I’ll be giving two talks at next week’s Galt’s Gulch conference in (hopefully) sunny San Diego, California. “Primitivism and Polarization—and the Power of Philosophy”: Deeply divided groups seem to dominate public discussion and generate a rhetorical race to the bottom. What is the evidence for increased polarization? What are the competing explanations for it? And […]

My essay is part of the just-published Springer volume Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics, edited by professors Christoph Luetge and Marianne Thejls Ziegler. Abstract: Entrepreneurship is a value-laden enterprise that typically demands a character and virtue set, and has implications for some models of business ethics (e.g., corporate social responsibility), for poverty

Max Planck, 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics: “New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organised, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.” (Source: Max

A hypothesis about the strange Left-Islamist alliance — both of them marching together to support Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Ayatollahs, and both hostile to USA, Israel, the West more broadly. Drawing upon two perceptive analysts, Friedrich Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill: * Nietzsche in 1887: “the truly great haters in world history have always been

Lecture 8. The Meaning of It All In our eighth and final lecture, we explore the philosophical debate between determinism and free will, examining whether human actions are governed entirely by causal forces or whether genuine volition exists. We consider biological, environmental, and divine forms of determinism, which argue that all actions are predetermined, alongside

“In a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.” Source: Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Chapter 11. Pictured: The original three rulers of

Lecture 7. The Human Being In lecture seven, we study three philosophical approaches to human nature: dualism (humans as body and non-physical soul), reductive materialism (psychological phenomena as physical byproducts), and integrationism (mind as an emergent property of complex systems). We explore key arguments, including dualism’s interaction problem, materialism’s limits in explaining psychology, and integrationism’s