Warning: Parmenides’ philosophy and writing can be very challenging. In this guide, I have chosen to pitch his ideas at a level somewhere between advanced beginner and intermediate to give you a sense of the depth, difficulty, and importance of Parmenides thought and text. Part of the reason for this is that is to counter-balance a tendency that first-time readers have in which they dismiss his work as mere “word-play”. In my judgment, the problems raised by Parmenides’ poem are so significant and fundamental that they go far deeper than mere words, they allow us to think beyond language itself.

While Heraclitus was the first great philosopher, Parmenides was the second. In my judgment, he was also greatest of all philosophers in the Western tradition before Socrates (the group of philosophers called “The Pre-Socratics”). But with philosophical greatness comes great difficulty. In Parmenides’ case, the difficulty is primarily due to the way in which he forces us to consider the absolute limits of human thinking. Never before had a human being ventured so far beyond language and tradition in order to try and convey ultimate truth.

In the Greek/European tradition, there is simply philosophy before Parmenides and after Parmenides.

There are three primary reasons Parmenides was so significant:

• First and foremost, his writings are the earliest evidence we have of a strange and powerful use of human reasoning called deductive argument. Deductive argumentation would go on to provide the foundation not just for philosophy, but mathematical and logical reasoning.

• Second, Parmenides presents arguments for genuinely striking and original metaphysical and epistemological conclusions that continue to influence modern discussions of existence, possibility, nothingness, change, identity, thought, and language. While contemporary philosophers have developed a more sophisticated toolkit to analyze the questions and problems first raised by Parmenides, many of his ideas are still in the background of contemporary discussions.

• Third, Parmenides’ arguments were viewed as a profound and puzzling intellectual challenge that many of his immediate successors responded to directly. The result of the response, and the efforts to understand where Parmenides went wrong, led to major innovations by figures such as Empedocles, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, and future thinkers.

As far as we know, Parmenides was born around 515 BCE and lived until roughly 450 BCE in the Greek city of Elea in southern Italy.

Elea became known (among other things) for it’s intellectual culture of rigorous and abstract reasoning in support of paradoxical conclusions.

One of Parmenides followers, who was also from Elea, was the famous Zeno. Zeno who would go on to became remembered for his philosophical and logical paradoxes (some of which are still puzzling to modern logicians and philosophers).

The strong culture created by thinkers from Elea has led historians to refer to Parmenides and related figures as belonging to a philosophical school called, unsurprisingly, “the Eleatic school”. The thinkers from the Eleatic school were widely known and respected. For example, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote an entire work dedicated to Parmenides in which he set up a fictional conversation between Parmenides and a young Socrates.

According to Diogenes Laertius, Parmenides composed only a single work which was a metaphysical and cosmological poem in the traditional verse of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

The poem, which consists of only hundred and sixty surviving “fragments”, was originally longer than what we have today. While it’s always unfortunate to have lost ancient works, the good news is that fragment B8, which I will focus on in this article, is the longest surviving fragment in Pre-Socratic philosophy spanning sixty-two verses.

The fact that any portion of his poem survives is an absolute miracle (as is the case with most ancient texts). In Parmenides case, the survival of his poem is largely due to the fact that later ancient authors, beginning with Plato, for one reason or another felt the need to quote some portion of it in the course of their own writings. For example, Simplicius wrote down a lengthy transcription of the poem in a book on Aristotle simply to make sure it wasn’t lost.

Parmenides is famous for his systematic use of a rigorous deductive arguments to arrive at strange and counter-intuitive conclusions about thought and reality. After Parmenides, this style of argument and reasoning would become one of the most powerful and widely used philosophical methods. Philosophers today continue to use Parmenides’ style of argument on a regular basis.

The reason that deductive argument is so powerful and characteristic of philosophy is that it allows an individual thinker to reach justified conclusions without relying solely upon empirical evidence or justification. The aim of a deductive argument is to reach a meaningful conclusion through pure thinking (an important point of clarification here: this doesn’t mean you can’t talk at all about things you experience or observe, it just means that the justification comes from the logical reasoning rather than from the observational evidence).

An argument is commonly understood as a set of claims aimed at supporting a conclusion.

You can learn about what an argument is and is-not by watching the video below:

A deductive argument is a special kind of argument according to which the truth of the claims necessarily guarantees the truth of the conclusion. For example, if I said that John is taller than Jim, and Jim is taller than Joe, then you could, by way of deductive reasoning, conclude that it must be the case that Jim is taller than Joe (assuming the earlier statements are true).

That’s how deductive argument works and this form of reasoning is believed by many philosophers to be airtight.

Parmenides relied upon deductive reasoning in service of trying to answer three gigantic philosophical questions:

• What conditions must something satisfy to exist?

• Is reality what our senses tell us it is?

• What is the relationship between thought and reality?

In pursuing the answer to these questions, Parmenides would touch upon the following major themes: being, coming-to-be, perishing, language, change, motion, time, and space.

Parmenides discussion of these themes has earned him the label of “the inventor of metaphysics”. I like to call him the “grandfather” of metaphysics since he was a little bit off his rocker.

Metaphysics is one of the main branches of philosophy.

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Heraclitus was one of the most important philosophers in history, even though few people know about him outside of the academy. As you will see throughout this course, many of his ideas would go on to have a considerable influence on the golden age of Greek philosophy (5th & 4th century BCE) and beyond.

Overview

As far as we know, Heraclitus was born in 540 BCE to an aristocratic family in the famous city of Ephesus and lived for around sixty years.

Despite being in line for a kingship, Heraclitus gave up the political life in order to dedicate his life to philosophy. As far as we know, he was an individualist and outsider. He has been nicknamed “the weeping philosopher” because many have read him as being a pessimist (although this is debatable). It is true that he was often arrogant, judgmental, and opposed to common thinking.

Heraclitus is reported to have written a single great book titled On Nature.

While most of his book has been lost to history, we do possess the beginning of the work as well as several hundred fragments. Although Heraclitus wasn’t the first philosopher, in many ways he is the first philosopher that we can study with confidence. Despite the fact that many of his writings were destroyed, and we know very little about his life, he would go on to exert a considerable influence on the development of Western ideas.

Nearly every great philosopher has written about Heraclitus at some point. The list includes figures such as: Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Heidegger. His works have even been blamed as providing the source of Christian heretical thinking!

Heraclitus believed himself to have made a discovery of great importance — what he took to be the key to understanding everything.

He believed that this discovery was captured by a single term or concept — Logos.

The word Logos (λόγος) is, arguably, the most important word in the history of philosophy other than sophia (σοφία), which means “wisdom”.

What does Logos mean?

Heraclitus’ big idea was that the meaning of Logos is that all of reality is unified and explained by a single rational principle which held that all things are one.

While I will explain Logos, as well as Heraclitus’ theory, in a bit more detail below, we can take the definition above as a starting point from which we can proceed to move deeper into Heraclitus’ philosophy.

Illusion & Reality

Heraclitus had much in common with early Advaita Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy famous for the concept of “māyā”. According to this tradition, māyā is the powerful force that creates the universal cosmic illusion that the world of appearances represents true reality. Māyā has the connotation of constant change and is contrasted in Advaita Vedanta with ultimate and unchanging reality — what they call “Brahman” or the Absolute.

In a similar vein, Heraclitus believed that despite being surrounded by the Logos, most people live their lives as if they are asleep and dreaming, fundamentally unable to see or understand true reality.

“One ought not to act and speak like people asleep”

Heraclitus, B73 (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV, 43)

Heraclitus believed that we can escape from this illusory condition by learning how to wake up our minds (the theme of liberation from illusion and suffering was very common in the ancient world). At the same time, he also believed, much like Socrates, that human beings are fundamentally limited in what they can know when compared to the divine. Part of being human is to occupy a normal state of ignorance and misunderstanding. Although it’s unclear whether he believed that we are in principle unable to attain true wisdom or understanding, Heraclitus still believed that we could make progress towards this goal, and that it is the proper goal for a human being to aim at. In this sense, Heraclitus was a strong advocate for “the examined life” over 100 years before Socrates famously declared that “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (Plato, Apology, 38a5-6).

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I just wanted to take a moment and personally thank you for choosing to entrust me as your philosophical guide. I genuinely believe that philosophy has nearly unlimited transformative power, so I do not take this role lightly. It has become my life’s work to become the best philosophical guide that I can possibly be. I am very much looking forward to learning from and with each and every one of you.

Before I introduce the course more formally, I just want to set a few expectations about what it means to study philosophy through The Micro-University. For the past few months, this space has become somewhere that mature and thoughtful adults can not only learn complex philosophy, but be their full selves. It is a space where we can seriously discuss controversial, as well as have some fun. If you are looking to show off how knowledgeable you are, promote a dogmatic agenda, or disrespect others, I will happily remove you and offer a prompt refu…

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The full answer to these question is incredibly complex and requires going beyond Being and Time, but it is helpful to reflect here on some important aspects of the answer at the beginning of our journey into Division Two.

According to Heidegger himself, the shift is from one subject to another, and from one type of analysis to another. It is a shift from the “preparatory” analysis of Division One, to a “more ontological” analysis in Division Two. Translated into plain English, Heidegger thinks that he is now ready to “get deep” after preparing us in Division One.

This “depth” brings us to the most exciting and puzzling areas of Heidegger’s thought — beyond the familiar world of “average everydayness” into an investigation of fundamental ontology and the nature of Being itself.

The shift from Division One to Division Two is also an expected shift from an analy…

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Over the next 12+ months, I’m sharing everything I have learned from dedicating 6 years of my life to completing a PhD in Philosophy, and 3 years additional years to teaching philosophy at various elite universities.

Why?

Because there are millions of curious, intelligent, and open-minded individuals who are dying to learn and discuss big ideas with others, but have very few places to go outside of traditional universities, disappointing “book clubs”, and annoying discussion boards.

I love introducing 18-22 year olds to philosophy for a living, but it drives me insane that a real philosophy education is pretty much inaccessible to anyone who is older than this, can’t afford to go to university, or both. There is no reason that people who want to learn, discuss ideas, and transform their lives cannot easily access the education they need to do this.

Eventually, I got tired of this and decided to do something crazy here on Substack.

I started my own philosophy school.

It’s called The Micro-University, and for the past few months I have been spending several hours a week leading a group of mature, thoughtful, motivated, and curious adults through some of the most exciting ideas a human being could possibly think about.

This past week, our group has finished reading and discussing Division One of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time.

For those who aren’t aware, Being and Time is one of the hardest (and most interesting) philosophy books ever written. Most philosophy majors never make it through the book. But for the past 15 weeks, our group has met for two hours every Sunday and carefully worked through 300 pages of the text.

The room has been buzzing lately.

At this point, I can confidently say that we have not only read the book, but actually understand it enough to apply the big ideas to everyone’s unique interests through free-flowing discussion.

I was so overjoyed that our group was able to reach this milestone together, that I decided to give everyone who went on this journey with me a yearly paid subscription to The Micro-University so that they could continue learning with me for free (congrats to ).

I probably should also mention that this same group also read Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil cover to cover while working through the Heidegger.

Amazing.

I initially thought it was crazy to teach a book like this to a random group of strangers on the internet. In the university, most people would have scoffed at the very idea.

But I couldn’t have been more wrong.

This experience has completely changed my life and the way I view the future of online humanities education.

It has shown me that traditional educational institutions have failed to serve adults after they stop paying for their degrees. It has shown me that there is a burning desire for a real humanities education which is being massively underserved. It has shown me that it’s possible to deliver an Ivy-League philosophy education through the internet and reach more thousands of more people than I can in my 25 student, gate-kept university classes.

It has made me commit the next few years of my life to developing The Micro-University into a complete philosophy program where someone can begin their philosophy journey at 35, 50, or 70+ years-old, and receive the equivalent of a B.A. in philosophy for a fraction of the cost.

I love the idea of starting to learn philosophy at 40, or 80.

It only takes 2-3 years to completely transform your mind.

I am awestruck by the potential impact that’s possible thanks to platforms like Substack. I randomly posted this note the other day, which has more than confirmed the burning desire online for serious intellectual spaces.

So if this sort of thing sounds appealing, and you want to enjoy a real philosophy education, follow a well-crafted plan, and learn with a group of mature minds, then consider reading the section below.

Your 12-Month Learning Plan

There are three major issues with learning online.

First, there is the passive consumption of thousands of hours of content without any sharp direction or feedback. Learning requires some direction and structure in order for real progress to occur. Otherwise, people consume endless amounts of “edutainment” content without going anywhere.

Second, although the internet has made information more accessible than at any point in human history, everything is scattered. This is intentional. All major platforms send their users on a wild goose chat to figure out how to organize the information that’s available to them so that they spend more time using the platform. Real learning requires guidance about where to go next, in order to develop a coherent narrative that progresses from idea to idea.

Third, and most important, is that most people have no intellectual community. This is problem goes way deeper than philosophy. This is a real human problem. People don’t just lack intellectual community, but community itself. What’s the point of learning if you have no one to talk to who cares about things that are actually interesting?

For these reasons, I have decided that the next evolution of The Micro-University is to offer a complete educational experience where subscribers can go through an entire series of courses that deliver the equivalent of a year in the philosophy major at university.

The idea is that after spending a year on the internet in our community, you will not just have a bunch of quotes from Marcus Aurelius, but the confidence that you have learned philosophy the right way, with expert guidance and a group of people to support you. The confidence that you don’t have major gaps in your knowledge, or misunderstand the basics. The confidence that you can progress from introductory courses to intermediate and advanced topics.

Here is the plan to help you do that.

Over the next 12 months, I will be offering five 8-week beginner courses that mirror the progression of a real philosophy degree:

• PHIL 1: Introduction to Philosophy

• PHIL 2: Introduction to Thinking

• PHIL 3: Introduction To Greek Philosophy

• PHIL 4: Introduction To Modern Philosophy

• PHIL 5: Introduction To Contemporary Philosophy

PHIL 1: Introduction To Philosophy

PHIL 2: Introduction To Thinking

PHIL 3: Introduction To Greek Philosophy

PHIL 4: Introduction To Modern Philosophy

PHIL 5: Introduction To Contemporary Philosophy

These courses will serve as the foundation of The Micro-University for years to come.

A few notes about this plan.

First off, the Introduction To Philosophy course, PHIL 1, is set to begin on July 25. You can read more about that at the bottom of this article if you are interested in joining.

It begins with a captivating general introduction to the field as a whole that motivates learners to continue deeper into the world of philosophy. After this, the focus is on developing the fundamental skills of independent thinking in PHIL 2. This includes logic, argument, and critical thinking. These skills that sharpen one’s mind for more advanced study and transform a learner’s sensitivity to language, logic, and bad arguments. This is absolutely critical, since few people online teach the actual skills of philosophy online.

The next three courses consist of detailed surveys of the major historical periods:

• Greek Philosophy (8th century BCE - 1 AD): Pre-Socratics, Socrates, Cynicism, Plato, Aristotle, The Old Stoa, Epicurus, etc.

• Modern Philosophy (1600 AD - 1920 AD): Bacon, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx

• Contemporary (1920 AD - Present Day): Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Fanon, De Beauvoir, Sartre, Foucault, Quine, Rawls

Each of these courses will cover the major historical figures and movements so that learners are walk away feeling “at home” in the tradition of Western philosophy and can confidently pick up almost any philosophy book and understand what’s going on. That was always one of my major goals in studying philosophy. I wanted to eventually be able to pick up any book, no matter how hard, and understand it on my own.

I should point out that the choice to take a historical approach to learning philosophy is significant and comes with trade-offs. In truth, any approach requires making significant trade-offs. It’s just a matter of which trade-offs you want.

If you teach the philosophical questions and issues directly without a proper historical understanding, students often feel like they are missing something or don’t understand key terms and background context. The benefit, though, is that you can jump right into a question without having to learn much about where it came from or how people have tried to answer it. But if you go too deep into history, it can detract from the liveliness of the questions themselves and focus too much on the figures and schools of thought.

Personally, I have always found that having a good background context helps me understand the philosophical issues better and I have a historical mind, which is why I am choosing this approach here. I have also always found it fascinating to trace the develop of the history of ideas so that I can identify the hidden patterns that drive human history and shape our worldview. The historical approach is good for those who want to grow a deep understanding over a longer time-scale. Additionally, since I have a strong passion for history it will simply lead to better teaching. It’s natural for me.

Alright, that’s the plan. My promise to you is that if you study philosophy with me, you will become a more confident independent thinker who is knowledgeable about the history of ideas, but also develops the flexible thinking skills to tackle novel problems.

If you want to jump on board this train, it’s about to depart soon.

The first course, PHIL 1: Introduction To Philosophy, is set to begin on July 25th and 30 people have already joined the waitlist. You can read more about the course by clicking the article linked below, or join now by upgrading to a paid subscription if you already know that you are ready.

In just a few weeks, we will be reading the very earliest written texts in the history of Western philosophy — Pre-Socratic fragments from Heraclitus and Parmenides. I can’t wait to see you in there.

Join The Micro-University

FAQ

Q1: How Do I Join?

You can join by upgrading to a paid subscription to The Micro-University. This gives you complete access to all current and past courses, a thriving private community, helpful learning resources, and direct messaging with me whenever you need help. You can also cancel anytime.

Q2: Can I still join if I miss the first course?

Yes! You can join at any point, since all previous classes will be recorded and made available to you through The Micro-University. Since these are 8-Week courses, it is also not difficult to catch up. Additionally, although these courses build on each other, they are also designed to make sense on their own, you just will have a richer experience by following the narrative as it develops.

Q3: How much time per week?

You should expect to dedicate around 1-1.5 hrs throughout the week to doing the reading, and then 1.5-2 hrs for the live meetings. You are not required to do anything, but if you want to have the best experience, that is what I recommend. If you want to learn at your own pace, the recordings will be available as well.

Q4: Am I required to do anything if I join?

Your level of participation is completely up to you. Joining gives you access to the content and spaces, but how much or how little you choose to engage with it is your choice. This is not military training.

Q5: Are there any pre-requisites?

You will need to be fluent in English and also be a human being. That’s all. Actually, one more thing — don’t be an a**hole.

Q6: Are The Readings Provided?

Yes. Everything will be provided through a private Google Drive folder. I will also give you recommended resources for further learning.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me directly.

Thanks for reading.

-Paul

We saw last week that the initial project of analyzing Dasein came to an end with the concept of care.

But Heidegger did not want Being and Time to be merely an “anthropology”. In fact, in his later work he criticizes Being and Time with being too anthropocentric.

It was always meant to serve his ultimate mission — what he calls “fundamental ontology”.

Paragraphs 43 and 44 are where Heidegger begins to connect his analysis of Dasein to the project of fundamental ontology.

In a way, he is showing off. Heidegger is showing off how, as a result of his analysis of Dasein and careful avoidance of the traditional approaches to philosophy, he can not only reject the theories and problematics of all the major Western philosophers before him, but show that many of their problems and questions don’t even make sense and are therefore not problems at all.

In just a few pages, Heidegger tries to show that the most longstanding problems in philosophy, such as the problem of how we can know f…

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Completed Courses

Master the basics of Western philosophy in 8-weeks with a group of mature and thoughtful participants and an Ivy-League instructor.

By completing this course, you can expect to become more comfortable talking about complex philosophical ideas with others, and better at being able to think more deeply on your own. You will also be exposed to philosophical questions and problems that most people go their entire lives without ever being aware of. If there is one philosophy seminar to take, it would be Introduction To Philosophy above all others.

The pedagogical backing of this course is that philosophy should be studied and taught in a way that transforms one’s soul, activating it’s highest intellectual potential, and making an impact on lived experience. This is not knowledge or knowledge’s sake, or pure theory.

This is philosophy that can be immediately integrated with your life.

Every semester, I teach Introduction To Philosophy to a room of 75 undergraduates who pay $9,000+ per course. This seminar is the exact same content they will be learning, but for 1% of the cost. Read that again.

This course is ideal for wisdom lovers seeking a rigorous introduction to philosophy, but without needing to lock themselves in to months of meetings and hundreds of hours of reading. The goal here is high-impact with optional depth. If you want to go deep, there will be plenty of opportunities to do that as well. Also, you can cancel anytime if its not for you. Nothing is required and everything will be recorded.

I will post video lectures and weekly guides to cover the basics, and then we will go deep in our weekly calls.

We start with Parmenides, who stunned the ancient world by arguing that change itself is an illusion and that reality is far stranger than it appears. Next is Plato, who asked whether the world you see is real or merely a shadow of something deeper. Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student, brought philosophy back down to earth to ask what it actually means to live well and flourish.

From there we cross into modernity with Descartes, who tore everything down to a single unshakable certainty—I think, therefore I am—and rebuilt knowledge from the ground up. Kant revealed that the mind isn’t a passive mirror of the world but actively shapes everything we experience. Nietzsche took a hammer to our most cherished beliefs and famously declared that God is dead and challenged posterity to create their own values in a universe that hands us none. Finally, Heidegger confronts what he takes to be the most fundamental question of all — what does it mean to be?

Course Details

• When: 8 Weeks (July 25- September 12)

• Where: Online

• (Session 1) Saturday mornings 12pm (EST/EDT); (Session 2) Wednesday mornings 7AM (EST/EDT)

• How To Join: When you upgrade to a paid subscription you receive complete access to The Micro-University which includes this course + all previous courses, a private community chat, and additional learning resources.

  Upgrade To Paid

8 Week Syllabus

In this course, you will read: Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and De Beauvoir.

Eight monumental thinkers in the Western tradition.

Here is the complete schedule:

• Week 1 — Parmenides: Is Change an Illusion? Reading: The fragments of On Nature (the surviving lines of the poem, especially “The Way of Truth”).

  • Focus: Being vs. becoming, the claim that “what is” cannot change, and the birth of metaphysics as rigorous argument.

• Week 2 — Plato: The World Behind the World Reading: Republic, Book VII (the Allegory of the Cave); selections from Book VI (the Divided Line).

  • Focus: Appearance vs. reality, the Forms, and what it means to be “freed” into knowledge.

• Week 3 — Aristotle: How to Live Well Reading: Nicomachean Ethics, Books I and II.

  • Focus: Eudaimonia (flourishing), virtue as a mean, and habit as the path to character.

• Week 4 — Descartes: Tearing It All Down Reading: Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations I and II.

  • Focus: Radical doubt, the cogito (”I think, therefore I am”), and rebuilding knowledge from certainty.

• Week 5 — Kant: The Mind That Shapes the World Reading: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (selections); Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Section I.

  • Focus: How the mind structures experience, and the categorical imperative as the foundation of morality.

• Week 6— Nietzsche: Creating Your Own Values Reading: The Gay Science §§108–125 (including “The Madman”); Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue.

  • Focus: The death of God, nihilism, and the task of creating meaning for yourself.

• Week 7 — Heidegger: What Does It Mean to Be? Reading: Being and Time, Introduction (§§1–8) and the sections on Being-toward-death (§§46–53).

  • Focus: The question of Being, authenticity, and how mortality gives life its weight.

• Week 8 — Simone De Beauvoir: How To Live Authentically Reading: The Ethics of Ambiguity

  • Focus: Authentic vs. inauthentic responses to the problem of free choice

Private Community

When you enroll in The Micro-University, you will be pleased to know that you are entering an already thriving community of serious intellectuals who are willing to not just show up every week, but to have actually read the material.

For the past several months, we have been working through some of the most challenging texts in the history of philosophy — Heidegger’s Being and Time and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil.

All of that work has built a real intellectual community that is here to stay.

We would love for you to be a part of it.

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The aim of this week’s guide is to start to tie together the various strands of thinking Heidegger has been spinning out through Being and Time. We will have the complete picture before us very soon.

Chapter VI is the last chapter of Division One, so we should expect some kind of resolution.

The first point to remember is that as being-in-the-world, Dasein is a unity, a whole. We cannot “split the phenomenon” as Heidegger has put it. We cannot separate subject from object, or mind from world.

The primary question in Chapter VI is this:

How is the whole of being-in-the-world to be disclosed?

A secondary question is:

How is it to be defined?

Heidegger’s answer to the first question is found primarily in paragraph 40 of Chapter VI on anxiety (Angst). Heidegger’s answer to the second question is care (Sorge).

In the second half of Chapter VI, Heidegger presents what are essentially to “mini-essays” — self-standing investigations on reality and truth. We will get to that next time. For now…

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They try to do it alone.

They don’t know where to start or what to read.

They are constantly doubting whether they understand what they’ve learned, or are completely making a mess of it.

If you want to learn the basics of philosophy quickly and develop the ability to confidently articulate big ideas, think for yourself, and stop doing everything alone, then the simplest way to do that is to take a proper introduction to philosophy course with other people and actually do the work from start to finish.

Although you can learn pretty much anything on your own thanks to the internet, there are three problems with this:

1. The information is scattered and packaged into edutainment videos — not a real curriculum that delivers a complete narrative experience.

2. There are no feedback mechanisms to help you see whether you are getting it.

3. Learning without a community is way less fun and can be very lonely (people tell me this all of the time).

Autodidacticism is awesome, but it’s not for everyone. I think part of the reason its so popular is that there aren’t many places where people can go for real community learning. I am also tired of seeing people spend thousands of hours consuming content that isn’t really helping them develop as philosophers or independent thinkers. In that same time, you could read and understand real philosophy books and skip the shortcuts that are actually slowing you down.

To fix that, I decided to create my own Introduction To Philosophy course that is the exact same material I will be teaching to a group of Ivy-League students over the summer. It drives me crazy that this content is inaccessible to the average adult learner who is honestly more interested in the material than my students. Instead, it is locked behind the walls of the ivory tower, jacked up in price, and only made available to 18-21 year olds. My hope is that by bringing a real Introduction To Philosophy course to Substack, it can make a significant impact on people’s lives and help them actually learn rather than consume interesting information.

The main problem with internet education is that it is all input and very little output. It doesn’t matter if high-quality information goes into the system of your mind, it matters what you do with it. Most “courses” are just a series of videos. Input, input, input. But the key question is, “what do I do with this information?”. That is the gap I am trying to fill. To not only make philosophy accessible to you, but to help guide you in figuring out how to integrate it with your life so that it can actually make a difference.

Taking introduction to philosophy completely changed my life as a college freshman. It was the most incredible intellectual experience I have ever had. I remember sitting in the front of a large lecture hall at Rutgers University, absolutely awestruck by the words that were coming out of my professor’s mouth. I had never heard anyone speak like this man before. I wanted to understand what he was saying so badly. I have been trying to understand it for 15+ years since then, and it has been the greatest source of joy in my life. Also, we already have an awesome community here on Substack at The Micro-University. We have been having a blast meeting every week for months to discuss existentialism, and I would love for you to meet everyone.

If this sounds like something you would benefit from, the rest of this email contains everything you need to know about the course. If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message.

Introduction To Philosophy

Course Description

Despite countless attempts, philosophy will never be reduced to a single definition or method. It is part of the essence of philosophy that it perpetually eludes us and pulls us into areas of thought that are fascinating, wondrous, uncertain, and free. In that way, philosophy is like love. It is infinite, never complete, and utterly compelling. This makes it incredibly difficult to introduce philosophy to beginners, since you are introducing them to an experience, attitude, or way of living more than anything else. Philosophy is not a regular academic discipline or body of knowledge. There are no established facts or theories. The methods are all up for debate. At the same time, philosophy is not arbitrary or merely subjective. Philosophy is the serious attempt to make sense of life’s most important and most difficult questions. It is the restless and exhilarating pursuit of wonder, curiosity, and meaning. In a sentence, it is the pursuit of ultimate truth. Like many of life’s most unique experiences, it is simply something that you can’t fully understand unless you get your hands dirty and experience it for yourself. Understanding philosophy, then, requires a kind of conversion or transformative experience.

In this course, I have taken a traditional approach to introducing philosophy for two reasons. First, it is what worked for me. When I read these thinkers, I was completely blown away and have not stopped thinking about them since. Even though there are many different ways to initiate newcomers to the world of philosophy, I figured it’s best to stick to what I know can work. But, it’s important to note that these thinkers will not resonate with everyone in the same way. For some, they will never resonate. For others, they will not resonate at this point in your life. I have often found myself finding renewed interest in thinkers who I previously dismissed. Your interests and assumptions will change as your life changes. Philosophy will become much easier and enjoyable once you recognize the value of radically changing your mind when presented with good reasons for doing so. That doesn’t make you a hypocrite, but wise. The second reason is that many people interested in philosophy are often held back in their progress by having an incomplete grasp on the tradition that they are either trying to learn, or to resist. Either way, if you hate it or love it, knowing the tradition at a general level is absolutely essential to avoid feeling stuck, perpetual self-doubt, and imposter syndrome as you progress deeper into the world of ideas. Even a basic familiarity with the giants of the field can help orient you regardless of what your interests are. For example, many people are interested in 20th and 21st century feminist philosophy. But if you go read the classics of feminist philosophy, you might get tripped up on their references to thinkers like Plato and Aristotle if you haven’t learned the basics of Greek philosophy. So if you really want to understand where certain foundational figures are coming from, it can often be very beneficial to have a sense of what they read and reacted to. To that end, this course provides a kind of “greatest hits” of philosophers in the Greek/European tradition.

It’s important to flag that even though this course is titled “Introduction To Philosophy”, it would be more accurate to title it “An Introduction To Philosophy”, since what it really is is an introduction to Western philosophy, or philosophy in the tradition that began in Greece and spread to Western Europe. There are many other traditions of philosophy that have been neglected or misrepresented for all sorts of stupid reasons. The world of philosophy is vast. My life’s purpose is to understand as much of it as I can and help others do the same. But the way that I can best do that is by introducing you to philosophy through the thinkers I have studied the most and know well before branching out into new areas (something I am constantly working on). So, in this course, you can expect to receive a general exposure to the giants of this particular tradition which has shaped the English speaking world more than any other.

In this course, you will read incredibly important and challenging texts from some of history’s most brilliant minds. I will provide video lectures that help orient you in this world of ideas and put you in a position to read the texts more intelligently on your own. I do not want to explain the texts for you, however. The goal is to create an environment and a framework in which you can train the muscles of philosophy yourself, and avoid basic misunderstandings or annoyances that make studying philosophy alone difficult. There will also be optional activities and exercises to check your comprehension and depth of understanding. Finally, during our live sessions, we have the opportunity to really dig into the details together and also engage in intellectual free play by entertaining unique questions and exploring the connections between our mutual bodies of knowledge and life experience. Some of the big questions we will explore in this course are:

What is knowledge? How should you live your life? What does it mean to be a good human being? What is the ultimate nature of reality? What does it mean to exist?

Prerequisites

Being a human being. Life experience. The English language. No prior philosophy or schooling required.

Course Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

1. Understand what distinguishes philosophy from other disciplines.

2. Explain major philosophical concepts, theories, and thinkers including ancient and modern, and compare their answers.

3. Interpret and critically evaluate philosophical texts attending to both their arguments and their practical implications for human life.

4. Situate philosophical views within their historical and cultural contexts, explaining how different conceptions of philosophy emerge in response to specific existential and social conditions.

5. Demonstrate philosophical self-reflection through writing, using philosophy as a tool for self-examination, clarification of values, and adopting a practical orientation toward life.

6. Discuss complex philosophical ideas with other people and engage in real dialogue.
   

Course Expectations

You will be expected to maintain a consistent reading habit and come to the live sessions prepared to engage in intellectually challenging and personally transformative activities.

This is not for someone looking to consume information for the sake of intellectual pleasure alone — there are plenty of Youtube videos optimized for that. If you give this course your full effort you are likely to remember it for the rest of their lives as one of the most impactful and transformative intellectual experiences you have ever had.

Course Schedule

How To Join

If you were interested in participating in this experience, the first step is to fill out the interest form by following this link.

I will get back to you once you fill that out.

Thanks for reading. I hope to see you soon.

-Paul

Ivy-League instruction, guided learning, and a genuine community.

It’s all here.

The Problem With Universities

Universities have become educational buffets.

Their expenses are out of control — which means their students end up paying $50,000+.

They offer everything to everyone in order to lure in aimless youths— meaning that students eventually end up paying for things they don’t actually want or use.

They don’t specialize in doing one thing excellently — meaning that the educational quality fluctuates from class to class.

Many universities have forgotten that their main purpose and priority should be education, not research.

I am convinced that it is now possible for individuals to receive a similar or in some cases better education online and for less than 1% of the cost of a traditional degree.

How is this possible?

It is possible because platforms like Substack have helped highly qualified content creators and writers identify the exact needs and interests of their audience and design courses that are specifically tailored to give them what they want.

What’s more is that these courses can be offered without needing to build any buildings, pay for utilities, security guards, or administrative staff.

This means that they cost virtually nothing when compared to their university counterparts.

Critics will argue that the in-person element and community aspect of universities is irreplaceable.

Maybe.

But is it worth an extra $5,000 per course? Or $25,000 per year?

Entire companies are run through Zoom and Google Meet.

I created The Micro-University to serve as a platform that allows me to teach the exact same or better content that I teach at elite universities, but without the absurd paywall and gatekeeping practices of the modern university.

My goal is to offer a lean and high-quality education experience that cuts out all of the middleman and unnecessary costs and deliver real learning directly to the student.

If that is something you are intersted in, you can learn more about it below.

Modern technology has made it possible for a single individual to reach thousands of students around the world interested in studying philosophy and deliver a high-quality education without incurring massive costs (buildings, employee benefits, marketing, etc.).

Over the past few years, I have secretly been training myself to be in a position to do this by developing a broad knowledge of philosophy across multiple sub-fields in order to see the macro-patterns.

I became a philosophical generalist.

By forcing myself to teach new subjects every semester, I had to develop a special ability to learn new things through relying on pattern recognition and frameworks that allowed me to contextualize new information based on what I previously studied.

Here is a list of complete courses I have taught since starting my PhD:

Intro To Philosophy, Existentialism, Philosophy As The Art Of Living, Aesthetics, Ancient Greek Philosophy, Philosophy: East and West, Intro To Ethics, Social Contract, Bioethics, Justice, Law, and Morality, Ethics and Society, Scientific Reasoning, Philosophy of Law, Environmental Ethics, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Space and Time.

I have never forgotten the struggle it took to get to this point.

The struggle to read, the struggle to write, and the struggle to understand and enjoy philosophy.

I am creating this school to help people in the same way I remember that I needed help.

To get rid of the stupid roadblocks and questions that people are too afraid to ask, but that actually prevent them from progressing.

I want to explain everything that holds people back.

The title of the book. That random French word that makes you anxious. Whatever little thing it is that is “getting in the way”.

I also want to teach philosophy in a way that avoids turning it into a passive consumption machine.

Everything will be framed and presents as being direct towards using or integrating what you learn with your own life.

The general frame behind the whole university is philosophy for living (a return to the ancient philosophical schools of Athens).

That will add a unique twist to all of my courses.

Even the most abstract.

Everyone needs a good teacher, someone they can struggle with and grow with. I may or may not be able to be that for you. Honestly, a lot of that depends on the right fit and personalities coming together. But I am going to try. And I am not going to charge you tens of thousands of dollars to roll the dice for each class.

If you want to give it a shot, I would love to have you on board.

Information and knowledge have become commodities.

The future of humanity will reward perspective and creativity.

The aims and incentives are mass education are not your own, they are social, political, and economic.

The system wasn’t made for you!

No one is willing to go slow enough.

To do it the right way.

To take intellectual risks, to feel the tension of personal growth, and to transform.

We have replaced spiritual transformation with information consumption.

Mainstream education has been captured by the pursuit of wealth which forces it to become a new form of job training in order to justify it’s absurd costs.

When education becomes economic training, intellectual and spiritual development become secondary.

Some course and concepts are better suited for a self-paced experience, whereas other more advanced courses require a hands-on interactive learning experience akin to a college seminar.

My idea is to eventually have an entire curriculum in place where students can learn everything they would learn at a university if they were to study philosophy. At the beginning of the curriculum would be introductory self-paced courses. As students progress they would “unlock” advanced seminars. Over the course of a year or two, you will have received the equivalent of a B.A. in philosophy.

How To Access The Micro-University

You can gain complete access to The Micro-University by upgrading to a paid subscription to The Micro-Philosopher Substack.

Upgrade To Paid

Membership to The Micro-University will give you access to the following:

• Weekly live classes

• Class recordings (including a complete course on Nietzsche and Heidegger)

• Exclusive learning resources (handouts, guides, book recommendations)

• Private course chat (ask questions, learn together, join a community)

Current Live Courses

Introduction To Philosophy: July 25-Sept. 12

This 8-Week introduction to philosophy is the exact same content that I will be teaching to my Ivy-League students over the summer, but offered to you for a 1% of the cost.

This course is ideal for students seeking a rigorous introduction to philosophy in a short period of time without needing to commitment thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours to understanding these great ideas.

For 8 weeks, we will dive deep into the greatest philosophical minds of the Western tradition and work through their texts together.

I will post video lectures to cover the basics, and then we will go deep in our weekly calls.

We start with Parmenides, who stunned the ancient world by arguing that change itself is an illusion and that reality is far stranger than it appears. Next is Plato, who asked whether the world you see is real or merely a shadow of something deeper. Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student, brought philosophy back down to earth to ask what it actually means to live well and flourish. Marcus Aurelius turns philosophy inward, showing how a Roman emperor used Stoic discipline to stay grounded amid power, grief, and the certainty of death.

From there we cross into modernity with Descartes, who tore everything down to a single unshakable certainty—I think, therefore I am—and rebuilt knowledge from the ground up. Kant revealed that the mind isn’t a passive mirror of the world but actively shapes everything we experience. Nietzsche took a hammer to our most cherished beliefs and famously declared that God is dead and challenged posterity to create your own values in a universe that hands you none. Finally, Heidegger confronts what he takes to be the most fundamental question of all — what does it mean to be?

Course Details

• When: 8 Weeks (July 27- September 12), Saturday mornings 12pm (EDT/EST)

• Where: Online

• How To Join: You can join the waitlist here to reserve your spot before July 27.

8 Week Syllabus

In this course, you will read: Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

Eight monumental thinkers in the Western tradition.

Here is the complete schedule:

• Week 1 — Parmenides: Is Change an Illusion? Reading: The fragments of On Nature (the surviving lines of the poem, especially “The Way of Truth”).

  • Focus: Being vs. becoming, the claim that “what is” cannot change, and the birth of metaphysics as rigorous argument.

• Week 2 — Plato: The World Behind the World Reading: Republic, Book VII (the Allegory of the Cave); selections from Book VI (the Divided Line).

  • Focus: Appearance vs. reality, the Forms, and what it means to be “freed” into knowledge.

• Week 3 — Aristotle: How to Live Well Reading: Nicomachean Ethics, Books I and II.

  • Focus: Eudaimonia (flourishing), virtue as a mean, and habit as the path to character.

• Week 4 — Marcus Aurelius: Philosophy as Practice Reading: Meditations, Books II, IV, and V (selections).

  • Focus: Stoic discipline, control vs. acceptance, mortality, and living according to nature.

• Week 5 — Descartes: Tearing It All Down Reading: Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations I and II.

  • Focus: Radical doubt, the cogito (”I think, therefore I am”), and rebuilding knowledge from certainty.

• Week 6 — Kant: The Mind That Shapes the World Reading: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (selections); Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Section I.

  • Focus: How the mind structures experience, and the categorical imperative as the foundation of morality.

• Week 7 — Nietzsche: Creating Your Own Values Reading: The Gay Science §§108–125 (including “The Madman”); Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue.

  • Focus: The death of God, nihilism, and the task of creating meaning for yourself.

• Week 8 — Heidegger: What Does It Mean to Be? Reading: Being and Time, Introduction (§§1–8) and the sections on Being-toward-death (§§46–53).

  • Focus: The question of Being, authenticity, and how mortality gives life its weight.

Private Community

When you enroll in The Micro-University, you will be pleased to know that you are entering an already thriving community of serious intellectuals who are willing to not just show up every week, but to have actually read the material.

For the past several months, we have been working through some of the most challenging texts in the history of philosophy — Heidegger’s Being and Time and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil.

All of that work has built a real intellectual community that is here to stay.

We would love for you to be a part of it.

Past Courses

Heidegger’s Being And Time

The most important philosophical work of the 20th century is also one of the most difficult — Being and Time.

(You can access the course syllabus here)

Being and Time is a work perfectly suited for modern life.

It helps us think about our relationship to existence itself, the technological world, anxiety, death, authenticity and, most importantly, other people.

The internet craves depth, genuine thinking, and intellectual community. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer places someone interested in these things can go (not even most universities). This course is somewhere you can to go to challenge yourself intellectually, learn real philosophy (straight to the source), learn how to read philosophy in a hands-on way, discuss the text with others, and learn together.

I want this course to address those very real spiritual and intellectual needs and help beginners actually finish one of the truly great works in the history of philosophy.

Who Is This Course For?

I want to be clear that this course is for beginners.

This is not a space for someone to show off how much philosophy they have read and make others feel behind.

At the same time, this is also not a space for people who want to sit back and have me explain everything to them so that they don’t have to do any real thinking for themselves.

This is an intensive and interactive learning experience — not a series of lectures or videos.

We will be going through Being and Time together, line-by-line.

We will be interacting with each other. Asking questions. Sharing interpretations. Making exciting intellectual connections. Forming an intellectual mastermind.

This course is for anyone looking for one of the greatest intellectual challenges of their life — something that they will remember forever.

There is so much philosophy online today that tries to make things so incredibly simple and easy that people are left yearning for the real deal.

This is the real deal.

You are not going to understand everything. In fact, I am not going to understand everything.

But we are going to make serious progress together.

(You can access the course syllabus here)

The course will end when we finish section 66 of Being and Time (roughly 380 pages).

This could take a while because we are going to go at the pace necessary to actually understand and learn the material, not simplify and skip over it. Even if you don’t make it to the end, each lesson will be valuable on its own because you will be practicing and improving your philosophical reading, thinking, and discussion skills in a very real way with me as your guide.

(You can access the course syllabus here).

Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good & Evil: Prelude To A Philosophy Of The Future”

This course is an in-depth, chapter by chapter reading of Nietzsche’s groundbreaking book.

Nietzsche writes that:

“This book is in every essential a critique of modernity; modern sciences, modern arts, even modern politics are not excluded. Besides this, it is an indication of an opposing type, which is as un-modern as possible, a noble, yes-saying type”

Future Courses

The Micro-University will be structured around two tiers of courses.

The first-tier are self-paced courses that are introductory and will cover the basic curriculum of a philosophy bachelor’s degree.

The second-tier are small seminar-style courses that are more advanced and focused on specific books, philosophers, or niche topics.

Introductory Courses

PHIL 1: Introduction To Philosophy

PHIL 2: Introduction To Thinking

PHIL 3: Introduction To Greek Philosophy

PHIL 4: Introduction To Modern Philosophy

PHIL 5: Introduction To Contemporary Philosophy

Advanced Courses

• Heidegger’s Being and Time (Currently Live) ✅

• Marx and Marxism ⏩️

• Philosophy of Economics (expected December 2026) ⏩️

• Philosophy of Technology (expected December 2026) ⏩️

• Nietzsche (Completed; Recordings Available) ✅

• Hegel ⏩️

• Adam Smith ⏩️

• Late Wittgenstein ⏩️

• Kierkegaard ⏩️

• Dostoevsky ⏩️

• Nihilism and the “Death of God” ⏩️

• The Philosophy of Pain ⏩️

• The Philosophy of Pleasure ⏩️

• Meta-philosophy ⏩️

In studying and teaching Heidegger, I have found that there are different ways to explain what he’s on about. Some of these click for certain readers, and others don’t. I hope that this one clicks for everyone.

According to Critchley, Chapter V of Division One provides a “conceptual infrastructure or undergirding to everything” in Being and Time. It is a long chapter, with a lot of moving parts.

The goal is to prepare us for the definition of the being of Dasein as “care” in chapter VI. The definition of Dasein as care is the primary aim of Division One.

The good news? Critchley says that “everything — even in Heidegger and even in Being and Time — can be said clearly. Anyone who says otherwise is bullshitting you”.

The …

Read more

Part IX is the book’s last chapter (other than the poems at the end). Rather than delivering a “Conclusion”, Nietzsche decides to end the book with what has become for him a very important question — “What is Noble?”.

His general answer?

Nobility is a way of valuing and feeling. It is defined by rank-ordering and by the pathos of distance — a felt sense of height and difference that makes higher and lower meaningful.

But the point is not simply to simply arrive at a definition or a “theory” of nobility and it’s value, but to open up a new pathway into the exploration and development of the human spirit. Nietzsche is interested in renewing an investigation into what has been noble, historically, and what nobility could become in both the present and future.

This chapter begins with a bang and remains explosive throughout. It ends with a discussion of Nietzsche’s sacrifice to the god Dionysius — the god of ritual madness, frenzy, passion, and the affirmation of life.

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Chapter Five marks a turning point in many ways, and provides the final ascent before we reach Heidegger’s summit in the form of Care.

In the preceding chapters Heidegger has analyzed being-in-the-world largely through our practical dealings with equipment — hammering, using tools, the workshop of ready-to-hand things. That might leave the impression that being-in-the-world just is dealing with equipment. But practical concern is only one mode of being-in-the-world.

What being-in essentially is, Heidegger now argues, is what he calls disclosedness.

The chapter’s task is to spell out the structure of the “there” (das Da) — the open, lit-up region in which entities can show up at all. Dasein is its “there.” Heidegger unpacks this “there” into a small set of equally basic (what he calls equiprimordial) structures. Here is a general overview of the chapter (up to paragraph 34):

• 28: Introduces the task — being-in is to be analyzed as disclosedness. The “da” of Dasein names this openne…

Read more

Part 8 is the strangest and, in some ways, the most ambitious stretch of Beyond Good and Evil.

On its surface it is a tour of national stereotypes — the Germans, the English, the French, the Jews. Read that way it can be off-putting or simply puzzling. But what’s really happening here is that Nietzsche is deliberately adopting the vocabulary of nineteenth-century nationalism in order to dismantle it from the inside out, and to add an important piece to his development of what he calls the “good European”. This serves his general project of outlining the cultural conditions under which a future philosophy might become possible.

The title of Part 8 is “Völker und Vaterländer”, or “peoples and fatherlands”. The word Volk is chosen intentionally as one that is saturated with German nationalist sentiments. The dream of Nationalism is that a people should be one and the nation united. At the time of his writing, the nationalist impulse was shared across nations.

Nietzsche wants to …

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I want to start this guide by underscoring the importance of Chapter IV of Being and Time and situating it within the bigger picture of what Heidegger has taken himself to have shown and where he is going. Hubert Dreyfus had this to say about the chapter:

“As it stands, Heidegger’s Chapter IV seems just a short chapter on the problem of other minds and the evils of conformism, whereas, it is in fact, the last nail in the coffin of the Cartesian tradition. Indeed, the discussion of the way public norms are established makes this in many ways the pivotal chapter of the book.

-Hubert Dreyfus”, Being-In-The World

Michael Gelven adds:

“The transition from Chapter Ill’s discussion of Being-in-the-world to Chapter IV, on the problem of the self, is by no means a mere shift from one existential topic to another. We are nearing the heart of Heidegger’s interpretation. Chapter IV is far more significant in terms of the ultimate picture of Heidegger’s analysis of Being; it is also a far more…

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In Part VII of Beyond Good & Evil, we get to learn about why “spirit” resembles a “stomach” and try to make sense of Nietzsche’s misogynistic remarks at the end of the chapter.

In this chapter Nietzsche continues his dissection of morality by turning to one of the major topics in the history of moral philosophy — virtue. The first handful of sections begin with an exploration of the relationship between virtue and “order of rank”. This all comes to a head in sections 230 which concerns the “fundamental will of the spirit”, before coming to a clunky conclusion in sections 232-239 which contain Nietzsche notorious remarks about “woman”.

We have been engaged in an extended exploration of the “free spirits” and “philosophers of the future” throughout BGE, and the title of this section tells us that Nietzsche wants to determine what sorts of virtues such individuals will posses.

What are virtues?

Aristotle is the most influential classical source for the ethics of virtue. Aristotle ar…

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Most of us assume “death” means one thing: the biological end of life, the moment the heart stops and experience goes dark. In this conversation, Heidegger scholar Iain Thomson (University of New Mexico) walks us through one of the most counterintuitive claims in twentieth-century philosophy—that this everyday notion of death is not what Heidegger is mainly talking about, and that grasping the difference unlocks the whole architecture of Being and Time.

Three kinds of “ending.” Thomson untangles a distinction that trips up most first-time readers. Perishing is the cessation of a biological organism—”a pear tree can perish,” as Thomson puts it, and there’s nothing it’s like to undergo it. Demise is how we humans experience our own physiological shutting-down—the mortal terror of a heart attack, felt from the inside. And then there’s death in Heidegger’s special sense, which is neither of these.

The problem death solves. Heidegger wants a way to grasp the whole of human existence—what he calls Dasein—all at once. The obvious candidate is to imagine your own demise, your final moment. But here he runs into the old Epicurean paradox: where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not. I can never actually experience my own demise, so it can’t give me a complete picture of my life. As Thomson summarizes it, “I can’t live through my ceasing to live.”

Death as total breakdown. Heidegger’s solution is strange and powerful. Death, for him, is the moment when the life-projects that organize your world—teacher, parent, artist, friend—collapse and you can no longer project yourself into them. Thomson offers a vivid image: a pet owner whose animal has died still finds themselves reaching for a leash, projecting into an absent project. Death is that experience scaled up to everything: “projectless projecting,” a self left standing when all its roles fall away like a house of cards.

You survive it. This is why Heidegger can say—astonishingly—that you survive your own death. In fact, you have to, in order to describe it. When your world breaks down, what’s left is a kind of bare self that doesn’t go down with the shipwreck. Thomson is careful to flag the echo of Descartes here, but with a crucial difference: rather than dissolving the world into doubt, this breakdown brings you “face to face with your world as world”—you see, for the first time, the implicit structure you normally just live through, the way a cyclist only notices the bike when the chain snaps.

Why it matters: rebirth, and time itself. Far from being morbid, this confrontation is the gateway to authenticity—what Heidegger calls anticipatory resoluteness. It’s a secularized phenomenology of conversion: you die to the borrowed, default answer about who to be (Heidegger’s “the They”), and reopen yourself to a way of life you can genuinely own. And it’s only in this breakdown, Thomson argues, that we encounter originary temporality—the deep structure in which the future comes toward us, meets who we’ve already been, and produces the living present.

The discussion closes by pushing on the edges: Where does the self come from in the first place (Heidegger’s surprising notion of “birth” as historical, not biological)? How do other people fit a picture that can look so individualistic? And what would Heidegger have made of ego-death and mystical experience—the dissolution not just of your roles but of selfhood altogether—where Buddhism and the psychedelic tradition may go a step further than he was willing to?

Watch the full conversation above for Thomson’s take on all three.

If you enjoyed this type of content, or had any questions or reflections, let me know by leaving a comment below.