My Cato Essays


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My interview with Aaron Powell and Trevor Burrus of Libertarianism.org has just been posted.

THE RADICAL NOTION OF INDIVIDUALISM

George H. Smith joins us to talk about Libertarianism.org’s first book, which is a reader on the topic of individualism.

This week George H. Smith joins us to talk about Individualism: A Reader, the first in a series of readers published by Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. In it, Smith and his co-editor Marilyn Moore have compiled 26 selections from 25 writers on the topic of individualism. How has the idea of individualism evolved over time? What are some common misconceptions about individualism? Is a commitment to individualism somehow antithetical to the idea of community?

Ghs

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George, I have the second edition of Popkin's book (2003), which has in its subtitle the span: From Savonarola to Bayle. Marvelous intellectual history. Popkin notes rightly that any inference from Pyrrhonist skepticism to keeping with tradition and with the Catholic faith is a non sequitor. Likewise for any inference to questioning tradition and Catholic doctrine. Naturally, I wonder if any uses made of Pyrrhonism in the modern era either in support of political conservatism or in support of political liberalism or in support of the state or in opposition to it are also one and all non sequitors. I suppose it need not concern all skeptics that inferences from their skepticism to religious or political conclusions are fallacious, but surely it should concern one like Montaigne who tried to craft a wholly rational path into Pyrrhonism.

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Looks like #200 will arrive in time for Christmas.

I have never seen such a gigantic cascade of high quality intellectual productivity. Is this how Gibbon worked when he wrote about Rome?

It might be helpful for future readers if these essays were conglomerated by subject emphasis and electronically published.

--Brant

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Looks like #200 will arrive in time for Christmas.

I have never seen such a gigantic cascade of high quality intellectual productivity. Is this how Gibbon worked when he wrote about Rome?

It might be helpful for future readers if these essays were conglomerated by subject emphasis and electronically published.

--Brant

Mega dittos on that idea!!

big-thumbs-up-smiley-emoticon.gif

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The Libertarianism.org podcast of my Essay #44 is now up. Titled "Jack and Jill and Two Kinds of Freedom," this is among my personal favorites.

Ghs

If one goes by objective judgement based on -what is observable- there is little difference between a Prudent Predator and a Good Guy. In terms of social regulation the winning repeated Prisoner's Dilemma strategy Tit-For-Tat will work out just as well as trying to reform the Prudent Predator and make him a Moral Operator..

Moral Principles function primarily as constraints rather than prescriptions. That is why social organizations in which Moral Principles are the operating norm use less energy to do their business than prescription based modes.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Great, great, great!

Hey, Greg! If you can walk on hot coals read this. If you can't, just the last two paragraphs.

--Brant

I believe that Darrow used a variation of this in the Scopes trial when he examined William Jennings Bryant as an expert in the Bible [which is the Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, as one of my fundamentalist friends refers to it]:

Darrow related the stopping of the sun in the sky for Joshua ?? and why the buildings and people did not fly off the ground having no gravity anymore...

Bryant responded that he believed in a God that created everything and that he could stop those natural laws if he chose.

Perhaps the most scandalous part of the Theologico-Political Treatise was its unequivocal rejection of miracles. A miracle is said to be an event that contravenes the laws of nature. According to Spinoza, however, those natural laws are themselves manifestations of the divine nature, so to say that God contravened natural law is to say that God “acted against his own nature—an evident absurdity.” Indeed, since God is perceived through the “immutable order of nature,” our knowledge of God increases along with our understanding of nature. But a miracle defies rational comprehension, so it actually diminishes our knowledge of God.

In addition, a miracle would be an insult to the divine nature, because it implies that “God has created nature so weak, and has ordained for her laws so barren,” that he must repeatedly tinker with his flawed creation through miracles. Deists would later have a field day with this argument. It was even used by the German philosopher Leibniz against the claim of Isaac Newton that God must occasionally intervene in the natural course of events to keep the universe running properly. This would suggest, according to Leibniz (who was not a religious skeptic), that an omnipotent and omniscient deity was unable to create a perfect universe on the first try.

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  • 2 weeks later...

My weekly Essays were wearing me down a bit, so Libertarianism.org agreed to give a some time off. I won't be posting again until early next month. Meanwhile, I will use the extra time to finish up the next Libertarianism.org book: "Critics of State Education: A Reader," which is overdue. I just need to finish the introduction and the anthology will be ready to go. It contains many wonderful, hard-core pieces by 19th-century voluntaryists (Baines, etc.) and other principled opponents of state education. I would wager that most of the selections will be new to even well-informed libertarians. After that book is published next in line is "Herbert Spencer: A Reader." The content of future Readers after Spencer is still being deliberated. As with the first Reader on Individualism, Marilyn Moore will be the co-editor

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  • 1 month later...

I've gotten lazy and neglected to list my recent postings on Libertarianism.org. Here they are.

My latest essay in the series on Freethought and Freedom: "Spinoza on Freedom of Religion and Speech."

http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/freethought-freedom-spinoza-freedom-religion-speech?mc_cid=be766b0d64&mc_eid=68fdc83f45#.qebnxb:vS17

The first two parts of my series "Ayn Rand and Altruism" are now available on podcasts.

Part 1

Part 2

Ghs

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  • 2 weeks later...

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