Sounds of the Tides: Some Thoughts on Literature in the Vernacular

The late and much missed Sidney Morgenbesser used to say that the whole moral and intellectual dilemma posed by the universalism-particularism dichotomy was an uninteresting, if not false, one: to paraphrase Morgenbesser’s reasoning, we all come from a specific time and place, but we leave the world with more than what we were given by…

Left Out In The Cold: The Impact From The Sub-Prime Mortgage Collapse

by Beth Ann Bovino The house party has started to wind down. The result of these excesses has finally started to appear. Big sub-prime mortgage lender New Century Financial has filed for bankruptcy, while tens of thousands of sub-prime borrowers are unable to make their payments. Defaults on these mortgages, which are granted to homebuyers…

Monday Musing: Liberalism’s Loss of the Skeptical Spirit

I recently completed Raymond Geuss’ Outside Ethics, a collection of essays from various talks on contemporary Western political and moral philosophy. I’ve been a fan of Geuss’ work ever since reading his very thin but insightful book The Idea of a Critical Theory, which Ram once described as lacking an unnecessary word, and after taking…