Questions SEP 22

Presentations-
Connor Sundling-__ .  Jacquez Caldwell-herd mentality

Kaag 83-119

1. Coming soon... go ahead and post your questions & comments (preferably by mid-day Monday)
2. 
   

#RECOMMENDED: Wept Ch9-13

1. 
   

The Awesome and Alarming A.I. Visions of Anthropic’s C.E.O.

For lack of a better word?!

“… There’s no question that Dr. Amodei is being sincere. In “Machines of Loving Grace,” he wants people to join the cause because the results, even in the short term, will be so excellent. A.I. over the next couple of years, he wrote, will be like having “a country of geniuses in a datacenter.”  

With A.I., Dr. Amodei added, our bodies for the first time will become entirely malleable. Freedom from disease is merely the start. There’s also biological freedom. This, he said, is: 

“the idea that everyone should be empowered to choose what they want to become and live their lives in the way that most appeals to them.”

In essence, A.I. will allow you to sculpt yourself into something else — to become, for lack of a better word, hot.

For instance, A.I.-accelerated biology will allow control over weight, physical appearance, reproduction and other biological processes, he wrote. Personalities will become tractable too. Diseases like PTSD, depression, schizophrenia and addiction will be effectively treated for the first time…” 

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/technology/dario-amodei-anthropic-essays-ai.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Questions Sep 17

 Kaag 37-80

1. What do you think Nietzsche means by playing seriously, like a child? Does it have something to do with children's willingness to question everything? 37-8
2. Do you think parenthood changes people, or tends to hasten their own embrace of adult responsibilities? If so, why do you suppose so many of the famous dead philosophers were childless (and often partner-less)? Was Kierkegaard wrong to break off his engagement on the grounds of being too melancholy? Was Schopenhauer wrong about marriage being akin to dipping your arm blindly into a bag of snakes? 
3. What would you say to the student who told Kaag she's been happy but "then I started reading Nietzsche"? 39  Any thoughts on this Nietzschean aphorism?: We [Hyperboreans] kept as far as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from “resignation”... There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast—for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal.... The Antichrist
4. What in general would you say about any philosophy by which you "came to terms with life" but also became incapable of living with others? 41  Would you--unlike Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, evidently-- wish to seek other terms?
5. Is it an intrinsic objection to the standard experiential human pleasures (food, material consumption, travel, games, sex, ...) that they are transitory and not permanent? Do Nietzsche and Schopenhauer (for instance) exaggerate the prevalence and ubiquity of suffering in most human lives?
6. Is Kaag unfair to those of us who, like Kant, walk consistent daily neighborhood routes when he says this-- by contrast with distance hikers and mountaineers-- indicates "a constipated mind"?  45  Was Nietsche unfair to Kant when calling him a nihilist and idiot?
7. Was Kaag's shift from Nietzsche to American philosophy more morally-responsible? Is Emerson's version of self-reliance preferable to Nietzsche's? Any thoughts on any of these Emersonian aphorisms (below*)?
8. Is "the Last Man" wrong to value safety, comfort, and convenience? 51   Can you value those things and "beauty and risk"? 
9. Can existence really only be justified as an "aesthetic experience"? 53  Why must it be "justified" at all, rather than just enjoyed and ameliorated? But does Kaag have a point when he calls out the beer-drinking Americans in the airport sports bars watching the Tour de France? 
10. "Pessimism disabused him of the idea that everyday life was meaningful..." 55 Any comment on this? Or on this statement from Christopher Hitchens?: "A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so."
11. Were the Romantics wrong about the point of life? 55-6
12. Are our values discredited by being contingent and historically rooted, rather than necessary and timeless? Should we "revalue" them, or just evaluate them in the light of our present conception of human circumstance and need? 66
13. What (again) is your response to the demon? 72  Do you find repetition in daily life inherently "crushing"? Do you find your "circles" an opportunity to grow and improve, with (for example) each pass around the sun? But does Nietzsche's fatalism ("nothing new") allow for such growth and improvement? And if you've seen Bill Murray's Groundhog Day, is this what makes his situation unlike Nietzsche's recurrence?
14. If, in response to eternal recurrence, you were to become more "well disposed to yourself and to life," wouldn't that then be something new? And if that sort of change is possible, why shouldn't a Nietzschean wish also to be a pragmatic meliorist like James and agree that “No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference… between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.” (VRE)

* 

• “Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.”
• “the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
• “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
• Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
• “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.”
• “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”

Yalom 54-103

1. Do you share "the horror of living an unobserved life"? Could that account not only for our culture's resistance to aging, but also to our hyper-online activity? 55
2. Is it possible for a non-metaphysical dualist to say, with Nietzsche, that "my illness belongs to my body but it is not me"? Is it really true (as Elie Wiesel famously quoted Nietzsche in Man's Search for Meaning) that if you have a why, you can endure any how? 57
3. If you have a life's mission, does it follow that you are not suicidal? Does your nervous system also cry out for sun and dry air? 58
4. Do you also have your best thoughts while walking? 61
5. "It is not the truth that is holy, but the search for one's own truth." 68  But then Nietzsche insists that belief in God is "not a human choice." Any thoughts?
6. Is hope really "the worst of evils"? 69
7. "Perhaps by the year 2000, people will dare to read my books." 71  Is a popular philosopher an oxymoron?
8. Do you find young Freud's incipient talk of the Unconscious (82-3, 97) here persuasive? Or is Josef right, that the evidence for it is scarce?
9. "Whatever does not kill me..." (96-7) - Any thoughts?
10. Is loneliness "a breeding ground for sickness"? 101

John Kaag, in search of transcendence and a life worth living

John sought "Nietzschean transcendence" in his two Swiss pilgrimages, first as a teenager and later in middle age.

He found something more sustainable (if also more honestly equivocal) in William James's pragmatism. Is life worth living? Maybe. It's up to you. Your choice. That's as existential an answer as can be.

Midterm report presentations

Starting Sep 10 you can indicate your preference (in the comments' space of this post) for the topic and date of your report presentation. It can be on any relevant topic of your choice that you can relate to the reading assignments (required or recommended) on the corresponding date. Presentations will begin on the 15th. We'll do two or three presentations per class, hoping to finish before Fall Break. I'll give you a free base or two on the scorecard if you volunteer to present on the 15th.

Take a look ahead at the coming syllabus assignments (reprinted below). Scan the assigned texts and select your topic accordingly. You do not have to cover everything, just anything you can plausibly relate to something in that day's assigned material. Also scan the lists of recommended books in the right sidebar, to see if you would like to use any of them as a basis for your report. If the library does not have the text(s) you choose, go to the circulation desk and request via inter-library loan.

Have fun with the project. Be creative. Consider using the podcast/video resources in the library's MakerSpace to prepare your presentation. Plan to present for about 10 minutes, with the goal of teaching us something we wouldn't have learned merely reading the assignment. Then lead a brief class discussion. Don't stress, you'll get all 25 available points if you fulfill these minimal criteria.

15 - Kaag (Hiking With Nietzsche) preface-p.36. #RECOMMENDED: Wept (When Nietzsche Wept) Ch1-4. Midterm report presentations begin - Marissa-"Embracing Suffering”. Caroline Humphries-Nietzsche's poetry

17 - Kaag 37-80. #RECOMMENDED: Wept Ch5-8 - Chris Jennings-the last man

22 - Kaag 83-119. #RECOMMENDED: Wept Ch9-13 - Connor Sundling. Jacquez Caldwell-herd mentality

24 - Kaag 120-155. #RECOMMENDED: Wept Ch14-17 - Erick Martinez-master and slave moralities. cooper-Decadence and Disgust. Anon-

29 - Kaag 156-193. #RECOMMENDED: Wept Ch18-20 - Bella Ambriz-Kaag. Natalie Moreno-Wept. Nicholas-The Abysmal Hotel and The Horse

OCT
1 - Kaag 194-230. #RECOMMENDED: Wept conclusion - Aaliyah Henderson- Nietzsche and the birth of psychoanalysis. Brent-"Birth of Psychoanalysis" w/ William Barrett. Evan-"Becoming Who You Are"

  *2 - Lyceum address by John Kaag: "Our DIgital Cave," COE 164 Friday 5 PM followed by catered dinner/reception with the author. Attendance expected.

6 - Exam 

8 - Cafe (At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell) Ch1-2. Spyridon Hale-ch1

Arguing with Nietzsche

Can there be optimism in a tragic universe? Or is escape – into music, as Schopenhauer said, or Dionysian dance, as Nietzsche said, or withdrawal, as Sceptics and sanyasis say, or drugs in all their forms, as so many say, or even suicide – the only option? Suffering is a condition of existence, and annihilation is its end: how else is one to face life, naked to its horror as thus viewed? Why, indeed, live?

…

Anthony Grayling 

https://acgrayling.substack.com/p/arguing-with-nietzsche?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Leopold and Loeb… and Nietzsche

Leopold and Loeb enter Joliet Prison following their convictions.

• Nathan Leopold Jr.
• Richard Loeb
• Clarence Darrow
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Home Trial Account
• The Leopold And Loeb Trial: An Account
• Great Summations
• Map of the Scene of the Kidnapping and Murder of Bobby Franks
• The Confession of Nathan Leopold
• Excerpts from the Psychiatric ("Alienist") Testimony in the Leopold & Loeb Hearing
• Darrow's Plea of Guilty
• Judge Caverly's Decision and Sentence
• Key Figures in the Trial
• In Nathan Leopold's Own Words
• The Glasses: The Key Link to Leopold and Loeb
• The Leopold and Loeb Trial: Photographs
• The Leopold & Loeb Trial: Bibliography
• Compulsion

One hundred years ago, on May 21, 1924, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb tried to carry out the perfect murder. At the time, Leopold was enrolled at the University of Chicago, and Loeb was a recent alumnus. Their studies were not unrelated to the crime, since the young men shared a mutual interest in philosophy. They would discuss, among other things, the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. As Leopold understood Nietzsche, the übermensch was a person who had transcended the moral scruples that keep ordinary people from exerting their will-to-power. Leopold, who was intelligent and accomplished, thought of himself as above the petty moral rules by which the weak try to restrain the strong. Together with his friend, they put this philosophy into practice by killing the fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks...

https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/telling-stories-leopold-and-loeb

https://famous-trials.com/leopoldandloeb/1663-keyfigures

Questions SEP 15

 Midterm report presentations begin

Kaag

1. Any thoughts on Leopold and Loeb? (see separate post)
2. Kieran Setiya says "You don't need to like Nietzsche to love this book... It is an attempt to reclaim his philosophy for the middle-aged..." Do you think different philosophies are suitable for different ages and stages of life? (And see #7 below...)
3. Per the Herman Hesse epigraph: Do you think it possible to philosophize deeply if you've never "tasted solitude"? Can you philosophize humanely if you've tasted too much?
4. Per the Nietzsche prologue epigraph:Is it noble to "perish in pursuit of" your goals?
5. What does literally going higher by scaling mountains have to do with becoming a better person? What does it mean to you to be better? Is confrontation with adversity for its own sake a good thing to pursue? In what sense do you aspire to be "above" other people? Is mediocrity the true spirit of democracy? (5)
6. What is your current reply to the demon's eternal recurrence proposition (below **)? Is that something you'd hope to change?
7. Any thoughts on "Breaking up with Zarathustra/Falling out with Superman" (below*)?
8. What does it mean for a final destination in life not to exist? 11  Given our mortal condition, how can aging also lack a final destination? 6
9. What was Silenus's problem!? 14
10. Was "the little pastor" a stoic? 19  Did he ever cease to be one?
11. Do you prefer beer, or pastries? 20
12. Do you agree that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger? 23  Did Emerson think so?
13. Do you also find walking "among the most life-affirming of human activities"? 26-7 (See "Gymnasiums of the Mind" (#below)
14. "I am no man. I am Dynamite." 33  Is there anything troubling about someone who says things like that? (Also, see the new Nietzsche bio of that title.)
15. Is there really anything "respectable" about suicide? Or self-starvation? 34
16. What does it mean to follow someone because you wish to follow yourself? 36  (Compare to Monty Python's Life of Brian scene: "You don't need to follow me, you don't need to follow anybody. You're all individuals." --"I'm not," responds the lone non-conformist.)

...

John Kaag, in search of “Nietzschean transcendence”

A tale of two pilgrimages-

https://youtu.be/eEVMAGLe73I?is=Uc-lTMIR_ISMaPPe

Yalom

1. Another epigraph question: Are you "ready to burn yourself in your own flame"? What would that entail, for you?
2. Who, according to some, is the "true father of modern psychotherapy"? Do you think philosophy can also be a "talking cure"?
3. In light of our discussion about the nonverbal "glimmer and twinkle" of experience that is not merely textual, do you have thoughts about Josef's self-berating inner monologue ("Stop thinking! Open your eyes! Let the world in!")? 2
4. What is a "posthumous philosopher"? 7 Aren't most philosophers in our culture (as opposed, say, to French) posthumous in Nietzsche's sense? Is that a deficiency in the philosopher, or the culture?
5. Is there really "no medicine for despair, no doctor for the soul"? 8  Do you think that's what eternal recurrence is, for Nietzsche? How about for you?
6. Could there ever be a functional and flourishing society in which the only acknowledged duty was "to perpetuate my freedom"? 12  Would that not degenerate to a power struggle? Mustn't freedom also acknowledge limits based on mutual respect?
7. Is Agonis or competitive "contest" the only or best way to develop one's natural gifts? 17  What about cooperative mutual support and reciprocity?
8. Any thoughts on Nietzsche's apparently-semi-asexual menage a trois with Lou and Paul? 19 (below***)
9. Are "free-thinking individualists" right to "reject socially imposed restrictions" and "create our own moral structure"? 20  What would Kant say?
10. Add your questions and comments...

 

From The Joyful Wisdom (aka The Gay Science)-

**341. The Heaviest Burden.—
What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: "This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence—and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!"—Wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse the demon that so spake? Or hast thou once experienced a tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him: "Thou art a God, and never did I hear aught more divine!" If that thought acquired power over thee, as thou art, it would transform thee, and perhaps crush thee; the question with regard to all and everything: "Dost thou want this once more, and also for innumerable times?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon thy activity! Or, how wouldst thou have to become favourably inclined to thyself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?—

==

*Breaking up with Zarathustra

Falling Out With Superman 

by Gary Kamiya

I stumbled upon Friedrich Nietzsche when I was 17, following the usual trail of existential candies -- Camus, Sartre, Beckett -- that unsuspecting teenagers find in the woods. The effect was more like a drug than a philosophy. I was whirled upward -- or was it downward? -- into a one-man universe, a secret cult demanding that you put a gun to the head of your dearest habits and beliefs. That intoxicating whiff of half-conscious madness; that casually hair-raising evisceration of everything moral, responsible and parentally approved -- these waves overwhelmed my adolescent dinghy. And even more than by his ideas -- many of which I didn't understand at all, but some of which I perhaps grasped better then than I do now -- I was seduced by his prose. At the end of his sentences you could hear an electric crack, like the whip of a steel blade being tested in the air. He might have been the Devil, but he had better lines than God. 

I was sold. Like those German soldiers in World War I who were found dead with copies of ''Thus Spake Zarathustra'' in their pockets, I hauled my tattered purple-covered copy of the Viking Portable Nietzsche with me everywhere. It was with me when I dropped out of college after a semester to go work in a shipyard, with me years later when, sitting on a knoll on a tiny island off Vancouver, I decided to wake up from my dream of total escape and go back to school. I read him to elevate myself, to punish myself, to remind myself of the promises I had broken. He was the closest thing I had to a church. 

Eventually, I stopped going to church. There were various reasons for this, some of them good and some of them not; I couldn't sort out which was which then, and can't now. Maybe it was just satiation. The philosopher John Searle once told me that reading Nietzsche was like drinking cognac -- a sip was good, but you didn't want to drink the whole bottle. I'd been pounding Nietzsche by the case. 

So I left Nietzsche alone on his mountaintop. But as every lapsed believer knows, you never wholly escape the church. Nietzsche had come to stand for something absolute and pure, like gilded Byzantium or Ahab's whale; he represented what I imagined I might have been. He had become a permanent horizon. 

Oddly, during this long, strange love affair, I avoided learning much about Nietzsche's life. Maybe this was because I had turned him into a shrine -- after all, totems have no history. I knew only the superficials: that he was a desperately lonely man, poor and largely unread, plagued by bad health, who went mad at the age of 44. 

Then, last summer, I planned a trip to Switzerland. As a highlight, I decided to visit Sils-Maria -- the small village near St. Moritz where Nietzsche spent seven summers and wrote many of his masterpieces. The tourist soon won out over the iconoclast: now that I was going to stand where the Master stood, I couldn't pretend I didn't care about how he lived, what people he liked, what he wore. So I immersed myself in various biographical accounts: ''Nietzsche in Turin,'' Lesley Chamberlain's psychologically penetrating book about the philosopher's final year; Ronald Hayman's challenging ''Nietzsche: A Critical Life''; and a book that only a Nietzsche cultist would consume, ''The Good European: Nietzsche's Work Sites in Word and Image.'' 

It wasn't the grand narrative of his life but the details that stayed with me. The joke photograph in which he and his friend Paul Ree posed in a cart over which Lou Salome, the 21-year-old woman with whom he was timidly, desperately in love, held a whip. Nietzsche in the Caligari-shadowed last days of his sanity, once again turning himself into a character in an unhappy novel, lamenting that a journey was ''perhaps the most unfortunate I have made'' simply because he had climbed aboard the wrong train. The fact that he liked ''Tom Sawyer.'' The solicitude of an old female friend who tried to buck him up but was unable to teach him not to let everything wound him. The visitor who simply reported how much he liked Herr Nietzsche, the lonely, earnest professor with the bad eyes. 

This wasn't the Nietzsche I remembered. The philosopher I had worshiped was an uncanny hybrid, simultaneously a terrifying Old Testament prophet and a 19th-century free spirit. To be sure, much of Nietzsche -- maybe the best of him -- was as lucid, critical and quick-footed as Stendhal. Yet it was the monstrous doctrines at the heart of his thought -- the Overman, the Eternal Recurrence -- that had drawn me; they hypnotized me because I couldn't figure out whether they were coming from man or some frightening gospel. Now that I understood how much of Nietzsche's work was an attempt to turn his personal torment into something lasting, I realized that perhaps those enigmatic pronouncements were best seen not as antitruths handed down from on high, but as words he whispered to himself, beacons he lighted in the darkness to cheer himself up. What was great in Nietzsche was not, I began to see, his holiness, maybe not even his wisdom. It was his courage. 

Then I went to Sils. 

Sils-Maria is a bland one-horse resort village under spectacular mountains between two crystalline lakes. Terminally respectable Swiss burghers polish their vacation homes; tourists (''They climb mountains like animals, stupid and sweating,'' Nietzsche wrote) fill the hotels. The Nietzsche-Haus stands near the center. In his day it was a tea and spice shop whose owner rented an upstairs room to Nietzsche; now it is a museum. In front of the tidy white-and-green building stands a sculpture of a large black eagle -- one of the companions that consoled Zarathustra in his last loneliness. On a gray afternoon I pulled open the door and climbed the stairs to his room. 

No one was there. I looked in. A small, low-ceilinged room, walls of knotty pine. A lumpy-looking bed. A small table with a green silk cover. A washbasin. A single window, looking out onto a patch of the forest. 

We go to literary shrines to touch things. We run our fingers along the writing table, we furtively step over the red velvet rope and finger the water jug by the edge of the bed. Yet to feel the pedestal is to call the very idea of the pedestal into question. Which is why there is something comic in all pilgrimages: while Don Quixote holds loftily forth, Sancho Panza steals the ashtray. 

But as I ran my fingertips along the knotty pine, it all rose up: the indelible words that had been created here; the misery of the man who had shivered out his life in this room; and all the years I had spent charting my course by a dream. Standing outside in the hallway, I was surprised to find myself beginning to weep, like the most breast-heaving pilgrim. A familiar voice, very old and once sacred to me, protested. I could not pity Nietzsche. It was a betrayal of everything he had believed. He had railed against pity. Compassion was for the hearth-huddlers, the followers, those who lacked the strength to turn themselves into ''dancing stars.'' The last temptation of the higher man, Nietzsche had taught, was pity; on its far side was a roaring, Dionysian, inhuman laughter. I could recite this chapter and verse, but I had never been able to live it. It was the most alien and terrifying of Nietzsche's teachings. Still, long reverence pulled me up short. Here, of all places, I must feel no pity. 

But my heart won the war. Maybe it was resignation -- the final acceptance that I was not going to forge myself into a new shape. Maybe it was weariness with a doctrine, with all doctrines, that sounded delirious but that couldn't be used. Whatever it was, I stopped fighting. Yes, part of Nietzsche would always stand far above the tree line, and I would treasure that iciness. But I had to walk on the paths where I could go. 

Still confused, I stood in the doorway. And then, as a gift, the following words came into my head, words spoken by Zarathustra to his disciples, disciples that Nietzsche himself never had. ''You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you. You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? . . . Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.'' 

I took a last look at the room. Then I walked out the door. 

Gary Kamiya is executive editor of the online magazine Salon.com. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/01/23/bookend/bookend.html

==

***

 

“One of the strangest yet most intriguing aspects of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas is his repeated enthusiasm for a concept that he called amor fati (translated from Latin as ‘a love of one’s fate’, or as we might put it, a resolute, enthusiastic acceptance of everything that has happened in one’s life). The person of amor fati doesn’t seek to erase anything of their past, but rather accepts what has occurred, the good and the bad, the mistaken and the wise, with strength and an all-embracing gratitude that borders on a kind of enthusiastic affection…” 

You can read more on this and other subjects here: https://goo.gl/cDu7st 

MORE SCHOOL OF LIFE Watch more films on CURRICULUM in our playlist: http://bit.ly/2bVcNyy

== 

# Gymnasiums of the Mind (excerpt)

"Followers of the Greek Aristotle were known as peripatetics because they passed their days strolling and mind-wrestling through the groves of the Academe. The Romans’ equally high opinion of walking was summed up pithily in the Latin proverb: “It is solved by walking.” Nearly every philosopher-poet worth his salt has voiced similar sentiments. Erasmus recommended a little walk before supper and “after supper do the same.” Thomas Hobbes had an inkwell built into his walking stick to more easily jot down his brainstorms during his rambles. Jean- Jacques Rousseau claimed he could only meditate when walking: “When I stop, I cease to think,” he said. “My mind only works with my legs.” Søren Kierkegaard believed he’d walked himself into his best thoughts. In his brief life Henry David Thoreau walked an estimated 250,000 miles, or ten times the circumference of earth. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,” wrote Thoreau, “unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from worldly engagements.” Thoreau’s landlord and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson characterized walking as “gymnastics for the mind...” --Christopher Orlet, Philosophy Now 

The Digital Cave

 Coming Oct 2-

Questions SEP 10

 Ex'sm ch5-6

1. What criticism of Sartre's approach to authenticity and bad faith was shared by his Communist and Catholic critics? What do you think he meant by the penultimate line of No Exit? Do you think he was right? Is it a judgment that applies equally to all other people, or just those most prone to bad faith?
2. What did Kierkegaard say philosophers have misunderstood about understanding and living? Do you find this a wise insight or a banal truism? What fraction of people do you think ever gain the kind of understanding SK presumably means? At what stage of life (if any) should one expect such understanding to occur?
3. What attitude did Nietzsche and Kierkegaard share with Socrates? Of what (or whom?) were they equally distrustful? With what were they both most concerned? Do you share their attitude?
4. What did Habermas say of Heidegger? In light of Heidegger's political biography, was Habermas's critique really so inaccurate? Any COMMENT on the Habermas essay cited above (and excerpted below*)? Are you too an "incrementalist" (or a meliorist?)
5. What did Jaspers find objectionable about Machiavelli's political philosophy? Do you agree?
6. Marcel's philosophy was a relentless struggle against what? (NOTE: This is one of the more salient points of agreement between existentialists and pragmatists.) Do you think "concreteness" is a philosophical virtue?
7. COMMENT?: “Language transcends us and yet we speak... Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history... Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being... “Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see.”  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
8. What was de Beauvoir's most famous phrase? How does her view go beyond Sartre's of human nature? What did they both try to humanize? How, generally, do you think about the distinction/relation between gender and sex? Is there no essential quality of femininity or masculinity that has not been socially contructed?
9. [ch6] What is Sartrean transcendence, according to Flynn? How does this compare to Ackroyd's version, mentioned in a reply to Brent's comment below? What do you think of his concept of nothingness in relation to consciousness? And what do you think of William James's definition of rationality as a feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment? Do such feelings contradict Sartre's talk of "insufficiency"?*** 
10. What kind of philosophy caused Sartre to "blanche with emotion"? Do you think the phenomenology of everyday life makes philosophy more concrete, in a good way?
11. What is meaning, for a structuralist?* What does structuralism reduce to a "placeholder"? Is this, in your view, a healthy "reduction"?
12. What did Foucault say about Sartrean existentialism? Why do you think he said it? Does it make any sense to you?
13. How did Gadamer define "the hermeneutic circle"? What does hermeneutics mean to you? Is it anything more than a synonym for the kind of critical interpretation of texts all scholars have always engaged in?
14. Existential psychoanalysis seeks to reveal what? Is this a better approach? What in general is your view of psychoanalysis? Do you think it useful? Have you or would you submit to it?
15. An ethic of situations (such as that of Levinas) echoes what ancient Greek? (And what "new name for some old ways of thinking"?) Is it a bad thing that we are "always in media res?
16. Do you think the possible connection between James's pragmatism and Levinas's phenomenology (such as that of last year's Lyceum speaker Megan Craig) is worth exploring?****

*In the 1980s there was a lot of excitement about postmodernism, deconstruction, structuralism and post-structuralism. This flood of theory appeared to offer a radical new perspective for understanding and experiencing the world. It was an enlightenment which left all those who rejected it cursed with still being stuck in the murky mire of the old ways of thinking which had dominated western thought for 2000 years and which at last we could escape. Such religious fervour with its condemnation of heretics and establishment of new messiahs has softened, and it is now possible to look quietly and calmly at what was going on.

Structuralism

Structuralism arose on the continent, in particular in France, in the early 60s. The first ‘big name’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, who took on Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French intellectual and philosopher of the time, and didn’t so much win, as went unanswered (which from Sartre’s point of view was worse). Here was France’s main philosopher, Sartre, who usually had something to say about everything, being attacked in Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind, and yet not replying! The implication was that he couldn’t reply, and the intellectual mood began to move towards Lévi-Strauss’ intellectual position, which he called structuralism.

A simple explanation of structuralism is that it understands phenomena using the metaphor of language. That is, we can understand language as a system, or structure, which defines itself in terms of itself. There is no language ‘behind’ language with which we understand it, no metalanguage to explain what language means. Instead it is a self-referential system. Words explain words explain words (as in a dictionary), and meaning is present as a set of structures... John Mann, Philosophy Now

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A fun new book on the post-Existential era of French thought:

The Frenchmen:
Or, My Life in Theory

by Emily Eakin

From leading critic and essayist Emily Eakin, a stylish personal history of French theory and its unlikely domination of American culture

When Emily Eakin arrived at Harvard in the late 1980s, she fell under the spell of an eclectic body of philosophical texts by a handful of French authors. This was French theory, a set of recondite ideas that had taken American campuses by a storm during the preceding decades. In retrospect, the influence of these men and their writings seems both extraordinary and improbable. The Frenchmen argued that language is all-powerful, meaning unstable, and the self is an illusion. Their prose was brilliant, dazzling even, but often mystifyingly elaborate and highly abstract. Yet American students and scholars flocked to their books and lectures, intoxicated by a powerful new means of understanding—and perhaps even changing—the world. For Eakin, an unsophisticated graduate of a small-town Midwestern high school, theory was no mere intellectual exercise but a way of being—a heady shortcut to worldly glamour and wisdom.

The Frenchmen is the story of Eakin’s youthful love affair with French theory, alongside a wider examination of its rise and fall. Looking closely at Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and the French-speaking Belgian Paul de Man, Eakin untangles their famously difficult works with peerless, delightful clarity. What’s more, she brings to light the eccentric, scandalous—at times criminal!—lives of thinkers who themselves were often highly averse to biography, in a daringly original weave of storytelling and exegesis.

As she explores the magnetism of their work, Eakin illuminates not just the Frenchmen’s enduring legacy but some of today’s deepest political, social, and intellectual arguments. She neither rejects nor flatters the Frenchmen’s ideas but instead reveals how they indelibly changed our understanding of power, truth, and identity. Eakin shows how, for better or worse, the Frenchmen continue to shape and unsettle our lives today. g'r

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**...In his final book, Habermas spoke of the need to “institutionalize the anarchic power of saying ‘no.’ ” The force of refusal, of Melville’s “I would prefer not to,” is potentially absolute: slop ceases to exist when we stop clicking on it. Europe, where the Enlightenment first arose and where it met its first demise, is the likeliest place for a concerted rebellion. State funding for media and culture means that the public sphere remains partly intact, and the E.U. has taken steps to regulate the internet and A.I. Moreover, as Habermas saw at the time of the Iraq War, a pan-European sensibility is being bolstered by a cumulative loathing for a long century of American imperialism—military, economic, technological, cultural. Perhaps there could even be a real shudder of self-disgust on these shores—a recognition that our national pursuit of material happiness has immiserated much of the rest of the world and is now devouring itself. Such, at least, is the vibe of our squalid semiquincentennial summer.

Philosophy is a discipline of abstractions, yet it raises achingly elemental questions. The august Kant asks, “What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?” The answers are seldom simple or bright. The seduction of despair can be intense, whether on the personal or the political level. But the fact that most of our hopes remain unrealized should not revoke the reality of our fitful, painful progress. This was Habermas’s core conviction; he was an incrementalist, though a radical one. On the other hand, in his almost manic drive toward consensus, he blunted the edge of his critical inheritance. If we are to say no to the monstrosities that we have unleashed, we need the uncompromising fury that the Frankfurt School writers invested in their work. We need Adorno to tell us that the confusion of truth and lies “makes it a Sisyphean labor to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge.” In the end, we need both voices: the critical and the reconstructive, the savage and the sage. The dialectic moves between crashing despair and hovering hope. ♦
   --Jürgen Habermas Defended Reason in a Darkening Age/The great German philosopher, who died in March, understood how much depended on a principled public sphere. Published in the print edition of the June 22, 2026, issue, with the headline “The Dream of Reason.”

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***"When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such times, "I am sufficient as I am." This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness,—this absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it,—is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled from any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of seems to us pro tanto rational." --The Sentiment of Rationality

==

****

Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology
by Megan Craig

"Bringing to light new facets in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and William James, Megan Craig explores intersections between French phenomenology and American pragmatism. Craig demonstrates the radical empiricism of Levinas's philosophy and the ethical implications of James's pluralism while illuminating their relevance for two philosophical disciplines that have often held each other at arm's length. Revealing the pragmatic minimalism in Levinas's work and the centrality of imagery in James's prose, she suggests that aesthetic links are crucial to understanding what they share. Craig's suggestive readings change current perceptions and clear a path for a more open, pluralistic, and creative pragmatic phenomenology that takes cues from both philosophers." g'r

There’s Something Better Than Happiness

… Both Beauvoir and Schopenhauer turn away from the life of recumbent happiness and toward something more difficult. Schopenhauer would probably think that Beauvoir asked too much of people, women and men both. To him, most of us don’t have the capacity to embrace authentic self-creation. The best we can manage is studying geography and the lives of insects. I tend to side with Beauvoir: As a teacher, I’m inclined to see the best in my students and have hopes for their futures that go beyond coin collections and amateur astronomy.

The last witness in my case against happiness — at least, happiness as perfect contentment — is interested in the enlightenment of humankind as well as of individuals. Friedrich Nietzsche’s archetype of the “last man” is the type of person who arises in a culture that encourages the pursuit of drone-like happiness. The last man is cautious: He has his “little pleasures for the day” and “little pleasures for the night.” He lives for tiny satisfactions: He never goes all out, never spends for vast returns. “A little poison now and then” — drugs, alcohol and empty entertainment are the last man’s delights. He’s willfully blind to the life of thought and artistic creation, or of being-for-itself, which Beauvoir thinks is necessary for true fulfillment. But he is, after his own fashion, happy.

When Nietzsche’s protagonist in his book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” tells a crowd of people about the last man, they rise as one and entreat him: “Give us this last man, O Zarathustra … Make us into these last men.” But it is too late. They already are last men and women and so, it appears, they will stay.

I don’t mean to malign every form of contented happiness. I only want to say that overall it may be better to seek meaning rather than pleasure. Of course, even the meaning-seekers need an occasional break, and why shouldn’t it be in a verdant glade or a sun-washed beach? For a while Nietzsche savored a blissfully relaxed life in Turin, Italy. (He felt that the waitress at his trattoria saved the lushest grapes for him.) 

Perhaps, though, we ought to make it a point not to stay in our happy place for too long and, surely, not to aspire to live in it for the rest of our lives.

Mark Edmondson

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/07/opinion/happiness-research-joy-mental-health.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Questions Sep 8

 Ex'm  ch3-4

1. Sartre's famous equation of Existentialism and humanism responded to what criticisms? What was his Kantian challenge to each human agent?
2. What did Camus consider the intrinsic absurdity of the human condition? Why does he nonetheless consider Sisyphus happy?
3. What's hopeful in the humanism of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus?
4. What was Heidegger's criticism of existentialists and humanists? Should his philosophical reputation be "secure," given his Nazi association?
5. What can it mean to say that "death is God"? Must we elevate our mortality to divine status, in order to defeat nihilism?
6. What was Marcel's view of "genuine hope"? Do you agree? Is his view anti-humanistic? Do you agree with Jaspers thatiTranscendence as "the absolute Other"?
7. Can you relate to Sartre's character Roquentin's revulsion at nature's superfluity? Or do you find it, like the sheer existence of anything at all ("rather than nothing") wondrous?
8. COMMENT?: "I do not have a body, I am my body." 
9. Existentialists are all concerned, each in their own way, with what?
10. What is it to be "in-situation"? What, for Sartre, does it always include?
11. To be in bad faith is to deny what? Heidegger's related notion is what?
12. What's existentially problematic about being a "perfect" waiter [or teacher, or student, or whatever]?
13. How did Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich achieve authenticity?
14. What did Sartre mean by existential psychoanalysis?
15. What is the significance for de Beauvoir of an "open future"?

Ellie Anderson’s Existentialism course, Fall 2026

Here’s the reading list. There are infinite good ways to teach Existentialism, and this reading list is pretty canon... https://substack.com/@skyecleary/note/c-327678948?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

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Sep 8:

One of the most common college courses for Philosophy PhDs in the US who specialize in European philosophy to be asked to teach is Existentialism.1 I was asked to teach it for the first time in Fall 2017 at Scripps College, a stone’s throw from where I currently teach. At the time, it sounded fun, but I didn’t think I agreed by and large with Existentialism. Sure, I worked on Simone de Beauvoir, one of the most famous existentialist thinkers, but I didn’t really work on Sartre or any of the other well-known existentialist guys. I had the impression, like a lot of people coming out of my graduate program, that existentialism was a teenage boy philosophy: cute for a phase when you needed to stake your independence, but immature after a certain point. (This is one surprising feature of academic philosophy: Existentialism is a commonly-taught course but is currently unpopular among scholars of Continental European philosophy.)

Teaching that course changed things for me: it planted the seeds for my becoming an existentialist. As I read and re-read material from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Beauvoir, and more, I started to see that most of the philosophy I liked best - from the post-existential period of French philosophy often referred to under the umbrella of poststructuralism - was already in some sense in existentialism. But what’s more, existentialism tackled head-on the ethical and political issues to which poststructuralism often paid lip service but never quite seemed to satisfyingly address. The following summer, at sea about what was next for me professionally when the prospect of a tenure-track job seemed completely out of reach, I did little other than read Being and Nothingness cover to cover. It got in my bones, and I followed it up a few years later with a reread of Being and Time. My academic course changed and I found myself swapping the Derrida and Butler for Sartre and Kierkegaard. I also found that there’s a lot of excellent contemporary analytic existential philosophy (which I previously would have discounted as a contradiction in terms), among which I would count Christine Korsgaard’s Sources of Normativity, Richard Moran’s Authority and Estrangement, and Matthew Boyle’s Transparency and Reflection.

As a result, I got interested in reviving existential philosophy within my subfield of Continental European philosophy. To that end, I wrote a book, which will come out next summer in my favorite philosophy series, arguing that phenomenology (which is a popular subfield relative to existentialism) should be existential phenomenology. It’s a book about the self, but this methodological argument is key to it.

I’ve continued to teach Existentialism every couple of years since, often tweaking my syllabus. In particular, I love how existentialism was very much a public-facing philosophy movement in twentieth-century France: its participants didn’t just write treatises but also plays, novels, public speeches, magazine articles, political journals, and so forth. Sarah Bakewell’s book At the Existentialist Cafe does an excellent job of painting a picture of this landscape. So I’ve sometimes included public-facing assignments for my college students such as social media threads, videos, and posts.

But the core reading list has remained, and I’m sharing it here with my Substack subscribers over the next few months along with a series of video lectures, audio recordings, and other material. I don’t think this is the only possible reading list for Existentialism, but I do think it works well for introducing some core influential ideas that speak to one another, and giving students a solid basis in texts that are often difficult to understand on one’s own (and which they can then follow up on with other texts that are more accessible)...

https://ellieanderphd.substack.com/p/existentialism-lecture-course-schedule?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=4320457&post_id=214766117&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=35ogp&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Questions Sep 3

 NO CLASS TODAY, and no new questions... spend some more time with Tuesday's, if you like; and take some time to investigate your midterm report presentation possibilities. You can make a specific topic request on Sep 10.

The bookstore does have Hiking with Nietzsche, on the bottom shelf

Talk, talk, talk! Words, words, words...

[Substack]

We were talking (talking, nota bene) the other day about the limits of language, and William James's sense of the "glimmer and twinkle" of something in "the living act of perception," something that language cannot catch but that honest philosophers must acknowledge. I'll be curious to see if the Existentialists share a similar skepticism towards those who uncritically accept our human ability to know reality verbally. The post-existentialist structuralists, post-structuralists, deconstructionists, theoretical psychoanalysts, Derrideans et al definitely do not. (Or maybe it would be better to say they don't really buy into the idea that "reality" names something nonverbal.) Derrida famously said “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” ("there is no outside-the-text"), a view James would find laughable. Me too.

I was reminded of this while reading Emily Eakin's new memoir/history of those post-existentialists, The Frenchmen. At the end of chapter 27 she writes of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981):

...he'd scrubbed his work of any residue of biology or Darwin... there were fewer and fewer allusions to the world of things. Lacan had abandoned Earth for the theoretical firmament. [A critic wrote:] '...when I read his work I can't help thinking, 'Words, words, words.'

And at the beginning of chapter 28:

Words, words, words indeed. You'd be hard pressed to come up with a better slogan for the decade [of the fifties in French philosophy]. 

Ha! In 1892 William James had written:

What an awful trade that of professor is—paid to talk, talk, talk! I have seen artists growing pale and sick whilst I talked to them without being able to stop. And I loved them for not being able to love me any better. It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words. --Letters I, Dec 28

And in Pragmatism III (1907) be wrote:

The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this way means that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than heretofore, minds more scientific and individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious either. It will be an alteration in 'the seat of authority' that reminds one almost of the protestant reformation.

James loved words too. He just didn't think they crowd out nature and the rest of the unverbalized fields of our experience. As Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet said: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” So WJ would say to Lacan and his logorrheic peers.

Think for yourselves, American scholars (but not BY yourselves)

On this day in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous “American Scholar” address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard. He told the students to think for themselves rather than absorb thought, to create rather than repeat, and not to look to Europe for cultural models...

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio-categories/twa-2018/

Questions Sep 1

Again, try to post at least three questions and/or comments, PRIOR to class, pertaining to today's reading. Try formulating discussion-oriented, open-ended questions related to these mostly-factual questions about the contents of our text.

Ex'm ch1-2

1. Existentialism's deepest roots are in an ancient Greek practice called ___, with a focus on what kinds of questions and attitudes? What became of that practice, in the subsequent history of philosophy?
2. What did Kierkegaard and Nietzsche both respect about Socrates? What view of truth did Kierkegaard think Socrates exemplified? Do you think Socrates would have endorsed Kierkegaard's account? [NOTE:This last question is discussion-oriented, in contrast to the other text-oriented questions which have a definitive answer in the text. Discussion-oriented questions are more open-ended.]
3. What is ethical emotivism?
4. What notion of space is illustrated by the tendency of students to self-assign their seating arrangements in class?
5. Which (if any) of the five basic themes of Existentialism most resonates with you personally? Why?
6. What have some misunderstood about Kierkegaard's "truth as subjectivity"? 
7. What did pragmatist William James say about "our passional nature" that echoes Kierkegaard's view of "conversion experience" and "leaps of faith"?
8. Why, for the existentialists, is "my truth" not a self-contradictory oxymoron? 
9. What was Sartre's general thesis about the stance literature and art should take towardes social oppression and economic exploitation?
10. Who are some prominent literary figures who exemplify existentialism?
11. What is intentionality?
12. What was Descartes' Pyrrhic victory?
13. What is the point of Sartre's discussion of the voyeur at the keyhole?
14. What do existentialists find objectionable in Husserl's phenomenological reduction?
15. What are some different names existentialists have come up with to characterize conformists?
16.  By what criteria was Kierkegaard the epitome of a Nietzschean?
17. What are Kierkegaard's three spheres or stages of existence?
18. What are some ethical categories that apply only after a leap or conversion experience, for Kierkegaard? Do you agree that people who live entirely in the aesthetic sphere are not immoral?
19. What Kantian precept is for Kierkegaard the essence of immorality? 
20. Do you agree that Kierkegaard's "teleological suspension of the ethical" is not its practical abandonment? How do you think such behavior as Abraham's would impact his relationship with his son Isaac?
21. Is it plausible to deny free will and at the same time affirm individual freedom and "free spirits," in Nietzschean style? Is it an existential error to emphasize the importance of choice in fashioning a free and flourishing life?
22. Was Nietzsche right to think that atheism naturally entails nihilism, in the absence of a philosophy like his own?
23. If fatalism is correct, how can Nietzsche's eternal recurrence afford the possibility of life affirmation and amor fati? How can one choose to affirm life, when events are fated? And how can thought-events be non-arbitrarily exempted from such fatalism?
24. What general 20th century calamity did Jaspers credit Nietzsche and Kierkegaard with anticipating? Do you think we're still suffering a version of that calamity, in the face of our own emergent technologies?

Questions Aug 27

Always try to post at least three pertinent comments and/or questions about the assigned reading PRIOR to each class, in the comments space below my questions. I'll show you in class how to claim participation credit on the daily scorecard for doing so. 

Your comments and questions can (but need not) respond to my dated questions, which will provide the content of our exams. 

Not many questions today, we'll take some time before discussing them for you to introduce yourselves.

Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction by T. Flynn (Ex'm) preface

1. The predominant mood of mid-20th century Parisian existentialists was always what? How did they prefer to do philosophy? In what mood do you find yourself, when philosophizing? Do you share their preference? 
2. What was Nietzsche's advice? Are "existential individuals" born, or made (achieved)? Do you think of your life as a potential succession of "stages," as Kierkegaard did? If so, how would you label/describe your present stage?
3. What post-war essay by Sartre rocked Paris? If you've read it, what do you (dis)like about it? With what kind of philosophy was Existentialism then linked? How do you respond to this question?
4. The supreme value and virtue of Existentialism are what? How do you define these terms? How do you attempt to realize them in your life?
5. Any comment on any of these Existential comics?

European Intellectual History Since Nietzsche: a Yale history course

If any of you know of other relevant online courses or podcasts you think might be appreciated by some of us, please share in the comments space below. 

“In general modern man has no solutions.”—Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shore. 

HIST 271/HUMS 339: European Intellectual History since Nietzsche is a survey course designed to introduce students to the dominant trends in modern European intellectual history. The class aims to sketch a narrative arc from the late 18th century transition to modernity through the late 20th century transition to post-modernity. Following an overview of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, we move through Hegelianism and Marxism and then on to Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God. (God had been multifunctional, fulfilling epistemological, ontological and ethical roles. His death left an enormous empty space. Much of modern thought could be described as an attempt to replace God.) Topics include Marxism-Leninism, psychoanalysis, expressionism, structuralism, phenomenology, existentialism, anti-politics, and deconstruction. Authors include Nietzsche, Lenin, Kafka, Freud, Husserl, de Beauvoir, Heidegger, Arendt, Adorno, Sartre, Girard, Foucault, Derrida and Havel. With Marci Shore, Associate Professor of History at Yale. To view and/or download a course syllabus and class handouts, please go to this link. https://yaleedu.sharepoint.com/:f:/s/... To view the entire course, please go to this playlist link.    • European Intellectual History since Nietzsche  

Episode 13: The French Existentialists... Episode 16: The Second Sex

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Transcript 

Other Yale courses: https://www.youtube.com/@YaleCourses

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If you know of other relevant online courses or podcasts you think might be beneficial to some of us, please tell us in the comments space below.