A key exchange between 3:AM Magazine and scholar Frederick Beiser, author of The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte: 3:AM: But this is the question that German philosophers in the last decades of the eighteenth century started asking: as you put it, they asked, ‘what is the authority of reason?’ They were […]
Beiser on why the Counter-Enlightenment still matters today Read More »
“Nothing but the most determined scepticism, along with a great degree of indolence, can justify this aversion to metaphysics.” Lecture Five: Counter-Enlightenment. David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau Themes: Skepticism, Passions, Fideism. Critiquing the Enlightenment. French Revolution. Lafayette. Voltaire. de Gouges. Robespierre. Texts: Hume: A Treatise on Human Nature. Rousseau: Discourse on Inequality. About the Instructor
To be fully human is to make one’s own decisions and initiate one’s own actions in life. In this essay at The Creativity Post, physician Alan Lickerman writes: “restrictions on our autonomy may lie at the heart of a great deal of our unhappiness. Studies show, for example, that one of the greatest sources of
Autonomy as a human need Read More »
Pope Alexander VI really knew how to throw a party. Rodrigo Borgia became Alexander VI in 1492 and livened things up at the Vatican. As reported in William Manchester’s excellent A World Lit Only by Fire, p. 79: ‘Once he became Pope Alexander VI, Vatican parties, already wild, grew wilder. They were costly, but he
Reformation-era extremes, Alexander VI version Read More »
From high theory in the 1960s to applied education in the 1980s to woke activism in the 2000s. Sub-topics: Woke, Critical Theory, Pomo, National Socialist philosophy. Related: The ‘Galt’s Gulch’ lecture mentioned in the interview:
From a later preface to Hans of Iceland, originally published anonymously in 1823: “When a man’s prime is past, when his head is bowed, when he feels compelled to write something more than strange stories to frighten old women and children, when all the rough edges of youth are worn away by the friction of
Victor Hugo on the power of the mature writer Read More »
Jerry Saltz, a senior art critic for New York Magazine, makes a strong connection between Duchamp and Immanuel Kant’s theory of the sublime in art. Writing in the Village Voice, Saltz says: “Fountain brings us into contact with an original that is still an original but that also exists in an altered philosophical and metaphysical
Duchamp’s urinal & Kant’s sublime, according to Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine Read More »
“Who was the greatest man, Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane, Cromwell, &c.?Somebody answered that Sir Isaac Newton excelled them all.” Lecture Four: The Philosophes and the French Enlightenment. Voltaire Themes: Deism. Toleration. Anti-superstition. Anti-torture. Irreverence. Who are the greatest humans ever? Augustine. Montaigne. Montesquieu. Diderot. de Gouges. Condorcet. The new “trinity”: Bacon, Locke, Newton. Text: Voltaire: Letters