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 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. Stick around until Hegel shows up in 1801 with his fashionable "Titus" haircut (Napoleon's haircut), and maybe even until the world spirit, Napoleon himself, rides through on horseback in 1806.
Paris, 1945
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. You are Marguerite Langlois, 23, from Lyon, with a letter of introduction to study philosophy with Jean Hyppolite at the Sorbonne. 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. Watch friendships form and dissolve over answers to the question: what does your freedom demand of you?
In development
Weimar on the Pacific: Adorno, Horkheimer, Brecht, Mann, Schoenberg, Lang
Los Angeles 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
The concept of America: 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