Philosophy

David Bahr on the project to see Xenophon alongside his peers.

Ian Marcus Corbin on the illiberal philosophers and our fractured politics.

Lessons from Aristotle for American self-government.

The spectacular rise of Jordan Peterson has caught much of the world flat-footed. Discussions of the psychology professor from the University of Toronto tend to focus on the enormous popular movement his lectures have spawned, rather than the actual ideas presented in the lectures themselves. As a…

Since the birth of the modern age, conservatives of various stripes have lamented—often with good reason—the cultural decline of post-Enlightenment society. Such critiques have emphasized different defects: the shrinking of human beings to mere seekers of comfort; the loss of reverence for…

Dr. Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, is the author of the best-selling title, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. He’s very active in public life: He lectures frequently, engages in televised debates, and produces YouTube videos on a range of political and…

Reviews and News:

America doesn’t need “more philosophers” Sen. Marco Rubio said in a 2015 presidential debate, echoing politicians on both sides of the aisle who have, unfortunately, derided education in the humanities.

Sunday Hill Farm, Wiltshire

I remember as a kid hearing John, Robert, and Teddy Kennedy all using in speeches various paraphrases of these lines from a play by George Bernard Shaw: “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’ ”

Robert Skidelsky, whose biography of John Maynard Keynes is unlikely ever to be surpassed, judged that his subject “never needed a Jehovah, because he had never experienced despair.” Skidelsky was speaking of religion and morals, a department where Keynes was a typical Bloomsbury hedonist. In…

There is nothing natural about tolerating the views of others. If someone stands, as today’s righteous say, on “the wrong side of history,” why refrain from shutting him up? Yes, Justice Holmes warned against “attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught…

Whenever the vanguard of the Race’n’Gender Left™ meets the avant-garde of post-postmodern art, hilarity ensues. So it is with Omer Fast’s August, a recent installation in Manhattan’s Chinatown. If you’re wondering why an art show called August opened in September and will close in October, trust…

In 1637, René Descartes recounted a “fable” of how he came to think well. From his youth, he had read the books of the ancients, exercised his rhetorical skills, and observed the debates of philosophers and theologians. But in all this learning he found no rest or certainty, only endless disputes…

Half a century ago, fashionable young moviemakers looking for new ways to separate themselves from old Hollywood fuddy-duddies—and to épater la bourgeoisie even though it was that very bourgeoisie they needed to become rich and powerful—sank their teeth into the notions that America and capitalism…

When George Will was being packed off to graduate school, his father, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois, asked him what, or who, he wanted to be in life: Ted Sorensen, Isaiah Berlin, or Murray Kempton? All three men were closely identified with a public trade. Sorensen, as…

On October 3, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, spoke to a group of Republican donors at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington. Unbeknownst to Ayers, his remarks were recorded, and the audio was subsequently obtained by Politico.

As I was leaving the theater after a screening of Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, the friend I watched it with turned to me and observed, “For a documentary about a library, that movie didn’t have a whole lot to say about books.”

On October 3, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, spoke to a group of Republican donors at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington. Unbeknownst to Ayers, his remarks were recorded, and the audio was subsequently obtained by Politico.

When George Will was being packed off to graduate school, his father, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois, asked him what, or who, he wanted to be in life: Ted Sorensen, Isaiah Berlin, or Murray Kempton? All three men were closely identified with a public trade. Sorensen, as…

As I was leaving the theater after a screening of Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, the friend I watched it with turned to me and observed, “For a documentary about a library, that movie didn’t have a whole lot to say about books.”

Don’t miss the newest episode in the Internet video series Conversations with Bill Kristol. The Weekly Standard’s editor at large talks with University of Virginia professor Paul Cantor about Shakespeare’s Rome. How do politics contend with philosophy? Can a republic survive becoming an empire?…

To many of those commenting on Donald Trump’s maiden address to the United Nations, especially if otherwise disturbed by the president’s character, his emphasis on state sovereignty was a welcome dose of diplomatic normalcy. For example, David Ignatius of the Washington Post found this theme…

To many of those commenting on Donald Trump’s maiden address to the United Nations, especially if otherwise disturbed by the president’s character, his emphasis on state sovereignty was a welcome dose of diplomatic normalcy. For example, David Ignatius of the Washington Post found this theme…

If I were a Republican strategist, which I’m pleased to say I’m not, I would pay especial attention to Shelby Steele’s op-ed “Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism” in the August 27 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Toward the close of his article, Steele writes that “the great problem for…

Something has gone missing from American politics. Since the beginning of the new administration in January, public debate focused on general ideas has largely disappeared. Yes, President Trump has a few issues he consistently supports, such as limitations on immigration and lower taxes; and yes,…

Something has gone missing from American politics. Since the beginning of the new administration in January, public debate focused on general ideas has largely disappeared. Yes, President Trump has a few issues he consistently supports, such as limitations on immigration and lower taxes; and yes,…

If I were a Republican strategist, which I’m pleased to say I’m not, I would pay especial attention to Shelby Steele’s op-ed “Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism” in the August 27 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Toward the close of his article, Steele writes that “the great problem for…

Kurt Andersen may be right in supposing that what looks like Americans’ increasing inability to distinguish fantasy from reality is the big topic of our times, and there are at least 2 or 3 of his 46 chapters in Fantasyland in which he does justice to his subject. His rapid tour d’ horizon on New…

Before his untimely passing earlier this year, political philosopher Peter Augustine Lawler offered up some timely reflections on Allan Bloom’s “souls without longing,” the elite students who comprise the bulk of Bloom’s study in his 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. As Lawler…

Before his untimely passing earlier this year, political philosopher Peter Augustine Lawler offered up some timely reflections on Allan Bloom’s “souls without longing,” the elite students who comprise the bulk of Bloom’s study in his 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. As Lawler…

Peter Augustine Lawler was a humanities professor's humanities professor, a genial gadfly who could talk and write about contemporary politics and pop culture—he was a huge fan of director Whit Stillman and published articles such as "Disco and Democracy" and "Celebrity Studies Today"—as adroitly…

Up on the third floor, in a bookcase against the south wall—the second shelf from the bottom, maybe two-thirds of the way along—there's an aging copy of The Art of Memory, written by the British historian Frances Yates back in the 1960s.

What makes a meaningful life? It's an often strenuous, and in no way uniformly happy, existence compelled by service to some higher calling—higher, anyway, than selfish gratification. It's also an explainable life, simple enough to be told back to you as a story, but it keeps in touch with the…

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Remember Existentialism? I heard about it, first, back in the early 1950s on a boat full of students bound for Europe. Among the many planned daily activities was a discussion about this exciting new way of thinking. It seemed to involve, centrally, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (always in that…

Remember Existentialism? I heard about it, first, back in the early 1950s on a boat full of students bound for Europe. Among the many planned daily activities was a discussion about this exciting new way of thinking. It seemed to involve, centrally, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (always in that…

In her section on memoirs here, Eva Brann reflects on her discomfort with at least one type of praise: “How much sweeter," she writes, "to be serenely sure of having been underestimated than to have to sink through the floor shamed by clueless overpraise." Hammering the point home, Brann adds:…

George Santayana remarked in one of his books that there is no good reason for a philosopher to make his living teaching in a university. He would probably be better off as the man who collects umbrellas and checks coats in a small, seldom-visited museum. And Santayana's onetime colleague at…

George Santayana remarked in one of his books that there is no good reason for a philosopher to make his living teaching in a university. He would probably be better off as the man who collects umbrellas and checks coats in a small, seldom-visited museum. And Santayana’s onetime colleague at…

At times of intense controversy, it can be a valuable exercise to turn to the works of the past not to escape the present but instead to gain a truer view of it. It is in this spirit that Edmund Burke's "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol" offers a rewarding rereading.

On May 11th, an article ran in the New York Times' philosophy blog, "The Stone," which bore the title, "If Philosophy Won't Diversify, Let's Call It What It Really Is." If you missed it, you can read it here: Its authors, Jay L. Garfield (Yale-NUS College, Singapore) and Bryan W. Van Norden (Vassar…

In his newsletter this week, the boss reported that "our friends over at National Review  asked several contributors to write brief reflections for their 60th anniversary issue (by the way, congratulations!) about what book influenced us the most." The boss encourages everyone to take a look at the…

Maybe he is the Republican Obama after all. Like the outgoing president, Florida senator Marco Rubio is charismatic, self-assured, and intelligent, as his performance in Tuesday night’s debate displayed. Alas, also like the president, Senator Rubio harbors an anti-intellectual streak, one that is…

During Tuesday night's Republican presidential debate, Marco Rubio articulated his disagreements with increasing the minimum wage, and explained his alternative ideas. 

I'm not sure what the great political philosopher Leo Strauss would have thought of the Internet (he was a skeptic about progress, but also a skeptic about reaction). I personally think he would have appreciated aspects of it. Perhaps he would have even written an essay on "Persecution and the Art…

Whatever one makes of either one of them, the similarities between Sarah Palin and Carly Fiorina (who’s just announced she’s running for president) stop more or less at the chromosomal level. Fiorina is an accomplished (if controversial) businesswoman; Palin, a half-term governor and television…

An MSNBC reporter asked Rick Perry in an interview that aired this morning whether the Texas governor is "smart enough to be president of the United States." Perry responded that "running for the presidency is not an IQ test."

Anniversaries come thick and fast. But 500-year marks are still rare, reminders of a simpler time, a different world.  We look back to Columbus and forward to the Reformation without understanding the epochal revolution in between that made our time, our world.

On board the ms Noordam sailing from Italy to Greece, with a break from both sightseeing and panels, it seemed advisable to me 1) to ignore the goings-on in Washington, and 2) to find time for an article I'd set aside to read, Harvey Mansfield's "Machiavelli's enterprise" in the October New…

Jean Bethke Elshtain may have been the busiest woman many of us had ever met. Shuttling back and forth between her regular teaching appointment at the University of Chicago and her settled home in Tennessee, she wrote and wrote—and wrote and wrote. Essays, talks, books, memos to fellow directors on…

President Barack Obama, speaking today in Berlin, cited German philosopher Immanuel Kant:

Democratic senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut admitted this morning that "It took me a while to figure out" that belief in gun rights is based on a philosophy:

Federally funded, low-speed train service Amtrak has launched a website to show its support for the gay pride movement and with the hopes of attracting additional clientele.

Remembering Friedrich Hayek, whose birthday is today. He was a philosopher and economist and wrote many wise things, including this:

Worth watching or reading: Leon Kass's Irving Kristol Address, "The other war on poverty: Finding meaning in America," delivered earlier this week at the American Enterprise Institute's annual dinner:

Superheroes: The Best of Philosophy and Pop Culture expounds Immanuel Kant’s defense of retribution as a duty intimately related to “respect, honor, and what it means to be a valuable person living a worthwhile life in a community of other moral persons. When,” on the other hand, “Rorschach…

The Immortalization Commission