The rights of future generations: A practical approach
10 January 2025
The Brundtland Commission and the rise of sustainable development While there were certainly many precursors, the ‘rights of future generations’ them...
Micro and macro philosophy
03 January 2025
That’s what it is to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those… of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a mil...
Unofficial diplomacy: Jean-Yves Ollivier
21 December 2024
If you want to go into an African village, always let someone from the village accompany you.– Félix Houphouët-Boigny, President of the Ivory Coast The historian Andrew J. Bacevich has revisited the issue of democracies and wars of choice in his recent book Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country. The argument ...
West vs East: Approaches to fighting corruption
05 December 2024
Corruption – the improper mixing of public and private interest – is one of the scourges of contemporary society. How should we go about fighting it? Alasdair Macintyre is a well-known philosopher, who begins his book, After Virtue, with a metaphor: Imagine that the natural scienc...
How and why language is hardening in modern discourse
11 November 2024
Unfamiliar words have entered everyday communication. I read German and Italian occasionally and have observed convergent changes in both. I remember...
Collateral consequences: The unseen price of consumerism
05 October 2024
Our hunter/gatherer ancestors had, say, 300 stock-keeping units (SKUs) – the managerial term for worldly goods. In New York City alone, the SKU is well over 10 billion nowadays (see The Mind of...
Diplomatic extraterritoriality
23 September 2024
I’ve just woken up after many hours of driving, shopping, and cooking (I believe in cooking as chain production). As I am going through the backlog of mail, I’m struck once more by the power ...
The dangers of believing states always act rationally
15 September 2024
On the Wikipedia page for Realism (international relations), it is stated: Realism is a tradition of international theory centered upon four proposit...
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