Feb 4th
2–5pm EST
Meets 4 Times
Explore the depths of human existence and gain insights into the fundamental questions of life through online Philosophy classes, covering topics such as ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics.
3 classes have spots left
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Simone de Beauvoir—activist, author, social critic, philosopher—is considered one of the pioneering figures of existentialist and feminist philosophy. Although her work spans multiple genres and address numerous modern social questions and classic philosophical dilemmas, it was the 1953 publication of The Second Sex that brought the “woman question” into plain and clear light and marked her entry into not only French, but also...
Sunday Feb 4th, 2–5pm Eastern Time
(4 sessions)
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
In the mid-nineteenth century, a young Karl Marx wrote, in the form of a published open letter to Arnold Ruge: “But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present—I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions,...
Thursday Feb 1st, 6:30–9:30pm Eastern Time
(4 sessions)
Unlock your most intimate and private stories through persona writing and develop your narrative and lyric voices in this introductory poetry workshop. Broaden your sense of what is possible in your work as you explore various literary styles and approaches. Join us online to deepen your understanding of the technique and receive constructive critiques from both teachers and fellow students.
Thursday Jan 25th, 7:30–8:30pm Eastern Time
(8 sessions)
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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
What is the relationship between the mind and the brain? Is the mind a reducible, physical system, or is there anything more to consciousness? It’s often taken for granted that the human mind is a kind of computer (and that, similarly, computers can “think,” know, and learn much as humans do). In more classical thought, the mind was frequently regarded as independent of the body, a thing associated with an incorporeal “soul.” But how seriously...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
How does an activity as simple as walking become emblematic of an age—or a school of philosophy? From the wandering peripatetic of ancient Greece to the paradigmatic urban wanderer of 19th century Europe—the flâneur, a boulevard stroller immersed in the throng of human traffic—philosophers have been walking and thinking, alone or in among the crowd, amidst an asymmetrical organization of gazes, at once observing and being observed. The freedom—of...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Plato’s Republic: Philosophy, Happiness, and the Beautiful City If Plato is foundational to the history of Western thought, the Republic is foundational to Plato’s philosophy. By way of a twisting, turning conversation, the Republic unlocks the fields of political and moral philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics, offering insight into Plato’s core ideas and ideals—from the notion of the Forms to the ideal of the philosopher...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
How can we, as finite beings, grasp the concept of infinity? Yet humans have been contemplating infinity for millennia, whether inspired by nature, philosophy, spirituality—or mathematics. This course is a historical and conceptual approach to the latter realm, the mathematics of infinity. Our topics will include the ancient Greeks’ discovery of irrational numbers and Zeno’s paradoxes; Aristotle’s distinction between “actual infinity”...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
How are we to understand loneliness today? It appears that we are facing a mass epidemic of loneliness—one perhaps exacerbated by virological pandemic of COVID-19. Britain has appointed a Minister of Loneliness to counter rising rates of isolation. Approximately 20-43 percent of American adults over the age of 60 experience “frequent or intense loneliness.” And, it is clear from medical research that loneliness has significant health impacts:...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Kant’s Practical Philosophy: Reason, Morality, and Freedom At the epicenter of Immanuel Kant’s broad philosophical project regarding nature, the self, aesthetics, and history is an ultimate concern with morality and the good. How must we re-conceive of our moral obligations to each other in the light of declining religious authority and belief? Can we understand morality on the basis of the nature of human reason alone? For Kant, there is an...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Throughout the West, Islam is frequently presented as a powerful monolith, a civilizational threat, or an infection in the body politic. However, even a cursory glance at historical and contemporary materials reveals a long historical evolution in Muslim ethical thought and practice, which prompts questions of urgent contemporary relevance and dizzying scope: What is Sharia? Is it a rigid, 7th-century-based law, or an ethical system promoting the...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Does history have a direction, a purpose, or an end goal? Can we deduce general historical patterns from studying the past? Is it naĂŻve 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 questions related to the philosophy of history. This course will survey these attempts to grapple...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
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 for Leibniz ours is “the best of all possible worlds,” Schopenhauer insisted that we are “not...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
“For the philosopher,” writes Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, “the most interesting thing about fashion is its extraordinary anticipations.” In other words, fashion is, in itself, an avant-garde: it shows us what the world will be like before that world has fully arrived. Its uncanny relation to the new is by no means the only philosophically interesting thing about fashion. And yet, philosophy (often coded masculine, serious,...
Curious Soul Philosophy @ Live interactive virtual
Living Authentically: Simone de Beauvoir’s Antidote to Alienation We all struggle with the weight of society’s expectations about who we should be and what we should strive for. Sometimes we are so overcome by the external pressures of others’ beliefs and demands that our lives feel like they are no longer our own. And sometimes we get so good at internalizing the social norms that were handed down to us that our chains become self-imposed....
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Charles Mills spent his early academic life teaching physics in Jamaica and the next four decades teaching political philosophy of race in the United States. Seemingly dramatically different, the two careers shared a single, fundamental concern: What supposedly universal claims about the order of the world are actually ideologically informed assumptions? For Mills, race is one such ideological assumption—and not, as many have it, a peripheral...
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