"To Waste Anger Chastising Them Is Pointless

"Why do so many find it impossible to believe that any so-called genius could fail to see that their prejudices were irrational and immoral? One reason is that our culture has its own deep-seated and mistaken assumption: that the individual is an autonomous human intellect independent from the social environment. Even a passing acquaintance with psychology, sociology or anthropology should squash that comfortable illusion. The enlightenment ideal that we can and should all think for ourselves should not be confused with the hyper-enlightenment fantasy that we can think all by ourselves. Our thinking is shaped by our environment in profound ways that we often aren't even aware of. Those who refuse to accept that they are as much limited by these forces as anyone else have delusions of intellectual grandeur."

Julian Baggini at Aeon warns against holding the thinkers of the past to today's moral standards.

"Any Business Deal Appears Like a Small Battle in a Never-Ending War for Financial Supremacy"

"His rejection of Friedman's vision of trade is clearly not a considered view but a gut reaction. The story he tells himself about capitalism is one that involves a high-stakes game of winners and losers—those who beat, and those who get beaten. As such, it seems axiomatic to him: In any deal, whether it involves individuals or independent nations, only one side can win. As a matter of economic science, Donald Trump may be wrong, but with respect to the sensibility that guides his approach to business and colors his understanding of capitalism, it may be the case that the GOP nominee is simply a man of his time—and ours."

John Paul Rollert at The Atlantic describes Donald Trump as an avatar of "Sociopathic Capitalism."

"I Kept Finding Parallels"

"The Buddha doubted the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. In his doctrine of 'emptiness,' he suggested that we have no real evidence for the existence of the outside world. He said that our sense of self is an illusion, too. The Buddhist sage Nagasena elaborated on this idea. The self, he said, is like a chariot. A chariot has no transcendent essence; it's just a collection of wheels and frame and handle. Similarly, the self has no transcendent essence; it's just a collection of perceptions and emotions.
"'I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.'
"That sure sounded like Buddhist philosophy to me—except, of course, that Hume couldn't have known anything about Buddhist philosophy.
"Or could he have?"

In a 2015 Atlantic article, Alison Gopnik describes her efforts in investigating a link between Buddhism and David Hume.

"A Mission to Show That the Great Dead Philosophers Have Been Misunderstood"

"Gottlieb has got Hume's geniality down to a T. 'Every philosopher likes to think he has reached his conclusions via rigorous reasoning,' he says, with a collusive wink to his readers; in the 17th century, indeed, 'falling in love with geometry seems almost to have been an occupational hazard'. Take Descartes: he was notable for 'his faith in his own unusually bright light of reason', but 'perhaps he did not have all the answers'. As for Hobbes, he was so 'bedazzled' by a priori geometry that he 'got rather carried away' and ended up 'over-egging his pudding'. But Leibniz is the one you really have to watch, since, poor fellow, he 'did, in effect, tend to confuse his own mind with that of God'."

Jonathan Rée in The Guardian reviews Gottliebb's The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy.

"To Make Philosophy Historical and to Render History Philosophical"

"Harris's study cumulatively demonstrates how Hume brought history and philosophy together. Since philosophy is powerless to prescribe the terms of its application, to be effective it has to understand the world in which it operates. More recent developments in Anglo-American thought have tended to withdraw from practical analysis into speculative accounts of ideal value. This has resulted in a species of political philosophy that has lost any grasp of the social world on which it pretends to reflect."

Richard Bourke in The Nation reviews James Harris's Hume: An Intellectual Biography.