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 ›
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 ›
Many people make resolutions on New Year’s Day. It is a day of beginnings and endings and is often accompanied by faith and hope in the new. But can there ever really be a new beginning? Well, resolutions are often… Read more ›
I just came across an interesting and, as far as I know, original argument why matter is infinite from Edgar Allan Poe. The argument takes place in the course of a very philosophical and haunting dialogue he wrote called “The… Read more ›
It is easy to lose our sense of wonder for things around us. Of course, we may wonder when confronted with things out of the ordinary. But shouldn’t it be more common to wonder about, well, everything? Perhaps not. After… Read more ›
Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849 It is March 21, 2020 and the coronavirus is a pandemic threatening everyone on Earth. In my relative isolation of social distancing, I have had more time to read and I was drawn to a tale… Read more ›
In earlier posts I briefly presented both St. Augustine’s (see here) and Leibniz’s (see here) arguments for God from eternal truth. Since I find this underrepresented approach to demonstrating God’s existence both fascinating and promising, I decided to present my… Read more ›
Many philosophers of the enlightenment, inspired by the scientific revolution, thought of nature as a vast machine rather than a living organism. For example, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) opens his masterpiece Leviathan (1651) with some startling claims that reduce life to a series… Read more ›