Sketches of Kierkegaard In this three-part introduction to Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophy I have tried, so far, to make it clear (1) what Kierkegaard’s fundamental problem is; (2) what his solution to the problem is. We have seen that disintegrated selfhood… Read more ›
In the first part of my overview of Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophy, I argued that his fundamental problem is the wide-spread distintegration of the self or inauthenticity. Kierkegaard’s answer to the problem of inauthenticity can be simply stated: we must develop… Read more ›
Soren Kierkegaard In this introduction to Soren Kierkegaard’s (1813-1855) philosophy I want to do three things: (1) make it clear what Kierkegaard’s fundamental problem is; (2) make it clear what his solution to the problem is; and (3) discuss the… Read more ›
Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), argues that “the problem of heroics is the central one of human life, that it goes deeper into human nature than anything else… Read more ›
René Descartes had three fundamental goals in his philosophy: (1) he wanted to find something certain—a goal which flows from his modern agenda to sweep away the mistakes of the past and find a new method to reach the truth… Read more ›
Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, claims, like the pre-Socratic Empedocles before him, that there are two “Heavenly Powers” or mutually opposing instincts: Eros and Thanatos. Freud characterizes these two principles as follows: eros is the instinct to conserve… Read more ›
Tristan Tzara, in his Dadaist Manifesto of 1918, argued that Dadaists were out to “assassinate beauty”. But why would anyone want to assassinate beauty? In the previous post in this series (go here) I discussed, with reference to Plato’s Symposium,… Read more ›
For centuries it was understood that if something was art then it was beautiful. However, in the 19th and 20th centuries many artists turned their backs on beauty. Here we could think of various works created within the romantic movement… 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, the making and… Read more ›
In a previous post (see here) I presented an essay exploring the relationship between freedom and critical thinking. Here I want to briefly suggest that human freedom, that most elusive yet visceral of phenomena, can be understood in a very… Read more ›
Anyone who studies the philosophy of education will quickly discover that there are two central models of how knowledge comes to be acquired: on one hand, we have an ignorant and passive pupil who receives information from an active and… Read more ›
Can we, sometimes, make free choices? Obviously, a lot rides on what we mean by free choices. Mark Balaguer has recently formulated a helpful definition in his book Free Will (MIT, 2014): a choice is the product of my free… Read more ›
In part one of this series we saw how aesthetics can play a role in global education (see here). Let’s continue by looking at some other ways aesthetics can help us learn. In his book The Aesthetic Understanding, Roger Scruton points… Read more ›
Aristotle, in his Metaphysics (Book Lambda, 1075a), notes that “thinking and to be an object of thought are not the same.” This makes sense: if I am thinking about a tree the tree is not my thought of the tree. Indeed,… Read more ›
In his Meditations (1641), Rene Descartes argues for a version of metaphysical dualism that maintains the mind and body are two completely different types of entities. The mind is not physical and so is not extended, doesn’t take up space,… Read more ›