Wright's Writing

Over the years I've taken copious notes on various topics of philosophy. In case anyone is interested, I'll link to several sets of such...

[Old notes.] Reading The Problems of Philosophy (1912) by Bertrand Russell. I’m inclined to agree with most of it. (In a lot of ways I’m...

Staughton Lynd's Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (1968) is a fantastic exploration of the ideological offshoots and effects...

[Excerpt from this book.] There are delights and dangers in adopting a broad perspective on oneself and one’s society. Looking at the...

[From an email.] Jerry Coyne does not impress me [in this talk], although at least he seems less irrational and annoying than Daniel...

Max Scheler’s Ressentiment (1912), while dated and silly in some respects, is worth reading. Scheler is a semi-Nietzsche in his...

[Old notes from my journal. See also this post.] Reading parts of a collection of essays published in 1978 called Anarchism, edited by J....

[Some notes I took a while ago. They may be kind of obvious, but I think it’s interesting to adopt something like Hegel’s perspective on...

From Peter Marin: “Kant called the realm of [human] connection the kingdom of ends. Erich Gutkind’s name for it was the absolute...

It’s a cliché but it’s worth repeating: one cause of modern loneliness is the attitude of treating people as means to an end, namely...

Albert Camus: “We [moderns] read more than we meditate. We have no philosophies but merely commentaries. This is what Étienne Gilson...

[A book excerpt.] The best way to think about the human task of living is that it should be, as Nietzsche said, a continual journey of...

The “moral sphere” has extended in recent centuries, so that now such things as slavery, colonialism, racial segregation, and...

[Excerpt from a book.] The awesome power of business propaganda is revealed in the fact that most Americans scorn the idea of socialism,...

[From this book.] An example of intellectuals’ need to make everything more complicated and difficult than it has to be is the unending...