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 […]
Kant’s Prolegomena as an Argument Against Hume’s Skepticism Read More »
By the beginning of the 1960’s the cultural and political influence of television newscasts on the American public was undeniable. The rise to prominence of American TV news media during this time was prompted by a number of economic and historical factors. The prosperity of the 1950’s meant that such technology was now financially viable
Broadcast Television as New Media during the Vietnam war Read More »
In 2006, U.S. interest groups spent $2.44 billion on reported lobbying expenses- approximately $5 million per Congressman.[1] A large portion of that expenditure came from multinational corporations (MNCs), the famed special interests who generate and control large amounts of money and are behind the sinister conspiracies in action thrillers. Notwithstanding fantastical story-telling, it is important
Lobbying, Subsidies, and U.S Multinational Corporations Read More »
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
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
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
Anti-laissez-faire Ideas since the Founding: 1870-1918 Read More »
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
A Critique of Bentham and John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism Read More »
When the Second World War ceased hostilities with the formal surrender of Japan on September 2nd, 1945 the curtain had been brought down on the most catastrophic of all the wars perpetrated by mankind. Only twenty one years earlier, the armistice of November 11th, 1918 had signaled the end of the “war to end all
The complex question of how society should strike a balance between an individual’s need for privacy and the government’s use of surveillance to protect its citizens from harm is complicated by the possibility of misuse. In 1986 in Minneola, Florida, fourteen-year-old Glenn Williams died from what appeared to be a drug overdose. Suspecting foul play,
Tensions Between Privacy and Government Surveillance in the 21st Century Read More »
“…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
Rousseau on Represented Sovereignty in Democracy Read More »