Adrian Rutt is a philosophy professor in Cleveland, Ohio.
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
“The only sin,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1841, “is limitation.” It was in this spirit (and under this influence) that John Dewey wrote some years later in How We Think that “growth is the only moral end.” Growth as a theme runs like a golden thread through all of