The Indian dramatist crafts distinctive emotional effects that allow the audience to savour those emotions; those emotional flavours, or rasas, culminate in a savouring of tranquility; and savouring tranquility offers a foretaste of the spiritual liberation that is our ultimate goal. Not at all bad for a night out at the theatre.
If you want to be a better person, the subject you should study is mathematics.
We live in an era that’s impatient and grasping, says Heidegger. Our technological prowess is only the most outward evidence of this more general way of being in the world.
It’s as if Plato were proposing a wholesale ban on Hollywood, Netflix, the publishing industry, and pop music—and that’s just for starters.
There’s no easy way around Singer’s argument once you encounter it. That’s what makes it dangerous.
According to Grasshopper, the best life is a life devoted to playing games.
On one hand, Heidegger is arguably the most important figure in European philosophy in the twentieth century. On the other hand, he was for a time a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party.
If we can learn to learn from one another, the philosophy of the Americas has tremendous potential for syncretism and growth.
Building a syllabus, at its best, is also an act of love and a gift to those with whom it’s shared. Like a music mix, it’s constructed out of elements that I didn’t make myself but the assembly in uniquely my own.
Anglophone philosophy in the last half-century has slowly pulled its head out of its own proverbial ass and it has done so in no small part thanks to the contribution of these four remarkable women.