It used to be that nobody would really argue with a woman, because what she thought (unless it was by way of providing helpful comments about one's o….

'Contract' succeeded 'status' as the basic organising principle in modern political vs. ancient society..

You can reasonably make the intellectual journey from thinking it's permissible to eat shrimp to thinking it's not permissible, or vice versa, wherea….

We call 'Slavery is wrong' a moral truth because there is a specific history of theoretical investigation of a particular kind of slavery. We discuss….

The Epicureans denied that the gods had created the world and also denied that they played any role in it..

For seventeenth-century astronomers, the Epicurean doctrine of multiple worlds separated by void space was seen to fit with the new Copernican system….

Even if the gods did exist, the Epicureans argued, they didn't care about us. Rather, everything comes from nature, and all that really exists are at….

I think we do have a better understanding now of how moral thought and discourse function..

For the chemists, who wanted to manufacture new medicines and elixirs and transform base substances into noble ones, the notion that there was no met….

Aristotle saw nature as intelligent and purposive, whereas for the Epicureans, and the 17th century 'mechanical' philosophers, there is no intentiona….

Outside of mathematics and logic, there are common sense truths, such as that it is snowing that normal observers, in a specified context can agree o….

Claims like 'Slavery is wrong' are not fully common-sensical, so they must be at least partly theoretical..

We have to gamble, and sometimes lose as George Ainslie argues; this keeps the appetite for life sharp..

About 70% of what I've written about is centered on the clashes and conformities between the emerging life and physical sciences and older metaphysic….

There's Hobbes, who understood in the 1640s that the sovereign is not an appointee of God, or even a figure of superior virtue and wisdom, but just a….

We need grief as a precursor to emotional refreshment, and so consume it vicariously in somewhat titrated but powerful enough form through engagement….

Moral claims aren't, as a class, truth-value apt or not..

We use and need to use both systems in complex political societies, and we oscillate in our commitments, because both oligarchy and rule by the will ….

Atomism had no absolute 'above' and 'below' and no such rulers, so favoured the undersranding of justice as an agreement amongst equals..

I don't see how being a faster runner, or a better mathematician makes you 'deserve' access to a better life, or more influence on policy, in the abs….

Human courtship has some wild extremes. At one end of the spectrum, there is harassment, pestering, blackmail, and an abuse of institutional power, w….