Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Here : All of the great philosophers of the present era, beginning with Descartes, made the same mistake, and it colored their account of knowledge and indeed their account of pretty much everything. By ‘great philosophers’, I mean Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Kant. I am prepared to throw in Hegel and Mill if people think they are great philosophers too. I called this mistake the “Bad Argument”. Here it is: We never directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world. All we ever perceive are the perceptual contents of our own mind. This confusion rests on jumping from the fact that Berkeley says we perceive "ideas," to concluding Berkeley believes what we perceive is "all in our heads." But here is George Pappas on Berkeley: I know of no reason to think that Berkeley is committed to holding that each idea is private in the sense described. After all, any idea immediately perceived by a finite perceiver is also immediately p...

Again, I highly recommend following this course : Deneen is uniformly worth reading. He opens with a very important point: "We are to liberalism as fish are to water: we swim in its currents without necessarily ever stopping to consider what water is." Liberalism is so much a taken-for-granted assumption in our culture that we hardly notice it. So, the right and left in America don't even question the supreme value of "autonomy": they merely disagree on how to best realize it. And when someone who was at one point , say, a libertarian, rejects liberalism as a whole, people tend to be certain he must have just switched to some other form of liberalism. (E.g., "Callahan has become a progressive.") And almost right away, Deneen gets at the heart of the matter: Thus, Locke and Paine reject the idea that tradition, custom, inheritance, or generational ties are a constitutive part of our natures. Rather, we can only understand our true nature by st...

Here . Note the libertarian in the comments. He never addresses Bruenig's argument, because he can't: it would make nonsense of a view central to his self-image. So what he does do is keep changing the subject: "You haven't put forward a better theory," etc.

I heard some people the other day saying they had moved to Pennsylvania from New Jersey because the property taxes we're so much lower in Pennsylvania. (And there reason was to "save money," not any ideological opposition to taxes.) But you can't save money this way: all property taxes known of at the time of the sale are going to already be factored into the market price of the home. So the house in New Jersey with the higher taxes will sell at a reduction in price equivalent to the discounted future value of those higher taxes. That analysis of course applies to a perfect market with full knowledge on the part of all participants. Real people don't have perfect knowledge and are not rational calculating machines. But, to the extent that many people think like the couple I heard at the hot dog stand, it will tend to make houses in the region with lower taxes over-priced compared to the ones in the high-tax area! So, save money on your next home purchase, a...

Microsoft Word (at least on my Mac) has three different lists of styles: one is a bunch of boxes above the document, one is a pull-down list in the upper left corner of the window, and one is available from the "Format" menu. Here is the thing: each of the three presents a different list of styles, with some overlap between them. I have spent over twenty years using (and advocating the use of) MS-Word styles.(If you format your papers "by hand," for instance, by indenting each blockquote one-by-one, you really ought to stop.) And yet, I still have no clue as to why some styles appear on list A, some on list B, and some on list C, or why there should be three different lists at all. Note: I am not saying that there is no explanation: no, I am sure there is. But good software should "explain itself": after working with it for a time, the user should have an intuitive grasp of why the features work the way they do. Word does not do this.

So here is a perhaps left-of-center economist getting this topic all wrong: "If I can choose how much I work, and my wage stays the same, and I work more and my income rises, then I must be better off. Because if I was not better off, then I wouldn't have chosen to work more and earn more income." Here is the correct version of this statement: "If I can choose how much I work, and my wage stays the same, and I work more and my income rises, then I must have thought, at the time of choosing, that I would be be better off working more. Because if I had not thought I would be better off, then I wouldn't have chosen to work more and earn more income." This distinction is not a matter of quibbling over words! The context in which our choices are made can be essential in determining what we choose. For instance, if the culture praises work over family life, many people might choose to work more even though they would be happier spending more time with ...

“[t]he common good, and not the person and liberty, [is] the very principle of all law, of all rights, of all justice and of all liberty[.]” -- Charles De Koninck ( quoted here ) The idea of the common good is really not that hard to grasp. Consider the Detroit Pistons, a group of fourteen basketball players, a few coaches, trainers, many office personnel, and so on. And let's imagine the Pistons are having an off-year, and, as a result, every single person in the organization decides to spend their time hunting for a new job instead of doing their current one. (So each of the players, for instance, just looks to pad their stats, and stops worrying about winning games.) As a result, the organization falls apart. Although every individual in the group attended to (what he thought of as) his own good, none of them paid heed to the common good of the organization. Now, given the idea is so simple, why do so many people so strenuously deny any such thing exists? Well, if it ex...