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I have been helped by many people during the course of my life. I am indebted to all of them, for they made my happiness possible. But three men went out of their way to teach, nourish, and guide me. I came to love them like fathers. The first was Leslie H. Kutinsky, who hired me as his law clerk in January 1981. I have no idea what he saw in me. I was so nervous during our interview that I could barely talk, and I’m sure that what I said was incoherent. During the next three and a half...

Font Size: Why Liberals Think Conservatives Are Stoopid By Keith Burgess-Jackson Published 06/17/2003 E-Mail Bookmark Print Save TCS Philosophers, like scientists, love puzzles. There is no disgrace in being puzzled. It is a normal, healthy reaction to a puzzling world. Puzzlement goes hand in hand with curiosity, which, while not a distinctively human trait, is one that humans have carried to a high level. The puzzles that attract and delight philosophers are logical puzzles, such as how it is possible for freedom of the will to coexist with determinism (the view that every event, including human actions, has a cause)...

Two things have happened to me as I've aged, and I'm not talking about the deplorable decreases in my bicycling and running speeds. First, I've become better at spotting ideology. Second, I've become less tolerant of it. By "ideology," I mean a hermetically sealed worldview, one that filters out all and only disconfirming data. Ideologues, by definition, are closed-minded and dogmatic. They have no reality-testing mechanism. Evidence and argument of the sort philosophers and scientists take for granted have no effect on them. Indeed, the very standards of evidence and argument they employ are calculated to reduce their cognitive dissonance...

"A young person who's conservative has no heart; an old person who's liberal has no brain." Have you heard this saying? There are two ways it can be interpreted: as a statement of fact (about people's actual political trajectory) and as a judgment of value (about which trajectory is good). I read it as both. It says that as a matter of (natural) fact, there is a progression from liberalism to conservatism; and it adds (quickly) that this is good. The saying is both descriptive and prescriptive, like "S is lazy" and "T is a coward." It commends young liberals...

My teacher, Joel Feinberg, once wrote that, "Every philosophical paper must begin with an unproved assumption." Argument, in other words, must start somewhere, preferably with a proposition that is widely accepted. The unproved assumption of this column is that hatred is bad. The Oxford English Dictionary (2d ed.) defines "hatred" as "The condition or state of relations in which one person hates another, the emotion or feeling of hate; active dislike, detestation, enmity, ill-will, malevolence." To hate is "To hold in very strong dislike; to detest; to bear malice to. The opposite of to love." Each of us knows firsthand whether,...