In this lecture, I want to look at one famous, and very specific topic which Merleau-Ponty tackles, and that is the phantom limb. Although Merleau-Ponty tackles a number of, what were then called ‘abnormal psychologies,’ his approach to the phantom limb provides us with a very acute sense of how he proceeds overall. Basically, if we can understand what he is doing with the phantom limb we can get a sense of all the other phenomena he tackles in PoP, such as sexuality, language, time, space, and what we will look to in the latter part of this lecture, habit.

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In this lecture I would like therefore to do a couple of things. Firstly, I would like to provide some brief biographical background on Merleau-Ponty. Then, I would like to talk about Merleau-Ponty’s primary philosophical method: existential phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty, in my view at least, is one of the most interesting innovators of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method. Merleau-Ponty was, with the exception of perhaps Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading exponent of Phenomenology in France. Then, I will proceed to explain what Merleau-Ponty means by perception and conclude with Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body.

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Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence is the most difficult, most obscure, and most fragmented of all of his philosophical proposals. It has been interpreted in a variety of ways by a variety of different philosophers and in the end, there is no real consensus on its value, interpretation or remit. Furthermore, the theory is unfinished and not fully worked out, and was likely to contribute to the non-book The Will to Power. What I am going to attempt here is a reconstruction. If eternal recurrence is to be presented as consistently as possible, I need to explain it cogently as I can, as well as tie it together to other core concepts of Nietzsche’s thought. But before that, we need to try and figure out exactly what Nietzsche means by eternal recurrence.

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In Thus Spake Zarathustra Nietzsche says, ‘The overman is the meaning of the earth.’ So, it is pretty important in Nietzsche’s view. Here, I will begin by excluding some potential interpretations of what the übermensch is, in order to get a clearer sense of what Nietzsche understands by it. This will allow me to explain how the question of the übermensch relates to his concept of amor fati, and Nietzsche’s optimistic fatalism. Subsequently, I will explain how the übermensch reveals the stakes of Nietzsche’s concept of morality and fate.

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In this lecture I outline how Nietzsche conceives of the will-to-power as a metaphysical question, how the will-to-power becomes a relational theory of forces, which in turn lays the ground for Nietzsche’s theory of perspectivity and the will-to-truth. 

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This week we turn our attention to Friedrich Nietzsche. In this lecture I outline what nihilism means, and then turn to Nietzsche’s explanation of active and passive nihilism from his book The Will to Power. My overall claim is that understanding Nietzsche’s account of nihilism is an essential prerequisite for understanding his more famous concepts i.e. slave-morality, the repudiation of Christianity, übermensch, amor fati, embodiment, the will-to-power, and becoming. Once we can grasp what he means by nihilism, only then can we grasp the totality of his work, as well as it’s specific ontological and ethical commitments.

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This week I am going to look at some key moments in the latter part of the PoS. Primarily, I am going to look at what Hegel has to say about culture and religion, moral theories, and ethical life (sittlichkeit). The latter part of the PoS is concerned with clarifying sets of social practices which count as spirit.

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Before we get to culture, politics, ethics and religion, there are still more steps to be carried out before we can understand ourselves as historical beings. Firstly, we need to understand how Hegel conceives of reason as a type of activity. In addition, to understand spiritual freedom (Geist) we need to comprehend what he has to say about the absolute. To this end, I will look at what Hegel says in the distinction he draws between reason and understanding. Also, I am going to explain a number of other forms of misrecognition i.e. stoicism, scepticism, unhappy consciousness, and the beautiful soul. These really are all different types of dependency, to which Hegel will proceed to provide an alternative account of freedom. Reasoning, in the end, will be the prerequisite for spiritual freedom. 

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This week’s lecture examines the transition from sense-certainty and perception to 'force and understanding'. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Subsequently, I will explain Hegel's account of desire, as well as the famous master-slave dialectic.

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This week’s lecture will begin with some historical and biographical context of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I will proceed to explain what the text overall is trying to accomplish. Subsequently, I will turn to the opening chapters of the PoS and explain what Hegel means by sense-certainty. 

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