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A Festive Three-Part Autumn Miniseries

Human world-making was born in a peculiar shape that determined a particular path in Western philosophy, drawing a jagged line from Thales to its Final Solution.

In this short three-part cool-cave Autumn-vacation miniseries, we will take one particular but near-optimal journey from the very birth of philosophical thinking up to the Final Solution of the problem that was born alongside it.

We will do a kind of Hegelian development journalism: follow one particular zig-zagging path through the history of philosophy, watching how each new solution generates its own disappointment—and how that disappointment forces the next move.

Our journey:

Part I — The Birth of Adequate Explanation

  1. Chaos the All-Father — Ungrund, non-explanation
  2. Homer — Personal, intentional, divine-agent explanation
  3. Thales — Water: the One beneath the Many
  4. Anaximander — The apeiron: indeterminate primordial stuff
  5. Anaximenes — Air: a mechanism for generating the Many
  6. Pythagoras — Number, ratio, form, and intelligible structure
  7. Parmenides — Being, identity, and necessity
  8. Anaxagoras — Mixture, differentiation, and Nous
  9. Aristotle — Matter, form, substance, and causes

Part II — The Crisis of Knowing

  1. Descartes → Locke → Leibniz → Hume

Part III — The Final Solution

  • Kant → DIMP/AG

The Best Way is also the Easiest

Understanding the biography of philosophy is possible: The Pre-Socratics solved each disappointment in the most childish way possible—by fiat. We know what our model needs, so we just put it there. Let there be … and it exists.

Yet the embarrassingly obvious wish-fulfillment nature of these raw, near-mythical answers yields some of the deepest information of all: the metaphors secretly driving our theorizing over time.

And when we finally arrive at Kant, we'll see those same baby-level moves, assumptions, and expectations playing out again. Only now we'll understand what the problem was all along—and what makes its Final Solution possible.

A new kind of SADHO video program

This will depart from our normal format, whose two pillars of the examined life in American culture have been BBC and PBS.

But don't worry! We'll have a new genus of videos this time. In fact, the videos will be morphing their kind due to a Copernican-like conformity force: the conformity of video to topic.

We'll use brief, immensely insightful clips—astonishing pieces of historical footage, naked attempts at brainwashing, and brilliantly liberating scenes from some of the best films ever made.

Think of them as engine-cutaway-view demonstration tapes. None will ever be longer than 6.66 minutes.

One particular path, out of a countable infinity of possible paths. But once you've journeyed through it, you'll feel its necessity.

METHOD

  • Watch this week’s chillingly deep video clips, located [will post within 24 hours].
  • As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.

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