Backcasting: Why and How the Past and Present Drive the Future
Backcasting is one of several methods futurists use to understand possible futures. Futurists, of course, cannot “tell the future,” but they work hard to...
Who Defends Democracy and On What Grounds?
Democracies have been in decline, and many scholars are now rightly asking how this process can be halted. Much of the research on democratic...
Democratic Law in the State of Nature: A Kantian Reconstruction
A familiar puzzle sits at the heart of contemporary legal and political philosophy. On the one hand, rights are taken to exist prior to...
Depression as a Philosophical Problem: Rethinking the Meaning of Suffering in the Era of...
When I was sixteen, I was hospitalized for depression for six weeks and put on Prozac. At the time, I was taught that depression...
Evil in Narrative Fiction
Imagine you read Kant. You may disagree with him, you may be bored by his style, but you will persevere, for after all, he...
Socrates Would’ve Absolutely Adored ChatGPT
Go on, admit it—you use ChatGPT (or something like it) more than you are willing to admit. You use it for all sorts of...
Foraging Thoughts
Few joys in my childhood memory rival the picking of blackberries under the scorching Greek sun. The rising dust, the dry and hot wind,...
When Society Stops Knowing How to Know
Over the past two decades, we have watched the pillars of public knowledge gradually weaken. John Stuart Mill is probably turning in his grave...
Immanence All the Way Down (and Across): Horizontal Transcendence in First Reformed
Paul Schrader crafted his 2018 film First Reformed to be, among other things, an extended phenomenological argument that transcendence requires moving beyond the physical...
Occupational Choice, Liberal Freedom, and Social Necessity
Occupational choice is for many an existential and deeply personal matter. An avowed goal of liberal societies has always been to permit citizens to...