philosophy

Chance and choice converge to make us who we are, and although we may mistake chance for choice, our choices are the cobblestones, hard and uneven, that pave our destiny. They are ultimately all we can answer for and point to in the architecture of our character. Joan Didion captured this with searing lucidity in …

Taking time for thoughtful consideration has fallen out of fashion, writes Emily Chamlee-Wright. How can we restore good faith and good judgement to our increasingly polarized conversations? The clamor of the crowd during a heated discussion can make it hard to tell who is right and who is wrong. Adam Smith wrote that the loudness …

The authoritarian excesses of cancel culture cannot be divorced from the deep incentives felt by status quo industries and institutions. There’s a famous story of a Canadian inventor who developed an inexplicably fuel-efficient carburetor. Men from the oil industry reached out to him. The inventor soon disappeared and he and his carburetor were ultimately never …

Question: Why does anyone need a philosophy? Answer:  “You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions—or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, …