Robert C. Soloman (1942-2007) Chapter 9 of Robert C. Soloman’s book From Hegel to Existentialism (New York: Oxford, 1987) is “Freud’s Neurological Theory of Mind.” In this chapter, Soloman argues that Freud’s theory, first explored in his unpublished “Project for… Read more ›
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) offered the world plenty of fascinating and often shocking ideas. His seduction theory, infantile sexuality, Oedipus complex, Electra complex, penis envy, castration anxiety, forms of fixation, and, in general, unconscious mind full of repressed content that nonetheless… Read more ›
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Introduction I recently reread Sigmund Freud’s brilliant essay “The Uncanny” (1919) and I came across a fascinating claim which I failed to adequately process in the past. It has to do with his psychoanalytic analysis of one… Read more ›
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 (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 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 ›