Adrian Rutt is a philosophy professor in Cleveland, Ohio.
In recent years, shelves have been stocked with books about the boogeyman of postmodernism; the demise of truth and the popularity of fashionable relativism; the increasing irrelevance of facts and science to politics and policy; the ascendancy of affective polarization; plummeting trust in traditional institutions and experts—all wrapped up
One of the themes of Greg Sargent’s 2018 book, An Uncivil War, is that our politics is caught in a “downward, self-reinforcing spiral.” Unsurprisingly, the two parties view each other as the primary reason we’re caught in a dysfunctional tailspin. From the Republican point of view, “Democrats regularly
The average person, but especially conservatives, would likely tell the story of American progress, how we became so affluent, healthy, and well-educated, as filtered through the lens of capitalism and freedom—the gradual unleashing of the power and efficiency of the market. The free market, in this telling, is just
When it comes to racism in the United States, there is a divide on the left between those who think we need a kind of spiritual reckoning, a full and honest confrontation with our past—with slavery, with racism, with something called “whiteness”—and those who think that it’s
“[M]y hunch is that Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs,” Richard Rorty wrote. “J.S. Mill’s suggestion that governments devote themselves to optimizing the balance between leaving people’s lives alone and preventing suffering,” he went on, “seems to me
If we look for people who made no mistakes, who were always on the right side, who never apologized for tyrants or unjust wars, we shall have few heroes and heroines. “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement,” Richard Rorty wrote. “Too
“Anyone who believes that if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem is part of the problem.” Aaron Haspel Guns and fetuses. Out of all the issues that have plagued American democracy in the past few centuries, none seem to reach the tenor and
In a recent piece for Vox, Zach Beauchamp claims that “Many modern liberals, including some brilliant and well-regarded thinkers, do not seem up to the task of defending liberalism from its newest wave of critics.” He says that they lean on old arguments and sit smugly on the victories of
Universities have once again come under attack from not only those who claim that the costs outweigh the benefits, but from those who see the whole business of a university as Athens viewed Socrates: corrupting the youth and denying the gods of Objectivity, Truth, and Western Civilization. They see the
Steven Pinker recently penned a piece reflecting on all the noise surrounding his recent book, Enlightenment Now. He says, You wouldn’t think that a defense of reason, science, and humanism would be particularly controversial in an era in which those ideals would seem to need all the help they
What is America? The question has been asked endlessly. And I’m not going to answer it here. Asking “what is America?” is like asking “what is liberalism” or “what is an apple?” On first glance, it seems simple. But then you start asking questions and thinking about all the
Recently, Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath wrote an essay on social constructivism in which he tries to clean up some ambiguities and tensions. I think he’s right to point out that the debate between social constructivism and biological determinism is really just an extension of the old nature versus nurture
In the 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC, the Court went out of its way to rule on matters never actually brought up in the original brief, making it a landmark case instead of a rather plain and incremental one based on precedent. Yet the decision was far
The standard story behind America’s founding goes something like this. In an effort to break the chains off tyranny and unrepresentative tax schemes, American colonists staged a rebellion and, soon, a full-fledged revolution against their mother country, Great Britain. After the hard-won, almost miraculous, victory some Americans realized that
Paul Crider’s recent piece Intersectional Liberalism is good evidence for how expansive the word “politics” has become. He says, “Any liberalism worth defending must be intersectional,” where intersectionality is defined as a “descriptive understandings for how lives can be shaped by identities and their interactions when they overlap.” “A
In 2010, Ken Minogue penned his last full-length book The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life. As fond as I am of democracy I am still inclined to (begrudgingly) call it a critical tour de force. It’s a full-on assault on the assumptions, procedures, intricacies, and inner