John Stuart Mill was a progressive in many ways. The English philosopher was a proponent of Benthem’s theory of utilitarianism, an abolitionist, and a feminist. (In fact, he was the first Member of Parliament to advocate women’s suffrage.) But Mill parted ways with other prominent thinkers—Marx and Nicolas Condorcet, among them—whose philosophies embraced man’s indefinite
READ MOREThe last few years have seen a good deal of conversation on education standards, spawned in large part by the arrival of Common Core. But according to the education site Chalkbeat, some states are instituting standards in far more than reading and math: “Tennessee will spend the next year on the task as one of
READ MORE“The American Dream is dead,” Donald Trump has proclaimed. Trump assures us not to worry because he is “gonna make it bigger and better and stronger than ever before.” And then comes Trumps’ oft-repeated punchline: “We are going to make America great again.” Where is American Greatness Found? In his book The Concept of Mind,
READ MOREOn more than one occasion my essays for The Imaginative Conservative have been inspired by bumper stickers. Many moons ago, for instance, I wrote “The Wisdom and Wickedness of Women” in response to seeing a bumper sticker declaring that “Well Behaved Women Do Not Make History.” Recently, sitting in traffic, I saw this very same bumper sticker on
READ MOREAlmost anyone of my generation will remember Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, he was a hero in the struggle against Soviet tyranny, as well as being one of the finest novelists and historians of the twentieth century. Back in the late-1990s, I had the inestimable honor to travel to Moscow
READ MORELast week, student leaders at the University of Houston drafted a bill giving the student body president emergency powers to punish one of its members, Vice President Rohini Sethi. Following the slaying of five police officers in Dallas, Sethi posted these two phrases on social media: “Forget #BlackLivesMatter; more like #AllLivesMatter” Her fellow student activists
READ MOREWhen it comes to texting, the period, full stop, point – whatever you call it – has been getting a lot of attention. People have begun noticing slight changes to the way our smallest punctuation mark is deployed, from declarations that it’s going out of style to claims that it’s becoming angry. What they’re actually
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READ MOREEthics are increasingly a part of the school curriculum, and practical introductory classes in applied ethics are part of the training that nurses, scientists and soldiers undergo. Ethical education is ubiquitous, even though it may not always involve complicated theoretical debates – but should it include a dose of philosophy? There are powerful reasons for
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