Philosophy articles feature reflection and analysis about public life, values, ethics, and morals.
All philosophy articles at Brownstone Institute are translated into multiple languages.
That attitude, requiring us to spend our intellectual resources to an extent that may be comparable with that to which Canguilhem exerted his intellect in writing The Normal and the Pathological, will exhaust us. But we must remember that is precisely what we adults should do.
Revisiting Georges Canguilhem in a Pandemic Read More »
While the story is fiction, the moral drama here is real and affects the whole of history. Every highly productive person – we don’t even have to speak of geniuses here – often ends up surrounded by resentful and mediocre people who have too much time on their hands. They use whatever limited talents they have to plot, confound, confuse, and ultimately wreck their betters. The demand to “comply” is always the watchword: it’s a tool of destruction.
Mozart, Mediocrity, and the Administrative State Read More »
Despite every mandate, closure, and imposition – despite the destruction of rights, liberties, and law – the virus would have its way. No class would be protected. No profession was immune. No amount of power or pomp would make a difference. Covid would come for everyone.
The US President Finally Gets Covid Read More »
Fundamentally, human rights cannot be dependent on compliance with public health officials. Or politicians. Or the whims of philanthropists and their favorite corporations. These rights must be an intrinsic part of being human, irrespective of the circumstance, irrespective of age, gender, parentage, wealth, or health status. Or we are, indeed, just complex chemical constructs with no real intrinsic value. Society, and each individual, must decide.
Are We Free By Right or Not? Read More »
A partnership of mutual benefit has developed over the past two decades, blurring the dichotomy between wealthy oppressors and those whose oppression often enriched them. With public-private partnerships, human rights and humanitarianism became a fashion statement, allowing corporations and their celebrities to demonstrate that inequality can be veiled with empathy.
The Rise and Fall of the Human Rights Industry Read More »
Whatever it is that the World Economic Forum is promising does not look especially impressive by comparison to the normal freedoms we took for granted. Indeed, we let the experts have a go at it and they created a monstrous experience for billions of people the world over. This will not be soon forgotten.
The Crash and Burn of Credentialism Read More »
The Bodies of Others is a personal, deeply empathic and excellently written tribute to the innermost layer of freedom, the very core that defines us as human beings. Or in Naomi Wolf’s own words: “The object of this spiritual battle? It seemed to be for nothing short of the human soul.”
Evil In Our Time: Naomi Wolf on the Covid Response Read More »
We live in a time when powerful forces, wielding very powerful new informational weapons, seek to place a wedge between ourselves and practices which have long been essential to the search for self-knowledge, social meaning, and the ability to promote and safeguard human dignity.
How Many Among Us are Suckers? Read More »
In his four years of struggle with what was a terminal cancer, Dr. Zelenko looked death in the eye numerous times. He said that these experiences made him unafraid of the opinions of men. But I think that he had a strength of character that enabled him to get to that point, separate from his own illness, that surely made him unique.
In Memory of Dr. Vladimir Zev Zelenko Read More »
For young Germans, the covid period has a bittersweet silver lining. It has become clear, again, that the Nazis of the 1930s were entirely normal people, and that everyone else in the world can be a Nazi too. The Germans can release themselves from the belief that there is anything abnormally evil about being German. There is a potential Nazi in all of us.
We Can All Be Evil and the Germans Were Nothing Special Read More »
The elites that deign to rob us of our bodily sovereignty and so much more in the name of Covid, or whatever other “mortal health threat” that they choose to publicize next through their carpet-bomber control of most media, have all done their homework on the frame game and carefully tailor their communications to fit with its imperatives.
Bill Gates and the Frame Game Read More »
At every turn, the story of the world’s response to Covid is the story of power: The perception of it, the exercise of it, the fear of it, the abuse of it, and the pathological lengths to which some will go to obtain it.
Your Misery Is All About Their Power Read More »
