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This is a four-part Olio seminar on the philosophy of history. While history is the study of the past, the philosophy of history is a study of how we study the past. Stated differently, the philosophy of history interrogates the historical imagination, and asks us to question why we believe the past is worthy of our attention. In my mind, it is literally...

The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: an Introduction to Moral Philosophy Why should we be good? What makes an action moral—and how can we know? If an act is moral here and now, is it necessarily moral there and then? Is goodness in some way connected to happiness? And, what constitutes a moral judgment—is it an exercise of reason, or merely an expression...

Does history have a direction, a purpose, or an end goal? Can we deduce general historical patterns from studying the past? Is it naïve to hope and work for a better future? From the Enlightenment to the twenty-first century, liberal, Marxist, positivist, and post-structuralist thinkers have offered radically different responses to these fundamental...

Our ideas about progress, history, and human nature often have their roots in the Enlightenment. The British political philosopher John Gray offers a unique way to understand the major events of our time and the role that Enlightenment thinkers, from Locke to the Positivists, have played in our assumptions about the world. Gray presents a nuanced...

Join Darryl Aiken-Afam as we explore a single chapter from The 'Tao Te Ching' to consider and discuss its contents and its application to our daily life situations. In addition, we will have a movement or somatic piece that features body integration of the principles of Yin and Yang through either Qigong, Zen Shiatsu, Meridian Touch Yoga or Sotai....

We are all aware of the impact of sunlight on plant growth and development, but few of us know that a plant actually “sees” where light is emanating from and positions itself to be in optimal alignment with light. This phenomenon is not just occurring in the plant kingdom—humans are also fundamentally directed by light, the same light that spiritual...

Art was anything but peripheral to Kant’s philosophical project. In judging a thing to be beautiful, Kant maintained, we bridge “the great gulf” of nature and human freedom, and prepare ourselves to “love something, even nature, without interest”—that is, exercise moral judgment. Immensely influential in its time, the so-called “third...

The Tao Te Ching is said to be one of the greatest wisdom books in all of recorded human history. Its philosophical moorings are unfettered by western religious and social notions like absolute good and evil, right and wrong, heaven and hell, etc.Featured throughout the Tao Te Ching the Taoist concepts of Yin and Yang, while appearing to be polarized...

In the early 20th century, a new generation of thinkers came to believe that European philosophy had reached a dead end. Reacting to what they held was the obfuscatory language and non-sensical direction of post-Kantian philosophy, Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore set out to revolutionize philosophy through a fundamental rethinking...

The Happier Hour is a monthly event series bringing philosophy out of the ivory tower of academia and into our modern day agora: the bar. It’s like the self-help section– only way funnier, smarter, and with booze. And now it’s a podcast too! 

It is difficult to imagine a more ambitious or even hubristic philosophy than that of G.W.F. Hegel. Even Hegel’s most contemptuous critics agreed with his faithful disciples on one count: he simply could not be ignored. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that much of 19th Century European intellectual history is a story about those who were with...

Time appears as one of these concepts impossible to define, nor to perceive as such. Augustine writes, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know”. Indeed, though impossible to deny its existence, since it seems to be part of the necessary framework (with space) in which we can perceive...