by Nat Hansen
Argue your way into great moments of philosophical history. Inhabit a character, argue with the people that you've so far only read about, and discover philosophy as lively conversations in real (ok...simulated) places, between people with real commitments, about things that matter the most.
Athens, 5th Century BCE
The Socratic Experience
Go down to the Piraeus with Socrates and Glaucon. Argue about justice with Thrasymachus. Try to convince Socrates that poetry has a place in the education of philosophers. Discover why Meno called Socrates the torpedo fish. You are Kratinos, a young Athenian, the son of a merchant, with strong opinions and a skeptical soul.
Oxford, 1952
The Ordinary Language Philosophy Experience
You are a young Californian on a Rhodes Scholarship, eager to see what British philosophers are up to. Attend Austin's Saturday Mornings, ask about the difference between shooting a donkey by mistake and shooting it by accident. Talk to Iris Murdoch, Phillipa Foot, and G.E.M. Anscombe about everything that the ordinary language philosophers are missing. Take the train to London and argue with A.J. Ayer about sense data or Karl Popper about falsification.
Jena, 1799
The German Romanticism Experience
You arrive in Jena as a young theology student from Tübingen, drawn by Fichte's reputation, but Fichte has just been forced out of the University. What do you do now? Attend Schelling's lectures on Naturphilosophie. Argue about irony and art with Friedrich Schlegel and August Schlegel. Meet Caroline Schlegel, the center of everything. Spar with the wünderkind Schelling. Watch Hegel arrive with nothing but a manuscript. Stay until the world spirit, Napoleon, rides through on horseback.
Paris, 1945
The Existentialism Experience
You step off the train in the Gare de Lyon one month before Sartre’s lecture that starts the existentialist craze. Hear Sartre declare that existentialism is a humanism in a room so packed that people faint. Argue with de Beauvoir about freedom and situation. Drink a Pastis with Camus at the Flore. Listen to Boris Vian play trumpet in the cellars of Saint-Germain. Watch friendships form and dissolve over answers to the question: what does your freedom demand of you?
In development
Adorno, Horkheimer, Brecht, Mann, Schoenberg, Lang
Los Ángeles 1943
Wittgenstein & the Moral Sciences Club
Cambridge 1934
Sous les Pavés, la Plage! Situationism, Foucault, Bourdieu
Paris 1968
The Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Smith, Black
Edinburgh 1775
Seismographs of the Street: Benjamin, Kracauer, Brecht
Berlin 1930
Spinoza, Rembrandt & the Dutch Golden Age
Amsterdam 1665
W.E.B. Du Bois, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, George Santayana
Cambridge, MA 1898
The Vienna Circle
Vienna 1930
Abstract Expressionism & the New York Intellectuals
New York 1952
Woolf, Moore & the Bloomsbury Group
Bloomsbury 1910