighting the good fight, Jürgen). Arkes, as everyone […]

Religion Dispatches reports on a Philosopher of Religion who has given up on philosophy of religion. “I just cannot take their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it,” says Keith Parsons, Philosophy professor at U. of Houston; founder of the […]

Edward Kennedy or Billy Graham? Margaret Sanger or Phyllis Schlafly? Who is more important? In the war over education content, the facts of 6th grade Social Studies can take on more meaning than we remember, when we had to memorize the 50 states and their capitals. Max Weber tells us that there is an utter […]

Logic is everything we know. In some sense. Ludwig Wittgenstein and logic Ludwig Wittgenstein’s examinations into the where logic can take us, what its limits are, and what it is dependent upon are found in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The Tractatus is one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century, at least in analytic […]

The President has effected a significant move toward “nuclear disarmament” (we all know the actual meaning is a more vague phrase: nuclear minimization). Historically presiding over the U.N. Security Council, President Obama called a unanimous vote on a U.S.-written proposal. Not binding yet … but is it enough to say “such a thing has never been […]