Category Archives: Philosophy

Derek Antony Parfit spent his career trying to answer two questions. What is a person? And can anything matter if God does not exist? He believed the second question was the most urgent question in the world, and he arranged … Continue reading →

On the afternoon of Sunday, April 20, 1969, the heavy doors of Willard Straight Hall opened and about a hundred Black students walked out into the cool Ithaca air. They had held Cornell University‘s student union for a day and … Continue reading →

On the morning of March 15, 2023, police at the Green Village interchange near Tel Aviv arrested a middle-aged professor of philosophy and law. He had walked down onto the road with other protesters to block traffic. The protest targeted … Continue reading →

He comes to Harvard from Hamburg at the end of the 1970s. He has tried sociology and left it. He wants the harder discipline, and at Harvard the hardest man in it is John Rawls (1921-2002). Rawls runs a quiet … Continue reading →

In the autumn of 1938, Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940) came home from Munich holding a paper he said meant peace. A young man at the Foreign Office read the terms, judged them a capitulation, and resigned. He was the only officer … Continue reading →

The rain falls on Nassau Hall and the people in the wheelchairs hold their ground. It is September 21, 1999. More than two hundred protesters fill the gates of Princeton University, and about sixty of them sit in motorized chairs. … Continue reading →

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (b. 1950) works as a philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual whose career joins three worlds that rarely share an author: academic analytic philosophy, literary fiction, and the popular defense of reason. Trained in the analytic tradition, she … Continue reading →

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote: My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary … Continue reading →

Roger Pilon (b. 1942) is an American political philosopher, constitutional theorist, and legal scholar whose work across more than four decades has shaped modern libertarian constitutionalism, and whose name now stands among the foremost American advocates of natural-rights theory, limited … Continue reading →