In 1660, Samuel Pepys, a 26-year-old civil servant in London, started writing a diary. He kept it up for about a decade before quitting, and the surviving record offers historians a rich glimpse into daily life in 17th century England. Take this entry from March 1, 1661. Pepys, an avid fan of theater, recorded his
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A large part of the controversy between Islam and the West boils down to scriptural hermeneutics. “Scriptural hermeneutics” refers to the lens that a person, group, or religion uses to interpret their respective scriptures. Most Christians, for instance, hold to some sort of theory of “divine inspiration” in regard to how the Bible was
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It’s probably important to preface any conversation on morality by noting that humans often struggle—mightily—to agree on what morality is. While it’s a thorny topic to define and explain, it would of course be foolish to avoid the pursuit of moral truths for this reason. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia
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In my reading on past education philosophy, I have repeatedly encountered the phrase “furniture of the mind.” Perhaps the first instance of it is found in one of the most famous educational documents in history—“The Yale Report of 1828”—where the faculty of Yale College (now University) said the following: “The two great points to be
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Last year, the ethicist Walter-Sinnot Armstrong asked whether philosophers were out of touch with, even contemptuous, of ordinary people and everyday life. The picture he paints isn’t flattering: Philosophers love to complain about bad reasoning. How can those other people commit such silly fallacies? Don’t they see how arbitrary and inconsistent their positions are? Aren’t
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Critics frequently accuse markets and capitalism of making life worse for the poor. This refrain is certainly common in the halls of left-leaning academia as well as in broader intellectual circles. But like so many other criticisms of capitalism, this one ignores the very real, and very available, facts of history. The biggest gains in
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