Professor Steven Pinker on Humanism and Campuses

*Transcript edited for readability.* *Link to video interview here.* Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and PhD from Harvard. Johnstone is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard; he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He […]

Woke ironies: achieving the opposite of its stated goals

In this article originally published in the British journal, Humanistically Speaking, the Edan Tasca of the Centre for Inquiry Canada and I examine the phenomenon of Wokism, which can be understood as a secular religion or as a mind virus that has infected humanist as well as many other organizations. We argue that, to achieve […]

DEI must DIE

Paul Nathanson Submitted: 24 January 2024 Last night, I watched Nazi Town, U.S.A,[1] a documentary on the rise of American Nazi movements during the 1930s, notably the German-American Bund of Fritz Kuhn and the America First Committee of Charles Lindbergh. This is a useful production, because not many people remember these movements. After all, they […]

Reflections on the death of Richard Bilkszto

I think there is much humanists can learn from the death of Richard Bilkszto. My tribute to him was published in this month’s issue of Humanistically Speaking, a humanist magazine published in the United Kingdom that was doing a special issue on the phenomenon of Wokism. The article can be found here:  How Woke puritanism […]

Interviewed: Carey Linde, lawyer and activist.

Carey Linde, former 60s radical, was the first lawyer in Canada to live and practice on reserve, the first to introduce the concept of shared parenting between divorced parents in family law, and the first to defend a parent in a transgender case. He has been in trouble with the authorities more than once. For […]

Security and dignity, new pretexts for censorship

Patrick Moreau is a professor of literature in Montreal, editor-in-chief of the journal Argument and essayist. His publications include “Ces mots qui pensent à notre place” (These words that think for us – Liber, 2017) and “La prose d’Alain Grandbois, ou lire et relire Les voyages de Marco Polo” (Nota bene, 2019). Le Devoir, January […]

Unrest at the university

By Normand Baillargeon * Le Devoir, Montréal, January 15th, 2023 I am currently editing lectures given by my dear Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) in 1950. In them he addresses the question of the philosophical and political conception of the individual. He inspires me to reflect on what I consider to be some troubling aspects of current […]

A plea for respectful robustness

By Jean-François Lisée Le Devoir, January 4th, 2023 I have read many political programmes in my life and helped to write some of them. However, I had never come across a sentence like this: “We agree to disagree: our opponents are not our enemies.“ Nor had I come across any variation of the following statement: […]

Requiem for a humanist discussion group

In 1993 the Humanist Association of Canada established an on-line discussion forum that was open to all humanists. That forum endured until late 2021. Read about the circumstances surrounding its cancellation: Requiem for a Discussion Page | Humanist Freedoms