Articles & Essays – Page 75

Anger—what is it good for?

August 18, 2016 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays

When a philosopher writes a book with five abstract nouns in a six-word title, you might justly fear a laboured tome of desiccating logical analysis. When the author is Martha Nussbaum, however, you can be reassured. Nussbaum is one of the most productive and insightful thinkers of her generation, though strangely undervalued in the UK. She combines a philosopher’s demand for conceptual clarity and rigorous thinking with a novelist’s interest in narrative, art and literature.

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Aristotle and the Palace of Westminster

August 11, 2016 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays

Virtue is finding the balance between giving appropriate value to our inheritance and the need to move forward and change. In other words, both radicals and traditionalists see things that are of value, but go wrong when they give weight to only one of them and so end up pursuing it to excess.

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A day to celebrate paying tax

August 1, 2016 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays

31 July should have been a day of great civic celebration. For the first 212 days of the year, every penny you’ve earned you’ve kept for yourself. In the meantime, you’ve been enjoying and helping others enjoy the health service, public education, kerbside waste collection, policing, defence, pensions, roads and welfare payments, all for free. Only since Sunday have you started to contribute your share to all these and many more benefits of a modern, developed state.

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Free will and Brexit

July 26, 2016 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays

Among all the disagreements over Brexit, one thing at least might appear to be uncontroversial: the decision was a free choice taken by the British people. Brexiteers would say that it was in fact a double victory for freedom, in that the result is a freer country, unshackled from the constraints of the European Union. If this summary seems self-evident it is only because the very idea of freedom has been debased. Brexit is not a paradigmatic instance of freedom at work, but of freedom being confused with something much less valuable: choice.

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Corbyn’s populism is no good for our democracy

July 25, 2016 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays

Think of populism and you’ll likely think of the nasty rightwing nationalism of Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders or Nigel Farage. But if Jeremy Corbyn is re-elected as Labour leader, it will be a mild-mannered socialist who will have led the most successful populist campaign in Britain in decades.

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