Congratulations to Ross Kenyon, whose latest C4SS piece has been picked up by the Christian Science Monitor!
The schedule for next month’s Alabama Philosophical Society in Pensacola (which looks to be our biggest yet) is now online. Abstracts will be added later. (I had planned to present a paper on the extent to which the Problem of Good, i.e. of reconciling the existence of goodness with the universe’s having been created by [...]
Three more blasts from the past (all a bit more recent than my blast from Oscarville): First, two papers I wrote for a science course in college: “The Temptation of Ludwig Boltzmann” (a short sf story exploring the implications of Boltzmannian probability theory – though Amazon thinks it’s something else) and “Evolution: Chance or Teleology?” [...]
I recently had reason to link to my 2006 Mises philosophy seminar files, and saw that the relevant page on the Mises site looks somewhat confusing these days, so I made my own page of links.
The following letter appeared in today’s Opelika-Auburn News: To the Editor: Elizabeth Rutland writes that the debate over gambling needs to focus on the moral issues (Sunday, “Bingo issue is a matter of morality, not legality”). I agree, but I think she misses the major moral issue: Is it moral to ban gambling? Do we [...]
C. S. Lewis’s article “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” is simultaneously an excellent argument against the rehabilitative or therapeutic approach to punishment, and a lousy argument in favour of the retributive approach to punishment. Lewis makes a compelling and eloquent proto-Szaszian case for the thesis that punishment not based on responsibility is wrong; but, never [...]
Under the feudal system, rights to one’s person were alienable (swearing fealty to a lord was irrevocable) while rights to land often weren’t (a feudal lord couldn’t sell his estate, as it belonged in perpetuity to his heirs) – the exact reverse of the rights system that most libertarians advocate. Forbidding the alienation of rightfully [...]
I was just watching part of a Congressional presentation on C-Span honouring the slaves who built the u.s. capitol – not by making restitution to their heirs, of course, but by setting up some sort of plaque. What especially bugged me was the speakers’ continual references to expressing “thanks” and “gratitude” for the slaves’ “sacrifices” [...]
How bad a given policy is depends on which party is in power – according to, this time, Thomas Sowell.
New studies suggest that the human fetus is incapable of feeling pain during the first six months. (CHT Der Leiter.)
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
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