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...
Continue reading "The Case Against Hume (II)" »
[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...
Continue reading "When the Top Just War Ethicist Calls for Proxy War" »
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...
Continue reading "On Marilynne Robinson's Edomites" »
[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...
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 ...
Continue reading "Ernest Nagel's Meta-philosophy of science (and politics)" »
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...
Continue reading "Ibn Khaldun, Discursive Power, and the Invention of Whiteness." »
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...
Continue reading "Quentin Skinner, Paley, Tocqueville, and the Charge of Utopianism (III)" »
[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...
Comment by Heath White on “What's Western in Russell's History of Western Philosophy (II)”
Posted by: Heath White | 01/10/2020 at 05:10 PM