Philosophy Classes in NYC, New York

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...

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 Worst of All Possible Worlds: an Introduction to Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer is a true oddity in the history of philosophy. Although a great metaphysical systematizer in the tradition of Leibniz and Hegel, Schopenhauer posed a worldview entirely antithetical to the “optimism” characteristic of traditional Western philosophizing. Whereas...

The arrival of Jacques Derrida’s work lit the American intellectual landscape ablaze. For many American academics and critics in the 1970s and thereafter, the charismatic Algerian-born Derrida was the face of “French Theory,” and virtually synonymous with postmodernism itself. With his enigmatic prose and seemingly esoteric approach to language,...

Jacques Lacan always insisted that he was a thoroughgoing Freudian—perhaps the most orthodox Freudian of them all. A larger-than-life provocateur, Lacan’s oracular lectures and clinical innovations (including the notorious “short session”) ultimately led to his excommunication from the International Psychoanalytic Association. Yet, despite...

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...

This course is a historical approach to the mathematics of infinity, with a focus on conceptual and philosophical questions.  We will begin with the ancient Greeks’ discovery of irrational numbers and discussions of Zeno’s paradoxes, then jump forward to the development of the “infinitesimal” calculus in the late 17th century (by Newton...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

Introduction to Aristotle: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Order of Nature For much of Western history, Aristotle was known simply as “the philosopher.” Systematic and extraordinarily wide-ranging, Aristotle’s thought encompasses everything from metaphysics to politics to psychology to logic to poetic tragedy—and even plant biology. A student...