Philosophy Classes in Los Angeles, CA

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...

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...

Angela Y. Davis’ 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, is arguably the foundational text for the intellectual and political work being done by the prison abolitionist movement today. More broadly, Davis’ wide-ranging writing and political activism over the past five decades mark her as one of the most important contemporary intellectuals.In...

Friedrich Nietzsche is among the most notorious and controversial thinkers in the western intellectual tradition. He aimed to philosophize “with a hammer,” to demolish the philosophical tradition founded by Socrates and Plato and slaughter its most sacred cows. Central to that tradition is the value placed on truth, reason, objectivity, and a moral...

This is a six-part Olio seminar on the philosophy of history. While history is the study of the past, the philosophy of history is a study of how we study the past. Stated differently, the philosophy of history interrogates the historical imagination, and asks us to question why we believe the past is worthy of our attention. In my mind, it is literally...

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...

“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...

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...