Interactive Philosophy Simulations
Argue your way into great moments of philosophical history.
The Socratic Experience
Go down to the Piraeus with Socrates and Glaucon. Argue whether justice is just the advantage of the stronger with Thrasymachus. Try to stand up to Socrates’s questioning, and 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.
The Existentialism Experience
You step off the train in the Gare de Lyon two days 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 collaboration. Drink a Pastis with Camus at the Café de Flore. Listen to Boris Vian play trumpet in the cellars of Saint-Germain. You are Marguerite Langlois, 23, from Lyon, with a letter of introduction to study philosophy with Jean Hyppolite at the Sorbonne.
The Ordinary Language Philosophy Experience
You are a young Californian on a Rhodes Scholarship, eager to see what Oxford philosophers are up to. Argue about illusions and other minds at one of J.L. Austin’s Saturday Morning sessions. 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 take a break from philosophy and go listen to some jazz in Soho.
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 the Wunderkind’s Schelling's lectures on Naturphilosophie. Argue about irony and art with Friedrich Schlegel and August Schlegel. Meet Caroline Schlegel, the center of the Jena social and intellectual world. Stick around until 1801 and you’ll see Hegel shows up with his fashionable "Titus" haircut (Napoleon's haircut).
Hegel, the Phenomenology, and Napoleon at the gates
It is the night of 12 October 1806. Napoleon's watchfires are being lit outside Jena. The Prussian army is camped in the fog. In a rented room a thirty-six-year-old G.W.F. Hegel has just mailed the manuscript of the *Phenomenology of Spirit* to his publisher, with a friend's money staked on the manuscript reaching the publisher by the 18th. By candlelight he writes to that friend and waits. You are Ernst Mayer, his student and friend. This might be your last chance to talk to him about his book and argue with him once again about the Emperor whose army is burning the Johannisgasse. If you stick around until the morning, you may even see the world-soul on horseback.
The Logician Goes to Court
You are Albert Einstein. In about an hour you will arrive at a federal courthouse in Trenton where your closest friend, Kurt Gödel, is to be sworn in as an American citizen. Over the past weeks Kurt has been studying the Constitution in preparation for the civics test and, because he is who he is, he has found what he considers an inconsistency: a legal path by which the United States could become a dictatorship. He feels he must explain this to the judge as a matter of urgency. The economist and game theorist Oskar Morgenstern is driving. You have the 45 minute drive, and maybe the hearing itself, to keep the greatest logician of the twentieth century from ruining his chance at becoming an American citizen.
60 Minutes with an Oxford Philosopher
You have written a short piece of philosophical work — 50 to 500 words, your core argument — and submitted it to one of four Oxford philosophers. Today, at the appointed time, you knock on their door. You have an hour. They have read it. They are not going to be generous with praise. Choose your don: Austin at Corpus Christi, Anscombe at Somerville, Hare at Balliol, or Murdoch at St Anne’s. If you are up for it, you can play through the whole eight week Michaelmas term; dons give reading recommendations for the week’s meeting and remember previous discussions.
Should philosophy be written down?
You are Phaedrus, a young Athenian who loves fine speeches. You and Socrates are sitting under a plane tree by the Ilissus on a hot summer day. Socrates is going to argue that writing is bad for the memory, and like an orphan, can’t defend itself. (Of course those arguments didn’t stop Plato from writing down what Socrates said.) What this short simulation explores is: maybe now writing can defend itself and argue back?
In the Lecture Hall
Berlin, winter 1828/29. Hegel is delivering his last cycle of lectures on aesthetics at the new Universität. You take a seat in the auditorium in January 1829 for Part III: The System of the Individual Arts. The lecture is reconstructed from Adolf Heimann's student *Mitschrift*, which is closer to the spoken Hegel than the edited Hotho text most readers know. As Hegel speaks, the works of art he describes appear on the screen. You may raise your hand at any time.
A rubber of whist at the infidel's table
Evenings in David Hume's house in Edinburgh in 1776 playing his favorite card game. You are the fourth at the whist table with Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson (professor of pneumatics and moral philosophy at Edinburgh). The cards are dealt, played, and scored by the house rules: long whist, thirteen cards each. Conversation takes place around and in response to the game. The game keeps score of points and shillings won and lost, and after you play one evening to its end you'll be invited back for another. You can play up until Hume is too sick to continue. Even though he is dying he is still the most cheerful man in the room.
Recent updates
In development
Live through the debates about sense, reference, definite descriptions, and proper names
Names and Descriptions 1918-1970
Step behind Rawls’s veil of ignorance in 1971 America
Original Position 1971
Queen Christina and Descartes, with a focus on the Meditations
Stockholm 1647
Descartes and Princess Elisabeth
Egmond Binnen 1643
Reports from Damaged Life: Adorno, Horkheimer, Brecht, Mann, Schoenberg, Feuchtwanger
Los Angeles 1943
The Vienna Circle and Karl Kraus’s *Die Fackel*
Vienna 1931