JAMES FRANKLIN is the author of The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal; Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia; What Science Knows: And How It Knows It; and An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics. He is honorary professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, where he taught mathematics for nearly forty years and set up the world’s first course on professional issues and ethics in mathematics. He is the editor of the Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society. He was awarded the 2005 Eureka Prize for Research in Ethics for work on the parallels between objectivity in mathematics and in ethics.
Titles by this Author
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Read MoreIn clear prose and deeply-informed philosophical argument, The Worth of Persons establishes a foundation for ethics in the equal worth of persons, which makes ethics absolutely objective and immune to relativist attacks because it is based on the metaphysical truth about humans.
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Read MoreTo scientists, the tsunami of relativism, scepticism, and postmodernism that washed through the humanities in the twentieth century was all water off a duck’s back. Science remained committed to objectivity and continued to deliver remarkable discoveries and improvements in technology.
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The triumphal Darwinian Centennial in 1959 seemed once and for all to end the argument between science and religion that had been raging since Thomas Huxley took up the cause of evolution in the Victorian era. As far as science was concerned, God was dead—case closed. But in the past two decades, as prize winning science writer Larry Witham shows in By Design, the case has been reopened. Advances in science suggest that the materialist “laws” may be incapable of comprehending the subtleties of evolution.
Common sense is the foundation of thinking and of human action. It is the indispensable basis for making our way in the world as individuals and in community with others, and the starting point for finding truth and building scientific knowledge. The philosophy of common-sense realism deeply informed the American Founders’ vision for a self-governing people, in a society where leaders and average citizens share essentially the same understanding of reality—of what simply makes sense.
Appeals to “human dignity” are at the core of many of the most contentious social and political issues of our time. But these appeals suggest different and at times even contradictory ways of understanding the term.
Anger now dominates American politics. It wasn’t always so. “Happy Days Are Here Again” was FDR’s campaign song in 1932. By contrast, candidate Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign song was Mary J. Blige’s “Work That” (“Let ’em get mad / They gonna hate anyway”). This is a book about how we got here—about how America changed from a nation that could be roused to anger but preferred self-control, to a nation permanently dialed to eleven.
Curiosity is the instinct that prompts us to act, and a book about curiosity should tell us how to live. This is the first to do so, with its twelve rules for life.
Is benevolence a virtue? In many cases it appears to be so. But when it comes to the “enlarged benevolence” of the Enlightenment, David Stove argues that the answer is clearly no.