A Reminder from Marcus Aurelius

Heraclitus famously said, “You cannot step into the same river twice.” He continued that thought with an explanation: “For it is not the same river and you are not the same person.” This is an even more radical statement than the more common phrase, “You can’t go home again.” We…

There’s a science to misinformation. Keith Raymond Harris is a doctoral research fellow in Philosophy at Ruhr University Bochum. He specializes in applied epistemology and metaphysics. (A quick reminder: “epistemology” is the term for how we know what we know and why we think we know what we think we…

American philosopher John Dewey — my candidate for the prototypical U.S. liberal — once said, “We only think when we are confronted with a problem.” I agree. As a liberal, I insist that taking the time to work (feel, think, talk, et cetera) our way through a problem is more…

So. What is liberalism? The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us this: Latin liberalis “noble, gracious, munificent, generous,” literally “of freedom, pertaining to or befitting a free person,” from liber “free, unrestricted, unimpeded; unbridled, unchecked, licentious.” mid-14c., “generous,” also “nobly born, noble, free;” from late 14c. as “selfless, magnanimous, admirable.” Liberal…

There’s a lot of debate about where the idea of liberalism comes from. If you want to take a serious look at the question, a good place to start is The Lost History of Liberalism from Ancient Rome to the Twenty-first Century by Dr. …

Suppose for a moment that every human being is an artist. For the sake of argument, let’s be specific — a visual artist painting on a cave wall, as our human ancestors did forty and fifty thousand years ago. Blank canvas, as it were for both the human and the…

Few have heard of the movement usually called humanism, even though it is well over a century old. Humanism is a post-Christian movement that rejects the supernatural and emphasizes the inherent moral capacities of the human animal and our ability to be good without the trappings of traditional scriptures. Many…

Western thinkers have long searched for the “unmoved mover,” meaning . . . some sort of god, or, at the least, something solid that is changeless, unlike . . . well, all of the reality that we actually observe. The concept was that — given all the movement in our…