Russell Hasan's Blog

I recently had a vigorous, healthy (i.e. mean and nasty) debate in a Libertarian discussion group on social media. I argued that rich children have an unfair advantage over poor children because poor children are trapped in failing public schools, and rich children can attend good private schools. The two people I was debating (one of whom was nice but foolish, the other absolutely vicious) could not think past the mistaken idea that I was saying it is unfair because the rich have more money and can afford to send their children to private schools, and poor people can't, which is NOT my argument. My argument was the libertarian argument that the government uses VIOLENT FORCE to compel poor children to attend the failing public schools, because of our rotten socialized k-12 public education system and compulsory attendance. Because the government uses this force against poor children, but not rich children, it is UNFAIR for the poor children, and the law is treating rich children di...

This mini-essay was expanded upon in my e-book The Apple of Knowledge. If this interests you, please take a look at my book. The Philosophy of Science. Many famous philosophers have sought to take the approach and methods of science and translate science into philosophy to create a truly scientific philosophy. These thinkers include Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Quine. I argue that each failed, for the reasons below: Hume seemed to think that because scientific theories are always capable of being disproved by new empirical evidence, that skepticism was the scientific attitude. He ignored the fact that science, when theories have been proven and experimentally verified, seeks to provide us some degree of knowledge. We can know that the sun will come up tomorrow, because of the scientific postulates of astronomy, which science has empirically verified. Whereas Hume claimed we cannot know that the sun will rise tomorrow. Hume’s rejection of faith was rational, but his rejection of...