Thread:Toph's Fanboy/@comment-681745-20130223081919/@comment-3338975-20130510044037

I do apologize for leaving this go for so long....Needless to say, my college semester has been a bit more hectic than I realized at the time of my last post. Luckily, it'll be over in about a week, and then I'll see what I can do with the philosophy articles you suggested above.

One thing I do have to warn you about, though: a full discussion of the philosophers above may not exactly lend itself to supporting liberalism. For example, David Hume was an atheist and empiricist who formulated probably the first argument against belief in miracles, and yet he was strongly in favor of a conservative form of government, which was due to his philosophical skepticism about our abiltity to find a logically sound basis for induction in empirical reality and his corresponding priviledging of human custom as the means of understanding the world. John Stuart Mill is the quissential classical liberal who would probably be regarded as a libertarian nowadays, with his utilitarianism being much derided by Marxists as contingent upon a bourgeoisse mode of production; Leibniz, of course, was one of the two inventors of calculus (a major advance in mathematics and therefore in physical science), and yet he was a very avid theist for his time (working to reconcile the Protestant and Catholic churches, among other things).