Digressions&Impressions

The Case Against Hume (II)

Hume’s notorious footnote may not have been widely known about until now. For my part, I have a fairly distinct memory of encountering it in the library of the University of Bristol when I was an undergraduate. I also remember being st...

When the Top Just War Ethicist Calls for Proxy War

[A]irstrikes against targets within the cities that the Islamic State controls will almost inevitably cause disproportionate harm to innocents. The West must not adopt the tactics of Assad. Ground forces capable of discriminating betwe...

On Marilynne Robinson's Edomites

Assmann’s argument is the sort of razzle-dazzle that depends on coinages like “mnemohistory,” which is the exalted and useful discipline of interpreting history that collective memory has displaced and suppressed so thoroughly only the...

Hazony on Conservatism, Part IV

[S]uch expressions of traditional Anglo-American nationalism and public religion would soon come to an end. In the wake of the Second World War, America, Britain, and other Western countries underwent a dramatic change in self-understa...

Ernest Nagel's Meta-philosophy of science (and politics)

Scientific knowledge does not depend on the possession of an esoteric capacity for grasping the necessary structure of some superior reality, nor does it require modes of warranting beliefs which are discontinuous with operations of ...

Ibn Khaldun, Discursive Power, and the Invention of Whiteness.

The four other zones are intemperate, and the physique and character of their inhabitants show it. The first and second zones are excessively hot and black, and the sixth and seventh zones cold and white. The inhabitants of the first a...

Quentin Skinner, Paley, Tocqueville, and the Charge of Utopianism (III)

A number of critics [of neo-roman liberty] argued that, even if this contention is not actually incoherent, the suggestion that an equal right to participate in government is indispensable to the maintenance of civil liberty is so Utop...

On Baggini’s How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy

[This is an excerpt of a commissioned book review that became a victim of the pandemic.--ES] Julian Baggini’s (2018) How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy is wonderfully written and provides a highly compelling comparativ...