Prompt options: 1. Freedom has been a theme which looms large in the philosophies and the lives of the thinkers we have studied. Consider the different manners in which this concept is treated by different philosophers. Try to bring your own voice into the paper near the end, what do you believe ‘freedom’ means? Try to go beyond the usual definition of ‘being allowed to do what you want as long as you don’t hurt others’. As an example, the etymology of ‘Freedom’ – taken back to Proto-Indoeuropean languages – means ‘To love’. What might Freedom have to do with love? 2. In Greek Mythology the god of death, Thanatos, is the twin of Hypnos, the god of Dreams. How are these two concepts related? What intuition did the Greeks have here? Death and dreaming are more motifs that many of our thinkers have taken up. In what way is falling asleep like dying? In what way do our dreams and the thought of our death affect our waking life? Again, try to get beyond the obvious – get into the depths. 3. Many philosophers from Plato to Heidegger to Simone Weil have attempted to convince us that we do not live in reality, that there is a truer, more real Being that we do not engage with, or engage with only rarely. Some philosophers such as Nietzsche assert that this Being does not exist, and that it is the very postulation of such a Being that causes us so much disturbance. Pick a side, is there some kind of reality beyond what we perceive? Is there a way to access it? Take examples from how you know people try to access a different reality, through drugs, through meditation, through microscopes and high energy particle colliders, and explain what the philosophers we have studied would think of these activities. 4. What is the role of loneliness in philosophy? This might be particularly topical given ‘social distancing’. Nearly every thinker we have studied has been isolated, a loner. Does one have to be isolated in order to think well? What is the effect of other people on our thoughts? Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger especially have comments on this last point. Finally, why is it that these lonely thinkers are able to integrate themselves so deeply into the public consciousness? So that now we use their terminology – like ‘unconsciousness’ or ‘superman’ – without thinking? Isn’t there a paradox that such isolated human beings end up having such an effect upon social consciousness
