Iain McGilchrist richly explains the right and left hemispheres of the brain, how each functions and what each tends to do. This paper serves, firstly, as a primer to McGilchrist’s fascinating exposition. Second, it offers a formulation that uses a spiral to structure the iterative and layered...

Jordan Peterson says that postmodernists say no interpretation is better than another. Hmm. I would no sooner identify Peterson's adversaries as those who have been misled by "postmodernism" than I would identify them as misled by "sustainability," "diversity," "multiculturalism," or...

Adam Smith was allegorical, knowingly and profoundly, but after him things went downhill, or even dropped off a cliff. From science anxieties many liberals spurned allegory, touting foundations, facts, science, etc. But we see in their discourse, notably on the economic system as cooperation,...

The present 77 page document is my set of notes used in a five-part reading group on Larry Siedentop's great book Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. The document contains a link to the set of videos online

This piece is a prologue to a symposium, cosponsored by the Acton Institute, that asks its contributors: Does professional economics need enrichment by religious or quasi-religious thinking? Many common criticisms of professional economics propose the incorporation of richer concepts and...

This paper explores concepts under a rubric termed “jural,” the meaning of which is differentiated from “legal.” Within the conceptualization of the modern nation-state, there are two categories of jural relationships. In the first, both parties have equal jural standing (equal-equal),...

Scholars distinguish between gratitude, which involves not only appreciation of benefit but a positive feeling directed to the benefactor, from gratefulness, which does not necessarily involve any benefactor, much less a feeling toward one (‘I am grateful for the warm sunshine.’). I suggest...

My university – George Mason University – has announced a Task Force on Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence. I gave a lecture about the discourse of those advocating such agendas. The lecture draws on Adam Smith and suggests that improprieties riddle such discourse. I treat improprieties of...