Simposeum

Converse with history's most consequential thinkers, grounded in the texts themselves and cited to the page.

Thinkers (177)

Philosophy (126)

Adam Smith, Theodor W. Adorno, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Anaximander, Elizabeth Anscombe, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, Hannah Arendt, Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo, Marcus Aurelius, J.L. Austin, A.J. Ayer, Jean Baudrillard, Jeremy Bentham, Henri Bergson, George Berkeley, Boethius, Nick Bostrom, Albert Camus, Rudolf Carnap, David Chalmers, William Kingdon Clifford, G. A. Cohen, Confucius, Nicholas of Cusa, Arthur C. Danto, Donald Davidson, Gilles Deleuze, Democritus, Daniel Dennett, Jacques Derrida, René Descartes, John Dewey, Fyodor Dostoevsky, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ronald Dworkin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Empedocles, Friedrich Engels, Epictetus, Epicurus, Ludwig Feuerbach, Philippa Foot, Michel Foucault, Gottlob Frege, René Girard, Kurt Gödel, Gorgias, H. P. Grice, Jürgen Habermas, H.L.A. Hart, G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Heraclitus, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Edmund Husserl, Ibn Khaldun, William James, Karl Jaspers, Immanuel Kant, John Maynard Keynes, Søren Kierkegaard, Saul Kripke, Peter Kropotkin, Thomas Kuhn, François de La Rochefoucauld, Imre Lakatos, Laozi (Lao Tzu), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Aldo Leopold, Emmanuel Levinas, David Lewis, John Locke, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alasdair MacIntyre, J. L. Mackie, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Marx, Mencius (Mengzi), Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Stuart Mill, Michel de Montaigne, G.E. Moore, Nāgārjuna, Thomas Nagel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nishida Kitarō, Robert Nozick, William Paley, Derek Parfit, Parmenides, Blaise Pascal, Alvin Plantinga, Plato, Plotinus, Karl Popper, W.V.O. Quine, James Rachels, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bertrand Russell, Gilbert Ryle, Jean-Paul Sartre, F.W.J. Schelling, Friedrich Schiller, Arthur Schopenhauer, John Searle, Wilfrid Sellars, Seneca, Henry Sidgwick, Oswald Spengler, Baruch Spinoza, Max Stirner, Sun Tzu, Alan Turing, Voltaire, Simone Weil, Alfred North Whitehead, Bernard Williams, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Xenophanes, Zhuangzi, Slavoj Žižek

Psychology (31)

Alfred Adler, James Mark Baldwin, Alfred Binet, Mary Whiton Calkins, Jean-Martin Charcot, Hermann Ebbinghaus, Sigmund Freud, Francis Galton, G. Stanley Hall, Pierre Janet, Carl Jung, Daniel Kahneman, Wolfgang Köhler, Emil Kraepelin, Jacques Lacan, Gustave Le Bon, C. Lloyd Morgan, Elizabeth Loftus, William McDougall, Stanley Milgram, Hugo Münsterberg, Ivan Pavlov, Jean Piaget, Théodule Ribot, Charles Spearman, James Sully, Edward L. Thorndike, Edward Bradford Titchener, Margaret Floy Washburn, John B. Watson, Wilhelm Wundt

Rhetoric (10)

John Quincy Adams, Hugh Blair, George Campbell, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Demosthenes, Frederick Douglass, François Fénelon, Isocrates, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, Richard Whately

Theology (7)

Jean Calvin, Flavius Josephus, John Henry Newman, Origen, Ernest Renan, Albert Schweitzer, David Friedrich Strauss

Mathematics and Philosophy of Science (1)

Norbert Wiener

Political Philosophy (1)

Edmund Burke

Theology and Philosophy (1)

Maimonides

Courses (97)

• Prediction and Control — A cat in a box, a baby and a white rat — how psychology threw out the mind and promised to engineer a person instead.
• The Man Who Never Lived — The chain of conquerors who each set out to become the last one begins with a man who never existed. Before anybody could imitate Achilles, somebody had to…
• Macedonia Is Too Little — Before he had done anything, Alexander had been told by his mother that his father was a god, by his father that the kingdom was too small for him, and by a…
• The Instrument — Alexander crossed into Asia at twenty-two with the best army in the world, an engineering corps, a war plan and an advance force already ashore. He had built…
• Never the Same Way Twice — Ten years, four great battles and a siege nobody thought possible — told through the two things that actually governed them: how little the sources agree, and…
• The Dispatch — Forty years before he wrote a word anyone remembers, Caesar was already managing what would be said about him — in funeral speeches, in restored monuments, and…
• The Serial — The Gallic War was published a book a year, while the war was still being fought, to be read aloud in Rome to people who could not read it. This is what that…
• The Case for the Defence — The Gallic War celebrated killing foreigners. The Civil War had to justify killing Romans — and every technique in it follows from that, down to which Latin…
• The Bulletin — Napoleon published his own campaigns to the French public while the fighting was still going on. Within his lifetime the word for those reports became French…
• What They Could Not Burn — After Waterloo the French state made it a crime to own his picture, and burned imperial emblems in the public squares. Thirty years later the record it had…
• Descartes: The Meditations — Six days of doubt and reconstruction with René Descartes
• The Evidence — Seven experiments into how attraction is manufactured — arousal, proximity, concealment, and the face.
• The Practice — Six lessons in the seduction tradition — Ovid, Casanova, Kierkegaard's seducer, Greene's nine types, and the objection that undoes them all.
• The Object — Six lessons on what desire is actually after — the Symposium, Freud's conditions of love, transference, and closeness produced to order.
• Is Morality Even Real? — Six steps into the first question of ethics: is there a truth about right and wrong at all — or only custom, feeling, and command?
• Virtue & the Good Life — Six steps into the oldest answer: that to be good is not to pay a tax on happiness but to possess it — the life of flourishing, and how a soul is trained for…
• Sentiment & Utility — Six steps through the British answer to Glaucon: that morality springs from fellow-feeling, and its whole content is the impartial promotion of happiness — and…
• The Moral Law — Six steps into the boldest answer to Glaucon: that morality is not about happiness at all, but the law reason gives itself — and that no person may ever be…
• The Reckoning — The finale: not a fifth answer to Glaucon but a weighing of the four — the genealogy that turns suspicion on morality itself, the trolley that neither theory…
• The Ground — Before the absurd there was dread — a Dane writing under false names and a Russian who had stood before a firing squad.
• The Absurd and the Free — Camus and Sartre were friends until one of them wrote a book about murder — and the argument that ended them is the argument itself.
• Freud: Applied — The instrument — how the hidden wish is actually reached
• Freud: Civilization — The instrument turned on love, society, and God
• Freud: Foundations — Six ways the hidden mind gives itself away
• Freud: Scholar — The whole edifice, put on trial
• The Existence of God — Five arguments for God, and what making them cost.
• The Case Against — Six arguments that changed what would count as a reason.
• The Evidence for a Man — Five lessons on what the documents will and will not carry.
• Hegel: Adept — Six dialogues through the system itself
• Hegel: Foundations — Seven dialogues into the thought of G. W. F. Hegel
• Hegel: Scholar — Six dialogues on the wars over my corpse
• Heidegger: Being and Time — The early existential analytic
• Heidegger: The Question — The Rectorate, the Black Notebooks, and the verdict
• Heidegger: The Turn — The later thinking — Being, technology, and dwelling
• The Human in the Loop — Everyone agrees a person must stay in the loop before a machine kills. Through the first weeks of the war in Gaza, one did. He had about twenty seconds, and…
• Hume: The Science of Man — An empiricist takes the mind apart — and finds no cause, no self, and no reason that could ever move you to act.
• The Devices — Six mechanisms of Nazi propaganda, each shown working — and none of them retired.
• William James: The Pluralistic Universe — Four dialogues where the psychologist finally philosophizes
• William James: The Stream — Six dialogues in the psychology of a mind describing itself
• William James: The Will to Believe — Five dialogues on belief, and what it has the right to do
• Jung: Applied — The living practice — reading the psyche's own language
• Jung: Foundations — A map of the psyche, drawn from what it actually produces
• Jung: Scholar — The whole edifice, put on trial
• Kahneman: The Method — He spent fifty years finding out how judgement fails, including his own
• Aggression in the Lifeworld — Alex Karp wrote a hundred and twenty-seven pages, in German, on how a speech can bind a crowd by giving it someone to blame. Then he built the software that…
• Kierkegaard: The Stages of Existence — Seven dialogues up through the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious
• Lacan: The Clinic — Three kinds of patient, and why the difference decides everything
• Lacan: Foundations — Five scenes that explain a difficult man
• Lacan: The Apparatus — The formalism, and whether it does any work
• Loftus: Memory on Trial — Change one word in the question and the memory changes with it
• Machiavelli: The Art of Power — Six dialogues on power, virtù, and the republic
• Who Kept the Mad — Before there were asylums, somebody still had to hold the mad. Three societies answered that question differently, and none of them was a rung on a ladder.
• The Founding Stories — The asylum arrived with an account of itself — chains struck off, science and humanity at last united. Every episode in that account is real. This is what…
• The Shape of Distress — Hysterical paralysis was epidemic in 1880 and is a curiosity now. The distress did not go anywhere — it changed shape, and this is how that happens.
• The Invention of a Disease — How dementia praecox reached America through a murder trial, was renamed into a confusion, and was replaced by a manual commissioned about psychiatry's…
• What Was Done to the Brain — Psychiatry cured one disease outright, by giving people malaria. Everything that followed — the comas, the convulsions, the ice pick — was an attempt to repeat…
• Who Emptied the Asylums — A revolt, a famous study with a man missing from it, and a question everybody thinks they can answer. The hospitals did empty. Almost nothing you have been…
• Marx & Engels: Adept — Capital — the anatomy of the system
• Marx & Engels: Foundations — The most consequential friendship in modern thought
• Marx & Engels: Scholar — Two Marxisms? — the contested ground
• What There Is — Eight steps into the first question of metaphysics: what is there, and what is it?
• Change, Cause & Time — Eight steps through the moving world: how things become, why they happen, and whether time flows.
• The Possible & the Necessary — Eight steps into modality: what could have been, what must be, and whether other worlds are real.
• Persons, Minds & Selves — Eight steps into the self: what a mind is, whether you are the same over time, and whether there is a 'you' at all.
• Being, Nothing & God — Eight steps to the deepest question: why is there anything at all, and is there a being that had to be?
• Freedom, Reality & the Limits of Metaphysics — Eight steps to the edge: are we free, is the world mind-independent, and is metaphysics knowledge at all?
• Milgram: The Obedience Experiments — He ran more than twenty of them. You have heard about one.
• Nietzsche: Adept — Six dialogues deeper into the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche
• Nietzsche: Foundations — Six dialogues into the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche
• Nietzsche: Scholar — Six dialogues into the contested heart of Nietzsche's thought
• Pavlov: The Conditioned Reflex — Five experiments into how a reflex is learned
• Piaget: Applied — Four interviews into predicting a child's mind
• Piaget: Foundations — Five interviews into how a child builds a mind
• Piaget: Scholar — Three verdicts — where the tasks were redesigned, and what survived
• Why Obey? — Eight steps into the first question of politics: by what right does anyone rule, and why should you obey?
• Who Should Rule? — Seven trials of democracy, prosecuted by its oldest and greatest enemy — and answered by its defenders, century by century.
• Liberty — Seven steps to the fence around the self: what may no power — not even the people entire — ever do to you?
• Justice — Eight steps to the hardest question in the city: when liberty and equality collide over who gets what, what does justice require?
• Power & Revolution — Seven steps into the question beneath all the others: what is politics, what is power — and what is it for?
• Named for the Wrong Job — Three molecules everyone can name, and the three jobs nobody explained
• Wanting, Liking, Learning — Three jobs that come apart under the knife — and the one that turned out to be an algorithm somebody had already written down.
• The Art of Survival — Before he was a financier or a philanthropist, George Soros was a fourteen-year-old on forged papers in occupied Budapest. This is the method his father taught…
• The Failed Philosopher — Soros wanted to be admitted to a company of thinkers, was refused three times, and built the substitute out of money.
• Alchemy — Soros kept his teacher's argument that we cannot know anything for certain, and drew from it the opposite conclusion about what to do on a Monday morning.
• Open Society — Soros took from his teacher the argument that nobody can know what is right, and then spent thirty-two billion dollars installing an answer.
• Stoicism: Foundations — What three Romans actually taught — the discipline of assent, of desire, and of action.
• Stoicism: The System — Logic, physics, ethics — the three parts the internet threw away, and whether the practice survives without them.
• The Ladder — Two researchers read everything the American agitators printed, looking for the grievance. There wasn't one — and the eight rungs they found instead are what…
• The Language — A philologist forbidden a library spent twelve years keeping notes on single words, and worked out that the speeches were never the instrument.
• The Method — A radio preacher nobody remembers, taken apart device by device by a man who would rather have been writing about music.
• The Buried Idea — How the hidden mind was found and named — the pathogenic secret, the magnetic sleep, Charcot's clinic, and Janet's dissociation.
• The Systems — Three rival theories of one darkness — Freud's repressed wish, Adler's striving from inferiority, Jung's inherited floor.
• The Verdict — What survived the century's testing — suggestion and false memory, the adaptive unconscious, and the honest ledger.
• Competition Is For Losers — The most widely read business book of its decade contains a complete theory of sacrificial violence, and never names the man whose theory it is. He taught at…
• Under Questioning — Four ways to lose an argument, ranked by a Roman in AD 95 — and walked down in order by the defence at Nuremberg.
• Wittgenstein: Early — Six dialogues inside the Tractatus — picturing the world in logic
• Wittgenstein: Late — Five dialogues into the Investigations — meaning, rules, and forms of life