Philosophy

In this week’s Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon reviews Steven Pinker’s new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. As Dr. Gordon aptly points out, Pinker knows a lot less than he thinks he does.

In this week's Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon examines John Tomasi's thesis of Free Market Fairness that the collectivism espoused by John Rawls is compatible with classical liberalism. Not surprisingly, Dr. Gordon has another viewpoint.

When we speak of “justice,” how does one define it? More importantly, what is the authority by which justice is defined? Murray Rothbard believed that law and justice were derived from natural law, not the edicts of the state.

Historian Ralph Raico, who is well-known in Austrian circles, wrote that Lord Acton believed that principles of liberty came from religious roots, and especially the Catholic faith.

In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln offered an interpretation of the Declaration of Independence which reinterpreted a declaration of secession into a justification for crushing secession.

Economics, at its core, is the study of cause-and-effect relationships—analyzing how scarce resources, which have alternative uses, are allocated.

When the legal scholar Richard Posner labeled Critical Race Theory as having a “lunatic core,” he was echoing what Ludwig von Mises years before had written about polylogism. Unfortunately, CRT now dominates the nation‘s law school curriculum.

In his important lectures on the history of political thought, historian Ralph Raico examined five myths that many still believe about classical liberalism and the origins of modern ideology. 

Should we regard morality as objective or subjective? In today‘s Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon looks at the writings of Timothy Williamson, who argues that we can see morality in an objective light. On that point, he would agree with Murray Rothbard.

What do we mean by equality? F.A. Hayek believed that equality under law and the socialist belief of material equality were opposed to each other. Furthermore, he held liberty to be necessary for civilization itself to flourish.