Stephen Hicks reviews Nick and Gordon’s latest: an incentive for me to begin reading it given that all three are some of the best conference discussants I’ve come across. The Lockeans ask, “How can we raise everyone up?” while the Rousseaueans ask, “If we can’t raise all of the poor up, how can we lower…
Marking the loss of a musical giant – Levon Helm – this song’s lyrics has a form of the Lockean proviso (the song was written by Robbie Robertson): Back with my wife in Tennessee, when one day she called to me “Virgil, quick, come see, there go the Robert E.Lee” Now I don’t mind choppin’ wood,…
As mentioned in this paper, Locke and social epistemology is an improbable relation but . . . Locke’s reputation as a sceptic regarding testimony, and the resultant mockery by epistemologists with social inclinations, is well known. C.A.J. Coady paints Locke as an extreme example of epistemological individualism; Frederick F. Schmitt argues that Locke regards testimony…
Here’s an article in this month’s Atlantic. Rejecting the views of classic political philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau that primitive humankind started out as a collection of scattered, unorganized individuals, Fukuyama writes: “Human sociability is not a historical or cultural acquisition, but something hardwired into human nature.” Nowhere is Wilson, who pioneered this view,…
Here’s a write-up in the New York Times trumpeting a paper that apparently resolves Molyneux’s Problem: Research published online April 10 in the journal Nature Neuroscience may have finally answered the question, which has vexed philosophers and scientists for more than 300 years.
manwithoutqualities 