“There’s ways of killing yourself without killing yourself.” – Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) offered the world plenty of fascinating and often shocking ideas. His seduction theory, infantile sexuality, parapraxes (Freudian slips), Oedipus complex, penis envy,… Read more ›
St. Augustine (354-430) famously put forth the privation theory of evil. Consider this passage: “For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence… 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 ›
Juneteenth (officially Juneteenth National Independence Day since 2021) is celebrated on June 19 to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United States. “The holiday’s name, first used in the 1890s, is a portmanteau of the words “June” and “nineteenth”, referring to June 19, 1865,… Read more ›
The great Sylvester Stewart, Sly Stone, passed away yesterday at 82 (March 15, 1943 – June 9, 2025). I have loved his music since I first saw Sly and Family Stone perform “Music Lover/Higher” and “I Want to Take You… Read more ›
Thomas Hobbes In chapter 15 of his book Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes wrote: “No man giveth but with intention of good to himself, because gift is voluntary; and of all voluntary acts, the object is to every man his own… 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 ›
Soren Kierkegaard In previous posts we have seen ways in which Eros (love) can imply, lead to, or be thwarted by Thanatos (death). Here is yet another example of a dynamic relation between the two that utilizes some ideas from… Read more ›
In this post I want to shed some light on the ultimate principle of explanation in Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) systematic worldview, the thing without which nothing can move and develop: God. To approach his theology we need to take a… Read more ›
One of my students was asked by one of his professors to interview another professor about social norms. So he reached out to me with four questions and I responded. I am no expert in social norms which is quite… Read more ›
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted” is the famous maxim of the novel Alamut (1938) by Vladmir Bartol which tells the story of the assassin Hassan-i Sabbah and the Order of Assassins he founded (the Hashshashin that existed in Nizari… 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 ›
When I teach the abortion issue in ethics class I usually establish a threefold theoretical structure that is well-received by philosophers and presented clearly in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s (IEP) entry “Abortion“. It goes like this: (1) There is… Read more ›