In his essay, “Thinking Inside and Outside the Fly-Bottle: The New Poverty of Philosophy and Its Second Copernican Revolution,” Robert Hanna formulates and defend two metaphilosophical theses. The first thesis is what he calls The New Poverty of Philosophy, which says this: I. So-called “hard” problems in philosophy are actually institutional artifacts of Anglo-American professional academic … [continue reading]

One of the exceptionally attractive qualities of Nietzsche’s brilliantly original style of philosophical writing, for better or worse, is that it’s the Rorschach blot of philosophy: everyone who takes it seriously finds their own philosophical obsessions written there. And this is true, with a bang!, of the subtitle of Twilight of the Idols: “How To … [continue reading]

In every cry of every Man,In every Infants cry of fear,In every voice: in every ban,The mind-forg’d manacles I hear (Blake, 1794: lines 5-8) [P]hilosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of [humanity]. … [continue reading]

In Robert Hanna’s “Preface and General Introduction to The Rational Human Condition,” which forms the principal part of The Rational Human Condition, Vol. 1 (Hanna, 2018), Hanna outlines his synoptic five-volume philosophical project of rational anthropology. Hanna argues that all philosophical inquiry ultimately centers on the question, “What is the human being?,” suggesting that metaphysics, morals, and religion are … [continue reading]

(Falk, 2020) As Jerrold Katz correctly noted, the philosophy of mathematics is central and indeed essential to philosophy as a whole, even despite its abstractness, formal character, and technicality. The reason for this is that an adequate philosophy of mathematics would explain the nature of truth, necessity, apriority, and categorical (i.e., unconditional, principled) normativity, and … [continue reading]

(Zwarenstein, 2024) What has the conscious, intentional human mind to do with the nature and status of logic and mathematics? Are irreducible facts about the human mind essential to logic and mathematics, or are logic and mathematics essentially mindless even if accidentallyconnected to human minds by means of contingent episodes of thinking? The rejection of … [continue reading]

(Zwarenstein, 2024) Benacerraf’s Dilemma (BD), as formulated by Paul Benacerraf in “Mathematical Truth,” is about the apparent impossibility of reconciling a “standard” (i.e., classical Platonic) semantics of mathematics with a “reasonable” (i.e., causal, spatiotemporal) epistemology of cognizing true statements. In “Mathematical Truth Regained” Robert Hanna offers a new solution to BD. He calls this new … [continue reading]

(Zwarenstein, 2024) In “Mathematics for Humans: Kant’s Philosophy of Arithmetic Revisited,” Robert Hanna revisits Immanuel Kant’s much-criticized views on mathematics in general and arithmetic in particular. In so doing, he makes a case for the claim that Kant’s theory of arithmetic is not subject to the most familiar and forceful objection against it, namely, that … [continue reading]

In his short essay, “Why The Better Angels of Our Nature Must Hate The State,” a reply to Anne Margaret Baxley’s comments on his earlier essay, “Exiting the State and Debunking the State of Nature,” Robert Hanna responds to her two critical worries about Hanna’s thesis that there is an unbridgeable gap between Kant’s political … [continue reading]

Contrary to the belief of most Kantians and Kant scholars, Kant is in fact an anarchist. In “Exiting the State and Debunking the State of Nature” Robert Hanna distinguishes sharply between two concepts of enlightenment, (i) enlightenment lite and (ii) heavy duty or radical enlightement; shows how there is an unbridgeable gap between Kant’s official … [continue reading]