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The French Revolution proclaimed the Rights of Men. Mary Wollstonecraft replied to vindicate the rights of women. Partly a riposte to a sexist proposal for female education, partly a slashing critique of the conservative Edmund Burke, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women marshaled the empiricism of John Locke and David Hume...

Friedrich Nietzsche is among the most notorious and controversial thinkers in the western intellectual tradition. He aimed to philosophize “with a hammer,” to demolish the philosophical tradition founded by Socrates and Plato and slaughter its most sacred cows. Central to that tradition is the value placed on truth, reason, objectivity, and a moral...

Described by Albert Camus as “the only great spirit of our times,” envied by Simone de Beauvoir for “having a heart that could beat right across the world,” and denounced by Susan Sontag as an anti-Semite, Simone Weil has been a subject of widespread fascination since her death in 1942 from (reputedly) self-starvation, undergone in solidarity...

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Philosophy, Phenomenology, and the Body To perceive means to have a body, which in turn means inhabiting an already significant world. We don’t—on a fundamental level—think the world, but rather live in it. So argues French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who stands with Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger,...

What are confessions? Why are we seduced by them? Why do writers choose the confessional form? How do we understand confessions as literary texts? How do we read confessions as theological or philosophical works? What is one doing when they publicly confess their misdeeds or sexual exploits? From Augustine who took pleasure in wickedness, to Rousseau...

“Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.” Taken from Epictetus’ Handbook, this maxim expresses a signature teaching of the ancient philosophy of Stoicism; it encapsulates Stoicism’s resolution to the problem of life’s turbulences, from sour...

Why do we hear so much about desire and so little about pleasure? When Roland Barthes asked the question, he concluded that while desire has dignity for contemporary philosophers and theorists, pleasure does not. If desire gets its prestige from what we lack, pleasure is often, for better and worse, about what we have—and what we can’t help having....

Complete Course Title: A Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing: an Introduction to Marx In the mid-nineteenth century, a young Karl Marx wrote, in the form of a published open letter to Arnold Ruge: “But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly...

Learn the basics about the tarot from Donna Henes, New York City's acclaimed Urban Shaman. This popular spiritual teacher and advisor will show you how to connect with your inner wisdom to do simple readings for yourself and others. Tarot is not about reading the future or telling your fortune. And it is definitely NOT about fate. It, like most...

The Pittsburgh Hegelians: Hegel’s Unlikely American Renaissance Long denigrated in English-language philosophy, Hegelianism experienced one of its great renaissances in the late 20th century—in Pittsburgh. Gathered at the city’s namesake university, the philosophers Wilfred Sellars, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom revitalized, against...

In 1930, Max Horkheimer became the director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Along with his colleagues and a broader orbit of external scholars, he inaugurated the first wave of what came to be called “critical theory.” This course is an introduction to some of the key works and concepts of the Frankfurt School, including...

Shocks and Phantasmagoria: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project Walter Benjamin once wrote that The Arcades Project was “the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas.” Never completed and well over a decade in the making, The Arcades Project takes on the presentation and history of an entire era and place: the Parisian...