He and I are walking towards the river on Clouet Street on our way to Mass. It is quarter to eight on a Sunday morning. We are smoking cigarettes a…
I graduated from college in May of this year. When I finished high school, I was convinced that institutional education was the tool of an authorit…
After dinner Claire and I go to the porch to smoke a cigarette. From her porch we see the sun setting on the horizon. To the south of Birmingham th…
The preface of the second edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason contains what I understand to be the most appropriate characterization of his g…
The primary activity of the human intellect, at least as it exists in the Western (European) cultural and philosophical tradition in which I find m…
I was born into a tradition of middle-class American suburban existence at the turn of the millennium. I grew up in communities — schools, sports t…
I have experienced an overwhelming concern with one primary intellectual debate for several years now, which I will introduce as the “rationalist v…
The name which Dostoevsky gives to the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, comes from ‘raskol’ — Russian for ‘schism’ or ‘split.’ It …
‘Akrasia’, a Greek term used to indicate an agent acting against his own better judgment, has been widely explored in philosophical literature as a…
In the worldview of most modern, classical, and even religious idealists, the material world is an unreliable, less beautiful, somewhat distorted a…
David Hume is widely recognized for his examination of the concept of causation and its significance in human perception. In his Enquiry Concerning…
It was always about words, or the lack thereof. I remember when you told me that the right way to smoke a cigarette was to…
There are many good reasons that human beings tend to stay in one place. There are simple reasons, like familiarity, which leads to safety (a biolo…
This semester I dropped out of school to read books, travel and drink beer with homeless people, which I’ve found is sometimes more educational and…
It is beautiful to conquer distance with a motor effortlessly, spontaneously to change surroundings and quench the mad thir…
In an article entitled “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research,” University of Michigan law professor Carl Cohen asserts that the p…
