Philosophy

Daniel Wahl reviews Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America, by Anonymous.

Craig Biddle answers a letter about tolerance, and Raymond C. Niles answers a letter about open-source software.

Includes the book's final, summarizing chapter along with an afterword on terrorism and an appendix on emergency situations.

Craig Biddle answers a letter about whether Jesus calls for violence against unbelievers.

An independent thinker faces reality and thinks for himself. A second-hander faces other people and expects them to think for him.

[caption id="attachment_28169" align="alignright" width="241"] Image: Wikimedia Commons[/caption] In a recent Christian Science Monitor editorial, Vladimir Shlapentokh suggests that the popularity of Ayn Rand among Tea Partiers should “concern all Americans” and recommends that Tea Partiers distance themselves from the 20th-century philosopher and novelist. Why? According to Shlapentokh, Ayn Rand was…

In Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist, Tara Smith dives deep into the virtues on which life depends, showing why they are requirements and what they demand. Here are six quotes I particularly liked, from Smith's chapter on honesty: "As the refusal to fake reality, honesty consists in a deliberate,…

Here’s a beautiful (albeit harrowing) passage from Meslier’s Superstition in All Ages: What light could have been thrown into the minds of many famous thinkers, if, instead of occupying themselves with a useless theology, and its impertinent disputes, they had turned their attention upon intelligible and truly important objects. Half…

Burgess Laughlin reviews Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, by C. Bradley Thompson with Yaron Brook.

Discusses the necessary conditions of a civilized society—or, the moral nuts and bolts of freedom and capitalism.