From Socrates to Sartre EP05 ⟩ “Plato IV – The Tripartite Soul”
Details
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 distill foundational ideas with almost psychedelic transformative clarity turns what might otherwise be dismissed as clichés 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 actually experiencing 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:
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism. She really walked the walk.
View all of our coming episodes here.
Every 2 weeks on Thursday until March 27, 2025
From Socrates to Sartre EP05 ⟩ “Plato IV – The Tripartite Soul”