Kevin Vallier says that the American right is now a "strange blend" of three things: (1) Techno-optimism, exemplified by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and Trumpist, who thinks that "the forces of creative destruction, if appropriately organized, are on balance a good thing for humanity, and that one can generally count on technological advances to…

Sarah McBride advocates a politics of grace. In a recent conversation with Ezra Klein, she defines grace like this: I think grace in politics means, one, creating room for disagreement: assuming good intentions, assuming that the people who are on the other side of an issue from you aren’t automatically hateful, horrible people. I think…

I think the general type of view that Errol Lord presents in this paper is somewhat widely held, and Lord develops a sophisticated version of the view. For these reasons, the paper is valuable. But I do not agree with Lord's view. Lord's paper deserves a solid and careful critique, but I will not provide…

Conversation is like dancing. Some conversations are like square dances, some conversations are like mosh pits, and so on. If someone who's used to having mosh-pit conversations is paired up with someone who's used to having square-dance conversations, they might find it difficult to talk to each other without stepping on each other's toes. This…

Inward light is what I take to be the central idea of Quakerism. In its main forms, it has the following four features: It's in you: To find inward light, you're supposed to look inside yourself. This is something you are supposed to do instead of taking directions from religious authorities or texts. "Silent waiting"…

Tim Kenyon and Jennifer Saul have observed that Trump often "appear[s] uninterested even in constructing plausible falsehoods." They say he is a "bald-faced bullshitter." A bald-faced bullshitter is one who not only does not intend to induce in an audience a belief in what they have said; they moreover make no effort to hide that they…

Some people say that there is no such thing as desert. They say that bad people do not deserve to suffer, and that good people do not deserve to be rewarded. One way to reach such a view is via skepticism about freedom. If you think that (a) we deserve X only if we deserve…

There are many different views about what the basic stuff of material reality is. Some have said, for instance, that everything either is an atom or is made out of atoms; others have said that, in addition to atoms, there are forces as well; some have said that there are atoms, forces, and laws, and…

A few days ago, a somewhat prominent philosopher created a hullabaloo on Facebook by suggesting that hiring people "on the basis of" race or gender is unjustifiable, and is illegal, yet is commonplace in academia. In the comments to their post, I wrote: It seems to me that diversity is probably more useful in philosophy…

Recently, for a little while, many philosophers were toying with stoicism. Happily, the stoicism trend seems to be dying out. Here's The worst form of stoicism: The world around you is completely outside of your control, but your inner life is completely within your control. Everyone, I assume, can see why this form of stoicism…