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Hannah Arendt on the Human Condition Hannah Arendt would certainly not claim that our politics is dignified. To the contrary, she would be among the voices warning of the current risks to our democracy in its recent lurch toward autocracy. Arendt ranks high among the most important political theorists of the 20th century. Many may want…

The contemporary analytic tradition in philosophy that is now globally well-established got its start with Logical Positivism at the beginning of the 20th century in Vienna. Logical Positivism can be understood as Empiricism, heavily influenced by Hume, and supercharged with powerful new developments in symbolic logic. The system of logic that we now teach in…

We didn’t get too far with Existentialism last time. Thought I’d offer another source in case there is further appetite for this topic. Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre 1946

Olga Shared this one. I think Greg Damico is using it. If anyone hits a NY Times paywall, let me know and I’ll send you the text. Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts – The New York Times

Meaning in Life is a relatively young topic in philosophy. This is partly because few felt a need to seek answers about purpose in life prior to the 19th century. Religion could be counted on to address these questions previously. But while science has challenged religious orthodoxy and undermined some of those answers, it hasn’t…

Functionalism remains the reigning paradigm for analyzing mental states. But not all that is mental yields to functional analysis. In particular, subjective conscious experience resists analysis in terms of functional roles. You might recall that consciousness was among the defining characteristics of Descartes’ immaterial minds. The difficulty of understanding conscious experience in terms of functional…