Wright's Writing

This student paper, from 2006, argues that knowledge in the strictest sense is impossible. No one ever has “absolute” knowledge,...

Sometimes I like to return to philosophy in order to get the sort of intellectual stimulation that reading history doesn't provide. E.g.,...

[Here are some notes from the first syllabus I wrote for the U.S. History After 1865 survey course. Below them are overly ambitious notes...

I've been reading Camille Paglia's collection of essays Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992). I disagree with a lot of Paglia's...

As a leftist, "I wish we could all just get along." Wouldn't that be nice? Maybe it would get boring pretty quickly. But a little less...

This is from a letter Sigmund Freud wrote to his pastor friend Oskar Pfister: I do not break my head very much about good and evil, but I...

A recent article of mine, called "Political Correctness Is Getting Out of Hand," elicited some angry emails. Not from people who...

Questions Raised by 9/11, and Their Answers [An old grad-school paper] Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to...

Marxism is right, and postmodernism is stupid. That's the thrust of a paper I've uploaded to academia.edu, which actually consists of...

Sometimes I like to read about contemporary philosophy and science, to escape the dreariness and intellectual semi-sterility of writings...

[From an email.] …Of course it's true that every event in history depends on contingencies. [I had said the Russian Revolution depended...

Richard Lewontin’s article “The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will Never Answer” is excellent. It counsels skepticism about...

[Old jottings from my journal.] Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, from the selections I’ve read so far, is sensible. (That isn’t...

The following is a long comment I wrote on a Facebook thread months ago arguing against a left-wing friend that--in swing states--one...

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

[Notes from my journal.] I'm reading Paulo Freire’s famous little book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), which is apparently...

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

Reading the Chomsky-recommended Political Economy and Laissez-Faire: Economics and Ideology in the Ricardian Era (1986), by Rajani Kanth....

Reading The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2011), by Corey Robin. An elegant and erudite elaboration of...

L’enfer, c’est les autres?— Contrary to what Sartre pessimistically thought, if hell exists, it is not other people. It is the absence of...