History of Philosophy

Dan Herbatschek Søren Kierkegaard was a singular figure. Alongside Nietzsche, he stands as one of the two 19th-century roots of what would later grow into 20th-century existentialism. The two could not be more different—Kierkegaard...

Recognizing that it’s no easy task to pin down the essential features of science, let’s return to the story at hand. In Lecture Two we saw how a piece of Einstein’s general theory of...

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is probably the most controversial philosopher who has ever lived in the Western tradition. We will examine his ideas chronologically, from his early work on Greek tragedy to his excoriating criticisms...

A Historical Perspective We’ve completed our first pass through logical positivism, having paid special attention to the positivists’ doctrines of empirical meaning and of evidence. We’ve seen, in the positivists own attempts to explain and...

Probabilistic Statements The Bayesian approach considers probability statements as subjective, asserting that they represent one’s degrees of belief. It does not impose that one’s degrees of belief should align with frequencies. What Bayesianism requires is...

A Theory of Justice In the most prominent work of political philosophy in English in the second half of the 20th century, his 1971 A Theory of Justice, John Rawls’s goal was to justify the welfare...

Modern Physics' influence on Philosophy From 1900–1930, the greatest revolutions in physics since the 17th century had a manifold effect on philosophy: some thinkers came to take philosophy now to be the handmaiden of science;...

Kant' starting point David Hume, one of the most prominent members of the Scottish Enlightenment, was a multifaceted Enlightenment thinker. Based in Edinburgh, Hume was a cultivated, cosmopolitan intellectual, a frequenter of Paris salons. Once...