Sparks Commentary

Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead once collaborated on a book. It was a three-volume work entitled “ Principia Mathematica ” – no...

This audiobook changed my mind about utilitarianism . In my college years, I was a fan of utilitarianism. Now, I’m a little soured on it. I ...

In the seventeenth century , Thomas Hobbes gave the most powerful argument ever written for the necessity of some form of government. His o...

The  Scottish   philosopher   Duns Scotus  got a bad rap after his death. The English word “dunce” comes from the name of “Duns Scotus.” ...

John Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government” is one of the greatest political works ever written. It had a massive influence on the founding d...

“The objects of the laws of England are so very numerous and extensive, that, in order to consider them with any tolerable ease and perspic...

“It is evident, that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature: and that however wide any of them may seem to run f...

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton, in a letter to Robert Hooke on 5 February 1675 Sir Is...

Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the founding feminist philosophers. Her 1792 work “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” is one of the class...

So I recently finished an audiobook about  Alfred Marshall , a British economist who lived from 1842 to 1924. This audiobook was called “Al...

“The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself ...

“But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too usele...

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own inter...

" ... every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neit...