Aristotle took a pragmatic, empirical approach to political science. For example, he (and his research assistants) collected over 150 constitutions of political communities so that he could analyze them. His concern, in his Politics, was to teach how political constitutions succeed and fail, in the hopes of helping his students…

Hannah Arendt, meet Maggie Gyllenhaal — Some time back, my sweetie and I were relaxing at home with the movie Secretary. It’s a silly story about a mousy young woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who becomes the secretary of an eccentric lawyer and who finds her job transforming into an erotic dominance-submission scene in which she learns to…

Here’s what the process looks like from beginning to end. — Brewing your own beer is fun, rewarding, and, if that’s not enough, it’s a good way to beat the federal excise tax on alcoholic beverages. In most states of the union it’s also legal. Today I’ll show you the process of brewing a batch of beer. It’s not that hard…

(The Only One That’s Coming?) — You see the beauty of my proposal is, it needn’t wait on general revolution. I bid you to the one-man revolution — The only revolution that is coming. — (Robert Frost, from “Build Soil”) Maybe, contrary to what the organizers of the world are always telling us, the key to…

“Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You overwhelmed me,” wrote Gandhi. “It left an abiding impression on me.” Ammon Hennacy wrote: “I felt that it must have been written especially for me, for here was the answer already written out to all the questions that I had tried to…

There’s a story about how Leon Czolgosz came to assassinate President William McKinley that goes something like this: Czolgosz came from a Roman Catholic family. …

How might an existentialist approach this notorious thought experiment of ethical philosophy? “Not only do we assert that the existentialist doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place.”―Simone de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity “I…

Petulant protest is ridiculous and counterproductive. Protesters must guard against the temptation to turn to petulant tactics, or they risk making a bad situation worse. Petulant tactics can take the form of “demands” with nothing much to back them up but the demand itself. Or they can be protest methods…

Being good involves interrelated skills (“virtues”) that are learnable and that most everyone can get better at with practice. Rules and maxims are poor substitutes for practice and habit when push comes to shove. Efforts to reduce ethics to one or a small handful of rules are perennially tempting and…