Booklog 
Plato’s Apology(21)
After returning from my Balkan adventures, I can now return to the serious business of using Plato to teach reasoning. Let us turn to the Apology.
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An Open Letter to National Public Radio
Kudos to the Morning Edition staff! I have been an NPR listener almost from the beginning, and while I am constantly impressed by the errors and distortions that pepper your reporting on literature and history, I must confess that even I was bowled over by Robert Krulwich’s conversation with Stephen Greenblatt on the subject of the Roman poet Lucretius. In only a few minutes Prof. Greenblatt managed to get just about everything wrong except for the fact that Lucretius lived 2000 years ago.
The Liberal Tradition I: Introducing a Few Basic Concepts
I am going to use the word “liberal” in a very broad sense to refer to the modern movement in ethics and politics that begins in the Renaissance, develops in the Enlightenment, and culminates in the classical liberalism of the 19th century. Socialism–and the other isms that have plagued European man for the past two centuries—is a byproduct of the liberal tradition.
Booklog: Liberal Books
I have started work on a piece analyzing the rights and wrongs of the classical liberal tradition. To do it properly, I am going to review a number of major works in that tradition, specifically, Mandeville, Condorcet, Smith, Godwin, JS Mill, Fitzjames Stephen, and Hayek. I do not intend to spend a great deal of [...]