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    Science and Common Sense
    Journal of Critical Analysis 8 (4): 117-123. 1985.
  •  207
    This essay is my review of Colleen Dyble’s book, Taming Leviathan: Waging a War of Ideas around the World. Dyble is affiliated with the legendary classical liberal British think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs. Her anthology is a collection of essays by people around the world who have been involved with similar free-market think tanks in countries with historically statist economic systems. These writers include Greg Lindsay, founder of the Center for Independent Studies in Australia; M…Read more
  •  4818
    Film and Propaganda: The Lessons of the Nazi Film Industry
    Reason Papers 35 (1): 203-219. 2013.
    This essay is my review of Erwin Leiser’s excellent documentary film Germany Awake. This classic film first aired in Germany in 1968, and remains to this day one of the best surveys of major Nazi-era movies and exactly what messages they were meant to convey. The film underscores the emphasis the regime put on film as one of the premier mechanisms of propaganda, though Leiser’s film points out that most of the cinema produced by the Nazi regime was not pure propaganda, but mainly entertainment. …Read more
  •  382
    Memorializing Genocide I: Earlier Holocaust Documentaries
    Reason Papers 38 (2): 64-88. 2016.
    In this essay, I discuss in detail two of the earliest such documentaries: Death Mills (1945), directed by Billy Wilder; and Nazi Concentration Camps (1945), directed by George Stevens. Both film-makers were able to get direct footage of the newly-liberated concentration camps from the U.S. Army. Wilder served as a Colonel in the U.S. Army’s Psychological Warfare department in 1945 and was tasked with producing a documentary on the death camps as well as helping to restart Germany’s film industr…Read more
  •  281
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    The Ethics of Tort Reform
    Liberty (June). 2008.
  •  329
    In this essay, I look at two films as possible exemplars of the Nietzschean view of egoism. Compulsion is based on the infamous 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case. In the movie, two arrogant young men—one of whom admires Nietzsche and preaches the (apparently Nietzschean) view that the strong and superior don’t need to follow conventional morality—kill a boy to prove they can outsmart the unter-menschen police. For a different take on what Nietzsche may have had in mind as “the Overman,” …Read more
  •  552
    Two problems of induction
    Dialectica 39 (1): 53-74. 1985.
    SummaryIn this paper, two different theoretical problems of induction are delineated. The first problem is addressed; the second problem is deferred to the sequel to this paper. The first problem of induction is taken to be the seemingly unformalizable nature of traditional inductive arguments. It is shown that the problem does not arise out of some particularly dubious argument form , but rather from the presupposition that inductive “logic” is, like deductive logic, assertoric. Rather , induct…Read more
  •  118
    This essay is my review of Olaf Gersemann’s book, Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality. Gersemann was a reporter for Germany’s largest business weekly magazine, and he came to America to write an expose of the weakness of the American economy. What he found instead—and argued in detail—is that the American economy was robust, for better off than commonly believed in Europe. I finish the review by pointing out some things he overlooked, such as the fact that the U.S. has paid and c…Read more
  •  177
    In this essay, I review an extraordinary bio flick, Temple Grandin. Temple Grandin is a professor of animal science, and to achieve her distinguished career she had to deal with her autism. The film explores what it is to suffer this disease, but it also explores her extraordinary work involving making slaughterhouses more humane.