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Camille Paglia on Free Speech on Campus

The Smart Set — great to have CP renter the “fray”. Free speech was a primary weapon of the Left against the moralism and conformism of the Right. How then, we must ask, has campus Leftism in the U.S. been so transformed that it now encourage, endorses, and celebrates the suppression of ideas, including those that…

Performance

Though it’s going on 40 years since Performance was made (1968, released in 1970) it is still the most modern of films with “adult themes” (philosophical and otherwise) from an age when films weren’t primarily made for fuckwits. The themes of social, sexual and gender identity make the fuss being made about these issues now seem so tired…

Team “H”

It’s been a four “H” week. Commemorating the birth of Hume, acknowledging the ascendance of Haidt, reading Haack again and today marking the birth of Hayek. Here is a brief article by Emily Skarbek discussing an aspect of Hayek: individualism ‘true’. David HumeEmily SkarbekFriedrich HayekJonathan Haidtsusan haack

Our Greatest Living Public Intellectual

Having listened to some 100 hours of “rabbi” Jonathan Haidt I’ve come to this conclusion. (Yes, the usual scratched record names will be proffered along with the activist wannabes, but their time is now over, and long overdue at that — advocacy is not inquiry!). Haidt has the empirical credentials, the philosophical credentials and equally importantly he…

David Hume

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. (Commemorating the birth of the greatest moral psychologist of all). David HumeMoral psychologypassionReason

Models of Environment

The thirteenth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Marcin Miłkowski Herbert A. Simon is well known for his account of bounded rationality. Whereas classical economics idealized economic agency and framed rational choice in terms of the decision theory, Simon insisted that agents need…

Walker Percy Wednesday 83

There is nothing like a liberal gone sour. ***** I told him this for two reasons. One was that it was the only reason he would believe, believing as he did that I was still a liberal and therefore capable of any madness. (Yet curiously it was for him an understandable madness: you know how…

Hume’s Call to Action

A review article of James Harris’ Hume: An Intellectual Biography Hume reconceived the task of philosophy. It ought not to be championed, as the ancient schools had done, as a “medicine for the mind.” Nor was it a source of rules for action that would guarantee righteousness. Its role was critical reflection rather than exhortation…