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 ›
Introduction In part one of this three-post series 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 contingent beings… Read more ›
Introduction Agnes Heller (1929-2019) was a Hungarian philosopher who, among many other things (see a bio here), was Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research for 25 years. I took four incredible… Read more ›
One of the ongoing puzzles for humanity is, paradoxically, something that accompanies us all our waking lives: consciousness. Consciousness seems to be so obvious and yet so perplexing. Here are a few very basic ideas and strategies that might be… Read more ›
One of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) most enduring contributions is his analysis of eudaimonia, a word that can be variously translated as happiness, fulfillment, flourishing, or well-being. His analysis appears to have lost none of its power… Read more ›
Nietzsche In section 117 of his book Daybreak Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) wrote: “In prison. My eyes, however strong or weak they may be, can see only a certain distance, and it is within the space encompassed by this distance that… Read more ›
Kant Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), offered the most influential and interesting theory of delightful terror or the sublime. He discusses two forms of the sublime in sections 25-28 of his book, namely, the mathematical and… Read more ›
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argued that the phenomenal world we experience – the world of space and time with unified objects that are causally related – is the outcome of our minds giving form to sense data. Or, to use his… 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 ›
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 ›
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 ›