Philosophy

The empirical evidence that you are not special is overwhelming, David McCullough Jr. famously observed in a 2012 graduation speech. 

Dogma cannot be separated from education, G.K. Chesterton argued.

Even intellectual giants cling to their dogmas. But does this intellectual intolerance do a disservice to the advancement of ideas?

The question "Is truth dead?" expresses a legitimate concern in an age of rampant subjectivity. But truth will never die.

Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius believed that battling reality was futile.

G.K. Chesterton believed that men, by nature, tend to be monomaniacal. Women are not.

The choice between virtue and vice is a human choice.

Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for on the war crimes trial of Nazi Adolph Eichmann.

G.K. Chesterton thought that the matter of the vote for women should be left to a vote of women.

Many on the left now hold that structural inequalities in society are so overwhelming that reason itself is largely futile, Andrew Sullivan writes.  

Since 2001 the United States has been in a perpetual state of undeclared war. We have ignored Madison’s warning for too long.

In their effort to right wrongs, the Social Justice warriors often commit the very evil they are attempting to erase.

One of the overarching desires in life – whether we admit it or not – is to simply be happy. We know it’s not always feasible or realistic, yet it’s something we desire on some level—for ourselves, our spouses, and most especially, our children.

Resilience depends not only on what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us.  

"I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured; but I doubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by the absurd modern attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitive clerks at the same time."

Liberalism simply observed that things go better with freedom – not perfectly, not always, not toward creating utopia, but generally much better than any kind of imposition from above ever can.

In his autobiographical book A Confession, Leo Tolstoy described the nihilistic beliefs that haunted him.

In 'What’s Wrong with the World,' G.K. Chesterton argued that capitalists and socialists alike show little interest in defending our most basic social unit.

Does our society need to revive the simple straightforwardness of cultivating rational creatures?

In her classic work The Origins of Totalitarianism, the philosopher Hannah Arendt described loneliness as 'the common ground for terror' and 'the essence of totalitarian government.'

Forcing an equality of outcome for disadvantaged groups requires enormous outside interference.

In his classic book 'The Art of Loving,' social psychologist Erich Fromm explained how 'being in love' depends largely on increasing our own capacity to love.

The belief that humans are perfectible leads, inevitably, to mistakes when ‘a perfect society’ is designed for an imperfect species.

Only in a free-market system can we truly achieve individual liberty and human flourishing.

It's not as ridiculous as it might seem. 

The claim that that humans possess an “internal GPS” that will always lead them to the highest good is not a tenable idea.

In his book, Self-Renewal John W. Gardner tries to answer “the puzzle of why some men and women go to seed while others remain vital all of their lives.”

Telling others to 'get on the right side of history' is not just a form of intellectual bullying. It also reveals a tyrannical dimension to those who'd invoke the future to destroy the past.