Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

In reply to Roderick T. Long. Well, as Al Kindi said, the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing. LikeLike

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. Mustafa Akyol’s heart is in the right place, but man, when he starts talking about Islamic intellectual history he gets everything confused. He thinks that because the Mu’tazilites were pro-reason, they must have…

There are many European grand masters of arguably greater technical proficiency than their American counterparts. Go through any museum containing both American and European painting, and you’ll probably see this. Or ask an expert, and they’ll probably…

In reply to Roderick T. Long. As it happens, I’m attending a Liberty Fund this weekend organized by Mustafa Akyol and moderated by Charles Butterworth: “Freedom and Coercion in the Qur’an.” I feel as though I’ve been somew…

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. Only tangential, but your mentioning Charles Butterworth reminds me of Butterworth’s telling me at a Liberty Fund that Ibn Sina (of all people) was a “religious fanatic” — because he hadn’t been …

In reply to Roderick T. Long. Belated comment in passing: I happen to be reading al Farabi’s Book of Religion (Kitab al Millah), and it turns out that, to my surprise, he endorses something like “the picture we find in Hayek, Leoni, Benson,…

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. You’re now forcing me to adopt Australian spellings of ordinary words, like “center.” You see how insidious a thing domination can be? LikeLike

In reply to butimbeautiful. I agree; those are all problematic instances of “wokeness” in its invidious sense. But you yourself have diagnosed the problem here. A certain class of people–Right, Centre, and Left–has, under the in…

In reply to mlyoung57. No matter where you set the bar, at a certain point you have to ask yourself, empirically: what in the world are we really talking about? How much of the actual world is characterized by the thing that satisfies your criterion, o…