Scott & Dave’s High Ontology

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

Hume Part IV; or, After the Storm, Animal Faith

If you’ve ever found yourself returning, again and again, to the refreshing astringent witch hazel of Hume’s work—not out of “hope” but in recognition of its unsparing clarity—welcome to the pleasure dome.

In the fourth and final episode of Thelma Lavine’s treatment of Hume, we meet the philosopher not only at the end of his system but at the end of his life: urbane, witty, and unflinching even in the face of death, cracking atheism jokes to horrified (because guilt-ridden) deists from his death bed.

It is from this Heideggerian vantage point that Lavine guides us through Hume’s final philosophical demolitions—of the self, of God, of miracles, and—most explosively—of reason itself as a guide in moral life.

We’ll follow Thelma through Hume’s Buddhist “bundle theory” of the self, which Hume claims (rightly) that any sane and serious-minded person ought to favor over the fantasy of a substantial self having continuous personal identity. The former passes his empiricist test; the latter can’t. Playing by the Copy Principle, we must conclude: since no impression of a constant self can be found, the idea collapses. There is not a single mote of evidence for a perduring “I” beneath the passing confetti of sense-consciousnesses, only a conditioned belief induced by the associative operations of memory.

Next, Thelma explores Hume’s surgical dismantling of theistic metaphysics. She does a fabulous job targeting (in order) Descartes’ causal proofs, Anselm’s ontological argument, or the deist design inference from Newtonian order. It’s really cleansing to run through all three flavors at once, and Hume’s empiricism nails them all. Where there is no impression, there is no idea; and where there is no idea, belief is fiction—in this case, a fiction born of fear, not reason. Religion is not knowledge—it’s anthropology.

Here, she shows us how Hume anticipates Nietzsche: the impulse toward religious belief is not the conclusion of rational demonstration but the symptom of psychological need—a projection rooted in fear, dependency, and the human refusal to face an indifferent universe without illusion.

From there, Thelma leads us into Hume’s infamous account of moral judgment: reason, he declares, is “and ought ever to be, the slave of the passions.” Don’t let your mom hear you saying that.

Far from being governed by rational principles, moral conduct emerges from sentiment and sympathy—those contingent, animal impulses which cannot be logically justified, only felt and described. The rationalist’s dream of deducing ethics from first principles is revealed to be, like belief in substance or God, another pious illusion.

Is Hume, then, a nihilist?

No! In a dazzling dialectical reversal, Hume appeals to something beneath reason: instinct. Though philosophy cannot justify our belief in an external world or a continuous self, we nonetheless continue to walk around objects and expect the sun to rise. It is nature, not reason, that governs belief. What remains after reason’s auto-deconstruction is what Hume calls animal faith—a nonrational, unavoidable trust in the givenness of experience.

Once again, Thelma shows us Hume’s link to the contemporary. In this, he anticipates the later “critical philosophy” of Wittgenstein and Hubert Dreyfus—one that exposes the limits of representationalist reason and turns back to pre-reflective, embodied coping as the true foundation of our relation to the world. Our engagement with outer existence is not inferential but animal, instinctive, and unarticulated: not unconscious in the Freudian sense of hidden psychic mechanisms, but background in the Wittgensteinian-Heideggerian sense—a form of life that shows itself in action rather than in propositional form.

Finally, we get to the hard problem of Hume: What survives Hume’s philosophical purge? What becomes of science, of religion, of ethics, after he has taken the torch to all unjustified metaphysical claims? And is Hume’s own mitigated skepticism coherent, or merely a performative contradiction? As Jack Torrence said to Wendy through the pantry door—Go check it out!

This episode forms the hinge on which the entire modern theory of knowledge will turn. If Descartes sought indubitable foundations, Hume dissolves them. What Kant will famously call his own “Copernican revolution” begins here, in the rubble.

Join us as we examine the most devastating—and strangely liberating—chapter of Hume’s thought. It is from here that Thelma will next launch us … into Hegel!

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

When I first saw one of her broadcasts on Public Access, I scoffed and jeered at the odd elements—for about 90 seconds. Then it hit me: her clarity and precision delivered a more powerful impact than anything I’d ever encountered.

Her unmatched ability to transmute the foundational ideas—banalized into clichés by others—into potent, transformative psychedelics turns even the most familiar concepts into insights so profound they catch in your throat.

While Magee is, as Eric Clapton once said, “by far and without a doubt the most gifted philosophical conversationalist alive today,” Lavine’s hypnotic delivery, along with her genius for crafting perfect metaphors and examples, makes her the most masterful foundation-demystifier in Anglophone philosophy. She’s one of a kind and I’m sure you’ll fall in love with her.

Like a Virgin, Seeing Foundations for the Very First Time

Professor Lavine is the tough-love mom I wish I had as a child. And she has a message for all of us non-, partial-, and pseudo-grokkers: foundational mastery in philosophy isn’t about delivering smooth confusionist performances or stringing together philosophical buzzwords. True mastery—the kind Lavine demands—requires effort on the level of authentic self-reinventive cultural immersion or learning a second language. Philosophy, approached seriously, means internalizing the metaphysical and epistemic assumptions of the great thinkers we read and letting them infect and possess us.

Philosophical understanding isn't normal. It requires something not dissimilar to religious conversion—a wholesale transformation of how you see and think about the world. To truly grok Descartes, for example, you cannot simply study his arguments, you have to induce a kind of trance. You have to inhabit the core of his thought, down to the foundations, in the same way an actor might embody a role—not just the personality, but the underlying worldview and backstory that motivates it.

The same goes for Hume’s radical empiricism. Entering into his world means actuallyexperiencing life as a flux of flashing sense data and questioning the coherence of our everyday projections. It’s disconcerting, even disorienting. But if you can immerse yourself in these frameworks, the rewards will be profound. You will see the clarity and brilliance of the thinkers in a way that mere conceptual understanding can’t provide.

In her stunningly clear lectures—as clear as a chrome airhorn on a bright winter day—the preternatural Lavine guides us through just these kinds of transformative experiences. She exposes the core commitments and hidden absurdities within each system, and demands that we confront the real stakes behind the systems we study and take them absolutely seriously. This is not philosophy as intellectual gymnastics—it’s philosophy as immersive and experiential and I dare say devotional.

Join us for a series of sessions that will push us to engage with the true depth of all the fundamental and foundational stuff that everyone loves to skip over and replace with popular caricatures. Lavine will cure you of that real quick. She doesn’t just present ideas; she forces you to method-act the systems from the inside and take a stand.

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

When I first saw one of her broadcasts on Public Access, I scoffed and jeered at the odd elements—for about 90 seconds. Then it hit me: her clarity and precision delivered a more powerful impact than anything I’d ever encountered.

Her unmatched ability to transmute the foundational ideas—banalized into clichés by others—into potent, transformative psychedelics turns even the most familiar concepts into insights so profound they catch in your throat.

While Magee is, as Eric Clapton once said, “by far and without a doubt the most gifted philosophical conversationalist alive today,” Lavine’s hypnotic delivery, along with her genius for crafting perfect metaphors and examples, makes her the most masterful foundation-demystifier in Anglophone philosophy. She’s one of a kind and I’m sure you’ll fall in love with her.

Like a Virgin, Seeing Foundations for the Very First Time

Professor Lavine is the tough-love mom I wish I had as a child. And she has a message for all of us non-, partial-, and pseudo-grokkers: foundational mastery in philosophy isn’t about delivering smooth confusionist performances or stringing together philosophical buzzwords. True mastery—the kind Lavine demands—requires effort on the level of authentic self-reinventive cultural immersion or learning a second language. Philosophy, approached seriously, means internalizing the metaphysical and epistemic assumptions of the great thinkers we read and letting them infect and possess us.

Philosophical understanding isn't normal. It requires something not dissimilar to religious conversion—a wholesale transformation of how you see and think about the world. To truly grok Descartes, for example, you cannot simply study his arguments, you have to induce a kind of trance. You have to inhabit the core of his thought, down to the foundations, in the same way an actor might embody a role—not just the personality, but the underlying worldview and backstory that motivates it.

The same goes for Hume’s radical empiricism. Entering into his world means actuallyexperiencing life as a flux of flashing sense data and questioning the coherence of our everyday projections. It’s disconcerting, even disorienting. But if you can immerse yourself in these frameworks, the rewards will be profound. You will see the clarity and brilliance of the thinkers in a way that mere conceptual understanding can’t provide.

In her stunningly clear lectures—as clear as a chrome airhorn on a bright winter day—the preternatural Lavine guides us through just these kinds of transformative experiences. She exposes the core commitments and hidden absurdities within each system, and demands that we confront the real stakes behind the systems we study and take them absolutely seriously. This is not philosophy as intellectual gymnastics—it’s philosophy as immersive and experiential and I dare say devotional.

Join us for a series of sessions that will push us to engage with the true depth of all the fundamental and foundational stuff that everyone loves to skip over and replace with popular caricatures. Lavine will cure you of that real quick. She doesn’t just present ideas; she forces you to method-act the systems from the inside and take a stand.

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

When I first saw one of her broadcasts on Public Access, I scoffed and jeered at the odd elements—for about 90 seconds. Then it hit me: her clarity and precision delivered a more powerful impact than anything I’d ever encountered.

Her unmatched ability to transmute the foundational ideas—banalized into clichés by others—into potent, transformative psychedelics turns even the most familiar concepts into insights so profound they catch in your throat.

While Magee is, as Eric Clapton once said, “by far and without a doubt the most gifted philosophical conversationalist alive today,” Lavine’s hypnotic delivery, along with her genius for crafting perfect metaphors and examples, makes her the most masterful foundation-demystifier in Anglophone philosophy. She’s one of a kind and I’m sure you’ll fall in love with her.

Like a Virgin, Seeing Foundations for the Very First Time

Professor Lavine is the tough-love mom I wish I had as a child. And she has a message for all of us non-, partial-, and pseudo-grokkers: foundational mastery in philosophy isn’t about delivering smooth confusionist performances or stringing together philosophical buzzwords. True mastery—the kind Lavine demands—requires effort on the level of authentic self-reinventive cultural immersion or learning a second language. Philosophy, approached seriously, means internalizing the metaphysical and epistemic assumptions of the great thinkers we read and letting them infect and possess us.

Philosophical understanding isn't normal. It requires something not dissimilar to religious conversion—a wholesale transformation of how you see and think about the world. To truly grok Descartes, for example, you cannot simply study his arguments, you have to induce a kind of trance. You have to inhabit the core of his thought, down to the foundations, in the same way an actor might embody a role—not just the personality, but the underlying worldview and backstory that motivates it.

The same goes for Hume’s radical empiricism. Entering into his world means actuallyexperiencing life as a flux of flashing sense data and questioning the coherence of our everyday projections. It’s disconcerting, even disorienting. But if you can immerse yourself in these frameworks, the rewards will be profound. You will see the clarity and brilliance of the thinkers in a way that mere conceptual understanding can’t provide.

In her stunningly clear lectures—as clear as a chrome airhorn on a bright winter day—the preternatural Lavine guides us through just these kinds of transformative experiences. She exposes the core commitments and hidden absurdities within each system, and demands that we confront the real stakes behind the systems we study and take them absolutely seriously. This is not philosophy as intellectual gymnastics—it’s philosophy as immersive and experiential and I dare say devotional.

Join us for a series of sessions that will push us to engage with the true depth of all the fundamental and foundational stuff that everyone loves to skip over and replace with popular caricatures. Lavine will cure you of that real quick. She doesn’t just present ideas; she forces you to method-act the systems from the inside and take a stand.

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here: