Author: John

I Am Because We Are has been recognized as a major, canon-defining anthology and adopted as a text in a wide variety of college and university courses. Rene Descartes is often called the first modern philosopher, and his famous saying, “I think, therefore I am,” laid the groundwork for how we conceptualize our sense of…

Published in 1958, “The Human Condition” is Hannah Arendt’s take on how “human activities” should be and have been understood throughout Western history. Arendt is interested in the vita activa (active life) as contrasted with the vita contemplativa (contemplative life) and concerned that the debate over the relative status of the two has blinded us to important insights about…

“The Second Sex” is a 1949 book by the French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. It is a hymn to human freedom and a classic of the existentialist movement. It also has claims to be the most important book in the history of feminism. One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. Simone de Beauvoir

Kripke’s most important philosophical publication, Naming and Necessity (1980), based on transcripts of three lectures he delivered at Princeton in 1970, changed the course of analytic philosophy. It provided the first cogent account of necessity and possibility as metaphysical concepts, and it distinguished both concepts from the epistemological notions of a posteriori knowledge and a priori knowledge (knowledge acquired through experience and knowledge independent of experience,…