philosophy

Two Perspectives on Catholic Philosophy: Alasdair MacIntyre and Pope John Paul II

philosophy, religion, theology

Alasdair MacIntyre in his 2009 monograph God, Philosophy, Universities gives what he calls a “selective history” of the Catholic philosophical tradition. This history of philosophy is centered on the relationship between the trinity of factors expressed in the title: God, philosophy, and universities, and culminates in a concluding chapter in which MacIntyre gives some insight […]

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Kant’s Prolegomena as an Argument Against Hume’s Skepticism

David Hume, epistemology, Immanuel Kant, philosophy, skepticism

Immanuel Kant is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era. In his work, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic (full text), which is based upon and contains selections from his work, A Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that he has discovered a means by which one can escape the

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The Fragility of Socialist Utopias: Some Problems of Central Planning and Rationalist Design

Economics, Political Philosophy, socialism

From time to time an author or thinker will create a work, often in the Utopian genre, which lays out a detailed design of an ideal society. Fourier’s phalanestères are one example: they are described as the structure of a social unit, all the way down to the number of inhabitants and to the shape

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Video Games, Violence, and Society: a Defense

Media, philosophy, popular culture, Video Games

I love video games. Lots of us do. Yet our love is not always shared, and many have asked about the potential social impacts of games: do they cause violence? Do they cause deviant, disruptive, or otherwise antisocial behavior? Since the tragic Columbine shootings, whose perpetrators were players of the revolutionary first-person-shooter Doom, video games

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Anti-laissez-faire Ideas since the Founding: 1870-1918

capitalism, Economics, Political Philosophy, property rights, socialism

Most libertarians would say that capitalism is dead in America. Many on the left would say that it is still raging. It’s ultimately a matter of what you define as “capitalism” (voluntary exchange vs. large corporation mercantilism), but we can be sure that the voluntary exchange aspect is killed day by day, and has been

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A Critique of Bentham and John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism

ethics, philosophy, utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is a philosophical epidemic in contemporary social and political dialogue. In one form or another, the notion of a “greater good” above the good of individual agents has taken root in group-centric ideologies. Dictators have invoked it on nationalistic or ethnocentric grounds; leftists have promoted it in the name of “mankind”; even the most

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Rousseau on Represented Sovereignty in Democracy

democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Political Philosophy, social contract theory

“…The moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no longer free: it no longer exists.” A “pure democracy” interpretation of Rousseau could use this statement about representatives as evidence that The Social Contract is a manifesto of radical self-government. If we hold as an axiom from this interpretation that a person under

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A Functionalist View of Consciousness in Bicentennial Man

mind, philosophy

Based on Asimov’s Bicentennial Man, the 1999 film Bicentennial Man stars Robin Williams as an increasingly lifelike robot. One fundamental question is: at any stage, does Andrew possess “consciousness”? Withholding the belief that humans over all other things have been supernaturally “chosen” or imbued with consciousness, a naturalistic assessment of qualitative experience permits Andrew to

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Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, and how G.E. Moore Fails to Respond to the Skeptics

analytic philosophy, philosophy, skepticism, Wittgenstein

Beginning with Descartes, traditional forms of epistemology have attempted to create a foundation of knowledge that can not be doubted. The skeptical tradition, employing and developing Cartesian doubt among other variations of it, has sought to undermine the possibility certainty about the external world and, more generally, all knowledge. The philosopher G.E. Moore attempted to

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