Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), in section 109 of his book The Gay Science, observes that the world is, despite certain appearances to the contrary, complete chaos: “Let us be on our guard against supposing that anything so methodical as the cyclic… Read more ›
Plato (detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens) When we engage in the philosophical activity of ethics we ask questions like: what are right and wrong actions? What does it mean for something to be good or bad? What is… Read more ›
I recently had a conversation with someone who maintained power and freedom are incompatible. He was thinking of power in the negative sense in which it is unfortunately all too often experienced, that is, as illegitimate, manipulative, immoral, and so… Read more ›
Rights, to quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “are entitlements (not) to perform certain actions, or (not) to be in certain states; or entitlements that others (not) perform certain actions or (not) be in certain states.” Some rights are civil… Read more ›
The great Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was, among other things, an Italian renaissance scholar, Catholic priest, humanist philosopher, astrologer, doctor, musician, reviver of Platonism, and the first translator of Plato’s complete extant works into Latin. He was also the head of… Read more ›
Here is a formal presentation of Sartre’s argument for human freedom by Jeffrey Gordon in the book Just the Arguments (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011): P1: In order for a given state of affairs deterministically to cause a human action, the causal efficacy… Read more ›
Fighting the Gravity of Vice: An Essay on Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth Dwight Goodyear Introduction (Spoiler Alert) The cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) is one of my favorite films. It was directed… Read more ›
In two recent posts (see here) I explored how we might, in these times where many people find it difficult to talk to one another given various political, moral, and cultural differences, help communities better embody the conditions for genuine… Read more ›
Martha Nussbaum, in her book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, 2011), observes that “The humanities and the arts are being cut away, in both primary/secondary and college/university education, in virtually every nation of the world. Seen… Read more ›
Directions for making an anamorphic projection from Jean-Francois Niceron’s La Perspective Curieuse (1652) Introduction I recently realized that some of the most powerful lessons I have encountered in philosophy share a dynamic which can be elucidated with the help of… Read more ›
Donald Judd, Untitled (1980-84) The art movement known as minimalism is not easy to define and, when applied to artists, their works, and their audiences, usually ends up oversimplifying things. Nonetheless, there is a set of family resemblances that can… Read more ›
William James in 1908 Introduction The title of this post contains a conjunction of two words—progress and tragedy—that don’t usually sit well together. After all, tragedy, whether in art or life, often spells doom for progress. The situation is a bit more… Read more ›
A scientific theory must give rise to a testable hypothesis. If someone has, for example, a scientific theory about how COVID-19 can be eradicated then we would expect that theory to offer us ways we can test it and prove or disprove… Read more ›
The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975; see here for an overview of her work) offered two groundbreaking and closely connected theories of evil, the banality of evil and radical evil, that help us rethink many common conceptions of not only evil but… Read more ›
The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975; see here for an overview of her work) offered two groundbreaking and closely connected theories of evil, the banality of evil in her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)… Read more ›