This week includes two highlighted posts:

The first, in political philosophy, examines the differences between the concepts of libertarianism, subsidiarity, federalism, nationalism, states’ rights, and racism. In modern political discourse, the first three of these concepts are frequently conflated with each other, and sometimes are polemically linked with the latter three. I show that the political philosophy of libertarianism and the principle of subsidiarity are strictly orthogonal to each other. Further, while libertarianism and nationalism are materially inconsistent with each other, nationalism itself can be understood as an expansion of the main concepts libertarianism affords to individuals to nation-states.

The second, ‘A glimpse of early Hebrew metaphysics in the book of Genesis‘, combines themes from the study of ancient history, biblical interpretation, and metaphysics, to show how errors in the interpretation of a text – in this case, the description of the sisters Leah and Rachel in the book of Genesis – can arise from more fundamental shifts in metaphysics.