In this week‘s Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon reviews The Harm in Hate Speech by Jeremy Waldron and finds Waldron‘s arguments in favor of hate speech laws to be wanting. Instead, Dr. Gordon looks to Murray Rothbard's views on speech as a standard to emulate.
Following the overtly anti-capitalist papacy of Pope Francis, one asks if Pope Leo XIV will follow his predecessor or steer the Roman Catholic Church‘s leadership back toward economic liberty and natural law. One hopes it is the latter.
In this week‘s Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon looks at the methodology of Timothy Williamson. While Williamson might not like the implication, Dr. Gordon notes that Williamson‘s methodology can be used to defend the epistemological views of Murray Rothbard.
Was Paul Heyne an ethicist who thought like an economist or was he instead an economist who thought like an ethicist? It was a bit of both. Heyne‘s popular text, The Economic Way of Thinking, educated a lot of students about how economics really works.
As a bookend to last week‘s critical article on Thomistic Aristotelianism of Alasdair MacIntyre, Dr. David Gordon in Friday Philosophy scrutinizes the libertarian-tolerant philosopher Henry B. Veatch. Dr. Gordon finds Veatch‘s arguments much more tolerable.
Tom Paine is one of the forgotten names of the American Revolution, but it can be argued that no other man was as important in galvanizing the thoughts of American colonials toward independence.
In today‘s Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon looks back upon the ethical views of the late Alasdair MacIntyre. While praising MacIntyre‘s work, Dr. Gordon points out that he never abandoned his Marxist views of economics, making much of his philosophical thinking crucially deficient.
Academic scholars tend to use Marxian terms when pointing out what they see as conditions of “oppression,” believing that race and class determine outcomes. However, the real world is not so abstract and things often are not what Marxists believe to be true.
Karl Marx still is revered by modern academics as a prophet. However, given Marx‘s penchant for making false predictions, at best he would be a false prophet, someone whose word cannot be trusted.
The antebellum abolitionist movement ranged from peaceful abolitionist societies in the South to groups in New England advocating violence and bloodshed. Unfortunately, the nation‘s political leaders chose to end slavery through violent means.
