Professor Kozlowski Lectures

Professor Kozlowski discusses Dostoevsky's shamelessly expository first book of The Brothers Karamazov , including the "muddle-headed" and dissipated father Fyodor, hapless Dmitri, capable Ivan, and Alyosha - who may very well be Dostoevsky's most successful attempt at making a convincing heroic protagonist.  Next week we'll tackle Book Two: "An Inappropriate Gathering" and see how these char...

Professor Kozlowski embarks on a new semester-long project: reading through Dostoevsky's mammoth, messy magnum opus: The Brothers Karamazov.   We'll be reading the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation on a week-to-week basis, starting with "Book One: A Nice Little Family" next week.  I encourage you to follow along in your own reading, as it is convenient for you. Since this project is online-...

Professor Kozlowski closes out his Love and Friendship class with some discussion of Foucault, but mostly by thinking out loud about the past, present, and future of his podcast, his workload, and where his Internet Presence is likely to go, now that he doesn't have the pandemic to both spur his activity and boost his viewership.  Here's hoping for some Dostoevsky in the spring! If you have q...

Professor Kozlowski well oversteps his expertise and discusses the ideas presented in early texts on Queer Theory, namely Michel Foucault's "Friendship as a Way of Life" and "Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity", as well as "The Ethics of Sexual Shame" - the first chapter of Michael Warner's The Trouble With Normal . If you have questions or topic suggestions for Professor Kozlowski, e-mail h...

Professor Kozlowski continues his discussion of Love in the 20th Century by examining the four waves of feminism and touching on several important texts written by feminist authors on the subject of Love: namely Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex , Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, Annette Baier's "Unsafe Loves", and Virgina Held's The Ethics of Care . If you have questions or topic sug...

Professor Kozlowski wanders off the beaten path of philosophical canon to discuss the attitudes on Love and Friendship most important to him personally: the account of love in G. K. Chesterton's Manalive , and the account of friendship in C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves. If you have questions or topic suggestions for Professor Kozlowski, e-mail him at profbkozlowski2@gmail.com To see what else Profess...

Professor Kozlowski discusses Freud today.  What could go wrong? CW: sex/sexuality, incest, rape, heteronormativity, childhood trauma, mental illness, coprophilia, love as a purely physical process, scientific objectivity, the gradual deterioration of Professor Kozlowski's mental well-being If you have questions or topic suggestions for Professor Kozlowski, e-mail him at profbkozlowski2@gmail...

Professor Kozlowski takes on some of the most divisive and dangerous thinkers in the history of the canon - along with some explanation of 19th-century obsessions like Social Darwinism, rampant Naturalism, and their often-racist conclusions.  We cautiously walk through some of Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's philosophy, hemmed in by dangers and unwarranted assumptions (there is a lot of sweari...

Professor Kozlowski guides us carefully through Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther , Wertherism, and the tangled, radical philosophy of Romanticism as we embark on our study of nineteenth-century philosophy. If you have questions or topic suggestions for Professor Kozlowski, e-mail him at profbkozlowski2@gmail.com To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://profess...

Professor Kozlowski pits Rousseau's dubious pedagogical advice against the clear-sighted feminism of Mary Wollstonecroft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in this last examination of love in The Enlightenment. If you have questions or topic suggestions for Professor Kozlowski, e-mail him at profbkozlowski2@gmail.com To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://pro...

Continuing through history, Professor Kozlowski discusses excerpts of Spinoza's Ethics , briefly recounts the intellectual history leading up to The Enlightenment (including its greatest accomplishments and most egregious shortcomings), and concludes by examining Kant's lecture "On Friendship", in which Kant approaches the tradition of Cicero and Montaigne with his characteristic keen incisiveness...

Professor Kozlowski discusses the rapidly-changing world of Modern Europe, from the Renaissance to the Protestant Reformation to the Scientific Revolution, in order to contextualize and understand the writings of Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and John Milton. If you have questions or topic suggestions for Professor Kozlowski, e-mail him at profbkozlowski2@gmail.com To see what else Professor Kozlowski...

Professor Kozlowski takes a break from philosophy proper to discuss the Love of the poets and artists of the late medieval and early modern era, focusing primarily on the romance of Dante and Beatrice as it is depicted in The Divine Comedy .  He specifically emphasizes how Dante is uniting the transcendent, holy love tradition in Medieval philosophy (evident in writers like Aquinas) and the c...

Professor Kozlowski goes for a (relatively) brief walk through the woolly area of Thomist philosophy: examining how Aquinas distinguishes between concupiscent and friendly love and how friendly love is, for Aquinas, one and the same with the Christian notion of "charity" - or transcendent, Godly love. If you have questions or topic suggestions for Professor Kozlowski, e-mail him at profbkozlowski2...

Professor Kozlowski commits a hat-trick of irresponsible academic conjecture by (1) wading deep into a contentious discussion that (2) he is woefully under-informed about, and (3) which involves a cultural/religious heritage he does not belong to.  But seriously, how the heck can anyone miss the connection between Islamic teaching about love (ca. 11th-12th century) and the Courtly Love tradit...

Professor Kozlowski largely abandons today's reading from Augustine's Confessions in order to embark on a brief history of the early Christian church, tracking its evolution from a guerrilla religion fleeing from Roman authorities, through its acceptance as the state religion of Rome, growing through schism, and the rise of the papacy, monasticism, and religious reform.  Where does Christiani...

It's time to talk about Christianity, and how it radically changed Western Culture's understanding of Love. If you have questions or topic suggestions for Professor Kozlowski, e-mail him at profbkozlowski2@gmail.com To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professorkozlowski.wordpress.com/

Professor Kozlowski muses on the subject of how philosophy texts become "important" to the canon, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire - as a subject of philosophical study, and also (when forced) what Cicero actually has to say about friendship. If you have questions or topic suggestions for Professor Kozlowski, e-mail him at profbkozlowski2@gmail.com To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up t...

Professor Kozlowski crosses the Rubicon to discuss the rise of the Roman Empire, its widespread (and politically-motivated?) embrace of stoicism, and how that informs Roman attitudes on hero-worship and suspicion against Love.  Today we're reading Theano's "Letter on Marriage and Fidelity", selections from Ovid's The Art of Love , Lucretius' argument against love from On the Nature of Things...

Professor Kozlowski ventures into Eastern Philosophy to discuss alternative attitudes toward love and friendship, as well as draw comparisons and contrasts to Western traditions like stoicism.  It's hardly a comprehensive study, but hopefully it will help to offer a sense of Eastern traditions and the questions asked by those traditions.  Today we discuss Chapters 15-16 of the Dhammapada...

Professor Kozlowski wanders through the series of questions asked and answered by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics IX.  Along the way, he'll discuss the self-destructiveness of viciousness, the relationship of self to friend, and the ways that friendship is shaped by attitude and perspective. If you have questions or topic suggestions for Professor Kozlowski, e-mail him at profbkozlowski2@gmai...

Professor Kozlowski turns his attention from eros to philia in his discussion of Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle.  In this lecture he discusses Aristotle's overall project in Ethics, including a synopsis of Books I and II, before discussing the three species of friendship, and how friendship relates to government. If you have questions or topic suggestions for Professor Kozlo...

Professor Kozlowski completes his encomium of Plato's Symposium by discussing the lives of Socrates and Alcibiades: how their love affair may have endangered the whole of Athenian civilization, and how Plato concludes his dialogue with the blind praise of a poet, the wisdom of a mysterious woman teacher, and the obsession of a deranged young man. If you have questions or topic suggestions for Prof...

Professor Kozlowski begins his encomium of the Symposium by discussing Greek cultural assumptions and how they relate and manifest in the first four speeches: Phaedrus' virtuous love, Pausanias' passionate (if disreputable) love, Erixymachus' love as a universal force, and Aristophanes' (comic?) love-myth.  Perhaps, by synthesizing all these perspectives, we might come to see some true vision...

Time to discuss one of the earliest perspectives on love in the history of Western Civilization: the love between God and His people in the Old Testament.  Follow along with Professor Kozlowski as he discusses the creation of the universe, the law given to Moses, and many of the most controversial issues in the Bible along the way. If you have questions or topic suggestions for Professor Kozl...