Introduction In part one of this three-post series (go here) I presented Agnes Heller’s account of the modern and postmodern worldviews and how she thinks postmodernism leaves us with “life on the railway station” or the state of being radically… Read more ›
When he was young the Danish philosopher and father of existentialism Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) wrote a journal entry which gives us direct insight into his fundamental problem: “I have just returned from a party of which I was the life… Read more ›
Venus is the Roman name for the Greek Aphrodite, the Goddess of beauty. For Plato, the Beautiful Itself is transcendent, not itself in the physical world, and yet can be detected in the world. Our capacity to detect it reminds… 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 ›
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 ›
I was recently asked to give a talk on what makes relationships beneficial. Since Valentine’s Day was approaching, I decided to offer a set of insights based on three philosophical theories of love which I cover in my philosophy of love… Read more ›
Our experiences of beauty and duty appear to be very different. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), in his book Critique of Judgment, argued that judgments of the beautiful must be “disinterested.” This means that we make these judgments (1) without concern for the truth; (2) without… Read more ›
Thanatos, death, has swallowed many things into oblivion. It undoes and thwarts so much growth in the world. It may ultimately prevail…but Eros, love, isn’t going to make it easy. Plato, in his dialogue on love Symposium, does a lot… Read more ›
R.D. Laing In his book The Divided Self (Penguin: 1969) the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927-1989) attempts to existentially and phenomenologically, rather than biologically and clinically, understand “the schizoid individual” or “an individual the totality of whose experience is split… Read more ›
In a previous post (here) we considered Thomas Hobbes’ account of how, once hedonism and egoism are embraced, love can quickly become entangled in self-defeating power relations. G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) offers us another way to think about love as power… Read more ›
One question to which Aristotle’s conception of friendship has traditionally given rise is this: is friendship motivated by altruistic motives or egoistic ones? Put differently: when we are engaged in the activity of friendship do we act for the sake… Read more ›
According to philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) we are typically (1) egoists motivated out of self-interest and (2) hedonists who desire pleasure and security over all else. This means we inevitably seek love since it gives us the most intense pleasure… Read more ›
In life we often have to fit in. We need to conform to certain roles in order to make friends, get a job, and be successful. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, a sense of belonging is integral to our… Read more ›
In previous posts we have seen ways in which Eros (erotic love) can imply, lead to, or be thwarted by Thanatos (death). Here is yet another example of a relation between the two. In his book The Meanings of Love… Read more ›
Soren Kierkegaard About 20 years ago I read this entry from Soren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals (Penguin) and thought it was, well, quite silly: “The best proof of the soul’s immortality, God’s existence, etc. is really the… Read more ›