I recently had a conversation with someone who maintained power and freedom are incompatible. He was thinking of power in the negative sense in which it is unfortunately all too often experienced, that is, as illegitimate, manipulative, immoral, and so… Read more ›
Friedrich Nietzsche What is the purpose of education? Some common answers come to mind: education is a means to gaining more income, finding one’s calling, cultivating an enriched inner life, being a productive citizen, or becoming a life-long learner. These… Read more ›
Soren Kierkegaard Introduction It is popular these days to think about evil from a scientific perspective that sees evil as, for example, a function of an improperly working brain. Such approaches typically remove free will and the more traditional parameters… Read more ›
Judge William and Johannes the Seducer are two fictional characters created by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) in his book Either/Or. The Judge, representing an ethical way of life and love, argues that love, if it is to be… Read more ›
In the last post, I considered how Shakespeare’s Richard III can be used to illustrate five stages of tyranny in politics. Now let’s look at how the play, on the one hand, illustrates four forms of evil, namely, demonic, instrumental,… 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 ›
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 ›
On Christmas Eve our thoughts often turn to those who are no longer with us – especially those who we have loved. This is fitting. But it is also difficult to retain these thoughts for long. Memories can be as… Read more ›
The Danish proto-existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) put forth an intriguing account of the demonic in chapter 4 of his eccentric work The Concept of Anxiety (see the Princeton edition translated by the Hongs). Kierkegaard claims the demonic person has “anxiety about the… Read more ›
Soren Kierkegaard The Danish existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), via his pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis (a Latin transcription for “the watchman of Copenhagen”), put forth a disturbing and ground-breaking account of demonic evil in chapter four of his 1844 work The Concept… Read more ›