On Flew’s Compatibilism and His Objections to Theistic Libertarianism

Libertarianism and Legitimacy : a Reply to Huebert

IT IS OBVIOUS FROM his review of my book that J.H. Huebert holds me in genuine high esteem. This saddens him all the more for, in his view, I have squandered my talents on so unworthy a topic as Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty, which he characterizes as “an unfortunate waste of talent for a powerful mind such as Randy Barnett’s” (p. 108). While there is much that I d...

Kymlicka on Libertarianism: a Response

In his well-known introduction to contemporary political philosophy,1 Will Kymlicka includes a substantial chapter on libertarianism, plus a preface and introduction that are also relevant to the topic. These sections are likely to help form many readers’ opinions regarding libertarian political philosophy. Unfortunately, many of Kymlicka’s assumptions and arguments seem to me to be crucially m...

On some early objections to Bohm’s theory

Recent literature on Bohm’s alternative to mainstream quantum mechanics may create the misleading impression that, except for perfunctory dismissals, the theory was ignored by the physics community in the years immediately following its proposal. As a matter of fact, Einstein, Pauli, and Heisenberg all published criticisms of Bohm’s theory, explaining their reasons for not accepting the theory....

Objections to hospital philosophers.

Like morally sensitive hospital staff, philosophers resist routine simplification of morally complex cases. Like hospital clergy, they favour reflective and principled decision-making. Like hospital lawyers, they refine and extend the language we use to formulate and defend our complex decisions. But hospital philosophers are not redundant: they have a wider range of principles and categories a...

Conscientious objections to reform.