“The pain of our corruption must be healed by virtue, knowledge, and eloquence.”—Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) In the wake of the “Trump phenomena” and other recent political developments, many people have become concerned that we have entered a “post-truth” era characterized by a contempt for objective facts. Fittingly, Oxford Dictionaries made “post-truth” the word of the
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Growing up, I knew better than to utter those two infamous words of childhood: “I’m bored.” The reason I rarely uttered them was because I knew that my mother would immediately find some type of chore to “entertain” me with. Today’s kids rarely utter the “I’m bored” phrase either. Only their reason for not doing
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One of the early-medieval words and concepts I’ve thought about bringing back is the ‘thede’. In old England, the ‘thede’ referred to the tribe. It was a familial, rather than an abstract, descriptor of the people or the nation. Even though it had a certain standing in common law, the thede is not to be
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Friday, Jan. 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day – an annual day that honors the memories of the victims of the Nazi era. Seven decades after Hitler perpetrated his terrible genocide on the Jewish people, the world is faced with a disturbing question: Can the Nazis be forgiven? As a member of a Jewish family
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It’s rare to find a book of philosophy which is so relevant to the debates of the day that it could have appeared on an op-ed page. But such is On Bullshit, by an emeritus professor at Princeton University, Harry Frankfurt. It first appeared in an academic journal in 1986 and 20 years later a
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Science always seems to be coming up with experiments which push the limits in the ethical realm. One of these occurred last fall when scientists announced that they had produced the first baby with three biological parents. Most recently, scientists now believe they are able to create a new type of creature by crossing a
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