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Is a Philosophy Major a Good Idea? (w/ Lauren Eichler)
March 27, 2025 · 82 min

Dave sits down with fellow philosopher, academic adviser, and long-time friend and research-collaborator, Lauren Eichler. Dave and Lauren talk about their winding journeys majoring in philosophy and advising students potentially interested in doing the same. They also talk about Lauren’s body of research on and personal connection to genocide, dehumanization, and the holocaust. 

Lauren’s recommendations:

The Good Place

Maquia

Aniara

Lauren and Dave’s co-authored articles

Lauren’s webpage

Become a deadbeat philosopher, and read Dave’s deadbeat philosophical scribblings, at https://deadbeatphilosophy.substack.com

Deadbeat philosophy = sideways investigations into philosophy, politics, and the contradictions of modern life—from a former professor, future skeleton.

Podcast. Books in progress. Weird stop-motion. Modern life dissected.

New podcast episodes drop every Thursday. New writing posted all the time.

Historical philosophers on the table include, among others: Lao Tzu, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Boethius, Hildegard von Bingen, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Voltaire, Franklin, Rousseau, Kant, Jefferson, Wollstonecraft, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Douglass, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Kafka, Leopold, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre, Arendt, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, Sellars, Fanon, Foucault, Derrida, Rorty, and many more.

Topics on the table include, among others: the meaning of life, ethical dilemmas, theoretical frameworks, domestic and international politics, institutional analysis, education, religion, mental health, arts and literature, environment, nature, animals, climate, and extinction, race, gender, and the politics of race and gender, racism, colonialism, sexism, fascism, capitalism, socialism, nationalism, stoicism, daoism, confucianism, buddhism, pragmatism, feminism, rationalism, German idealism, romanticism, transcendentalism, environmentalism, modernism, postmodernism, phenomenology, critical theory, deconstruction, German culture, history, and politics, expat life, and much more.

A co-production with the Museum Hegel-Haus, Stuttgart

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