Philosophy

Philosophy articles feature reflection and analysis about public life, values, ethics, and morals.

All philosophy articles at Brownstone Institute are translated into multiple languages.

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Banishing Ghosts after the Pandemic

Banishing Ghosts after the Pandemic

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Gratitude and its rewarding expression were sorely lacking during the Pandemic. Masks, medicines, and the disease of politics created wide rifts amongst friends and family. Some of the wounds may never heal, but the holiday where we remember our dead is over. Now we move into the season where we give thanks to those still with us.

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Chronicles of an unvaccinated leftist

Chronicles of an Unvaccinated Leftist

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The prejudice observed against the unvaccinated was far from minimal. It was two and a half times greater than the exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants from the Middle East. Researchers discovered that the unvaccinated were as disliked as individuals struggling with drug addiction and significantly more so than people who had been released from prison.

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depopulation bomb

The Depopulation Bomb: A Halloween Sci-Fi Tale

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A plague, a pestilence, a pandemic seemed more promising. Past naturally occurring pandemics had reduced human populations much more successfully than wars. The Black Death of 1346-53 may have reduced the world population by as much as 25 percent, a much more encouraging number than the measly 3 percent from World War II. As an added economic bonus, the Black Death served as a very effective concentrator of wealth for the survivors, as it caused minimal collateral property loss.

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Brownstone Institute at Year Three 

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This period of our lives has shattered the hopes and dreams of millions and billions of people, and practically buried the ideal of freedom as an anachronism in a new age of corporatist totalitarianism. The neo-Hegelians in our midst condescend to us and say that this is just how things are and there is nothing to be done about it. This is not true.

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covid amnesty

Covid Amnesty: Is Mercy the Answer?

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Until we have meaningful reconciliation, amnesty will merely cement the incumbents’ hold on academic, media, and narrative power, all but ensuring we repeat the failures of pandemic public health policy. Thus, for those of us who anticipated the harms to kids, we can further anticipate the harms of granting mercy to those whose trembling, intolerant hands still hold the cannons.

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sovereign people

Thomas Hobbes’s Philosophy Made Real 

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Considering these “rights which make the essence of sovereignty,” it does not take too much of a mental stretch to conclude that we live at a time when these have been appropriated by governments worldwide, essentially leaving political subjects with no rights or recourse like that which they (believed they) enjoyed before. 

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friendship

On Broken Friendships

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No matter what their basis or origin, friendships—and close relationships with selected kin—entail exchanging perceptions of the world and life. In so doing, friends influence each other’s thinking, even without trying to. Listening to friends or favored family members, or listening to ourselves talk to them, can also help us to figure out what’s true. Or at least what feels good to believe or say. 

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serfdom

Is Serfdom Humanity’s Default?

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The real problem is that, as our fellow Americans wind their way blithely down the road to serfdom, they are taking the rest of us with them. Because we cannot have a country in which some are allowed to live freely, according to their own lights, assuming the concomitant risks, while others are “guaranteed” a life free only from such decisions and responsibilities.

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The Left Needs to Find Itself

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The new movement of cancellation, vilification, exclusion, and abuse is not a left or right movement. It promotes a form of totalitarianism closer to fascism than anything else, whilst calling others “fascist” for valuing free thought and free association. Fascism is not a synonym for freedom; it has a different and unpleasant meaning.

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