Gladiator

Even though it may be tempting to summarize the virtues of ancient Rome as “might makes right” because of the emphasis, which is even in the Latin language, on fighting armies and repressing rebel populations, the virtues did not reduce to those of war. In fact, such virtues, as Nietzsche suggests in his texts, can serve as a refresher for our species as it has “progressed” through the centuries since the Roman Empire existed. Even though the film Gladiator (2000) contains much mortal combat albeit contained in coliseums rather than unrestrained on battle fields, at least three clusters of virtues can be gleamed and articulated as alternative “schools” of virtue ethics. This is not to say that all three are equally valid, however. The virtues cherished by the Emperor Commodus, for instance, are arguably inferior ethically to those of his father, Marcus Aurelius, and even those of the gladiators.

The full essay is at "Gladiator." 

The E.U. without Enlargement: An Oxymoron?

The political debates concerning the accession of candidate states such as Texas, California, Alaska and even Hawaii into the U.S. were long past when the issue of enlargement became salient for the E.U. due to Russia’s unilateral, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. In the American case, surely no one was arguing that the U.S. without being enlarged would cease to be credible, yet in 2025, a government official of the candidate state of Montenegro said as much of the European Union. Even if Filip Ivanovic was merely using rhetoric during an interview on October 4, 2025, even that should at least make sense. Making matters worse, his comments can be interpreted as ultimatums for the E.U. even though nothing binds the E.U. to annexing any future state. In fact, given the veto-power of state officials at the federal level in the E.U., enlargement should arguably come only after internal reform of the E.U.’s basic law concerning the power of the states at the federal level.

The full essay is at "The E.U. without Enlargement."

Silent Night

The medium of film has an amazing ability to trigger emotions, even very strong ones, through dialogue, narrative, cinematography and sound. The suspension of disbelief, if achieved, renders the impact all the more complete. Dread, for example, can be conjured up even with another yet different emotion, such as joy, even in the same song. The medium is also capable of stimulating thought not only as viewers attempt to figure out unnecessarily convoluted plots, but also thinking more abstractly in philosophical or theological terms. Such abstractions, besides being implicitly or explicitly treated in the narrative, extend beyond the confines of a narrative and its story-world. “Life and death” is such a theme, as is whether the human soul is immortal. Less tantalizing, though arguably just as important for typically being overlooked, philosophy of mind (and philosophy of psychology), for which a strange, incomprehensible plotline is by no means requisite or even constructive, stands as a rich reservoir for filmmakers. Even though the question of life and death is central to the film, Silent Night (2021), which interestingly was made during the global coronavirus pandemic—there is even a “Covid Supervisor” listed in the credits!—a seldom-recognized vulnerability innate to the human mind may deserve top billing in that film. The group-think evinced by the group of friends at the house on Christmas Eve and perhaps a wider mass-hysteria only touches the surface of the problem in terms of the human mind. I contend that the star-attraction in the Christmas film rightly goes to the human mind’s vulnerability to presumption to the assumption of infallibility (and susceptibility to group-think cognitively and as in terms of power).  In the context of a group’s suicide pact, critical thinking in the sense of critiquing whatever assumptions are being held is so very important, yet it is only evinced by Art, a young boy, who is under unrelenting pressure especially from his parents to take a fatal pill before a “cloud” of toxic, climate-changed gases hits. 

The full essay is at "Silent Night."