The HBS hosts look under the hood, inspect the engine, and try to figure out what drives us.
Perhaps more than any other affect, desire is put to work in so many areas of philosophy. For Plato, it is the beginning of knowledge (or the soul’s search for truth), for Augustine, it is what marks post-lapsarian humanity–“Our hears are restless until they rest in you.” For Hobbes, it is one of the root affects and, perhaps, the root of the war of all against all. More recently, desire has become a focus in feminist philosophy, Foucauldian “geneaology,” philosophies of race, and queer theory, just to name a few central directions. In this episode, the HBS hosts talk about desire.
In this episode, we discuss the following sites, works, thinkers, creators, and ideas:
- Recent attacks on tenure by state legislatures
- The jazz vocalist Dee Alexander
- The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago
- The Chat N Scat Diner, Clarksville AR
- Twitter Blue subscription
- Baruch Spinoza on desire and appetite from Book IV of Ethics
- The correspondence of Elizabeth of Bohemia with Descartes
- Descartes’ Passions of the Soul
- Plato’s Symposium
- Augustine, Confessions
- Thomas Aquinas on desire and its kinds from the Summa Theologiae
- The Marxist fascination with Spinoza
- Edward Bernays, the originator of modern advertising
- Thomas C. Holt, “Empire of the Mind,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction
- Aristotle’s discussion of the “natural slave” in Politics
