Tag: History
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The Spiritual Equivalent Of War
Contesting Flabby Pacifism Imagine William James–now older and, it’ll turn out, just four years before death–delivering a public lecture at Stanford in which he’s telling fellow pacifists that their position isn’t philosophically defensible. In 1906, the feeling of war–with a long build-up to hostilities that will become WWI and the Boer War (1899-1901) not long…
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Does It Matter If There’s A Lot Of AI Hype?
In her book Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (2018), philosopher Shannon Vallor rightly points to one of the central puzzles we face today. This is that there’s, in her coinage, a stunning “epistemic opacity” with regard to how technology is and will unfold and, of course, with what…
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The Tribal Future Of The West: On The Need To Grow Up More
I’m currently two-thirds of the way through Mike Maxwell’s book Tribal Future of the West. While I know very little about Maxwell, it’s enough to say that he is clearly a critic of liberalism (i.e., of the liberal political order) as well as a proponent of tribalism. In what follows, I’ll briefly summarize his main…
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Indiscriminate Benevolence In A Society Without God
When I was living in St. Louis around 2006, I re-read Theodor Adorno’s darkly acerbic Minima Moralia. I recalled, just today, one of his searing lines about “indiscriminate benevolence”: Indiscriminate benevolence towards all constantly threatens that coldness and remoteness against each, which are once again communicated to the whole. Francis Fukuyama and Phil Zuckerman (in…
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Whatever Happened To Work, Friendship, & Family?
Charles Taylor argued quite convincingly in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) that one of the hallmarks of modernity is “the affirmation of ordinary life”: immanent goods like family, friends, and work are to be embraced. This marks the turn toward worldliness that is a fundamental feature still of the…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 