Sartre on “Existence precedes essence”
My video meditation on Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous phrase from his “Existentialism is a Humanism,” below or at YouTube:
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History of Philosophy
Immanual Kant versus Liberalism — my three Cato articles collected
Here are my three collected posts in the Cato Unbound series: Does Kant Have a Place in Classical Liberalism? How Kant’s political views are a mix of liberal and anti-liberal claims, but, more importantly, how his fundamental distinction between noumenal and phenomenal selves means that philosophically he has no defense of practical liberalism.
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Why Postmodernism? — politics plus epistemology
The thesis of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault: More information also at my: Explaining Postmodernism page. Credit: Matheus Pacini made this graphic meme. Here’s his group’s Facebook page.
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Is Rand’s Ethics Nietzschean?
An audiobook version of my “Egoism in Nietzsche and Rand” is below or at YouTube: Text version published in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 10:2, Spring 2009, 249-291. Also here as PDF. Also relevant: My chart (with sources) comparing Nietzsche’s and Rand’s positions on 96 philosophical issues.
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New printing of *Explaining Postmodernism* — the fifteenth
A new printing of the expanded edition was published this month in a snazzy hardcover. Its theme: “The failure of epistemology made postmodernism possible. The failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary.” This is the fifteenth printing since its first publication in 2004. Samples from the scholarly reviewers of the first edition: “By the end of Explaining
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Johann Herder as prophet of the contemporary university
[Herder (1744-1802) was an early Counter-Enlightenment voice calling for group identity politics and value relativism, along with a rejection of cultural appropriation and an embrace of zero-sum cultural conflict. The following is excerpted from Explaining Postmodernism.] Herder on multicultural relativism Sometimes called the “German Rousseau,”[1] Johann Herder had studied philosophy and theology at Königsberg University. Kant was
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“Should I marry you?” How philosophers answer
Romance is in the air, so here is a repost of my round-up of philosophers talking to their sweethearts – collected from conversations overheard at smoky cafés, college libraries, mountain caves, and seminar rooms the world over. The Aristotelian: “I wish to marry you, for I know that my happiness, both of body and soul,
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Philipse’s book on Heidegger — David Auerbach’s review
Professor Kevin Hill drew my attention to Auerbach’s review of Herman Philipse’s Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being (Princeton, 1998) and this excerpt from Philipse in particular: Heidegger’s individualistic notion of authenticity, according to which Dasein has to liberate itself from common moral rules in order to choose one’s hero freely, tends to collapse into a collectivist
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