Schopenhauer and the Frankfurt School

Heidegger's Artwork Essay

What does it mean for a painting, a sculpture, or even a building to disclose Being? In this episode of Daybreak, we consider Heidegger’s claim in The Origin of the Work of Art that art is a way of revealing truth. Our guest, Jensen Suther, unpacks Heidegger’s vision of art as an ontological event. In his talk at the Warwick Post-Kantian Seminar, Jensen explores how Heidegger’s ideas challenge conventional notions of artistic representation and why they still matter for philosophy, culture, and artistic practice today. Here's a link to Jensen Suther’s research. [https://harvard.academia.edu/JensenSuther]

The Vocation of the Intellectual Woman

Daybreak hits the road. Join us as we visit the Pacific Division of the APA in San Francisco to take part in a groundbreaking panel on the work of Amalia Holst. The episode centres on a talk by Dalia Nassar on the vocation debate in eighteenth century Germany: what is the human being and what ought we become? Dalia draws on the work of Germaine de Staël and Amalia Holst to expose the exclusion of women from the human vocation and to challenge the neglect of women philosophers in the canon. Here's a link to Dalia's research [https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/dalia-nassar.html].

Schopenhauer and the Frankfurt School

In this episode of Daybreak, we explore the intriguing connection between Schopenhauer’s radical pessimism and the Frankfurt School’s critique of modernity. Drawing from Schopenhauer sobering vision of existence as “hell on earth”, thinkers like Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer developed a powerful critique of capitalism, ideology, and social domination. Join us as David Bather Woods presents a talk on Schopenhauer’s impact on the Frankfurt School and how philosophy can help us face our historical moment truly and bravely. Here’s a link to David’s research [https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/people/woods/].

Beauvoir and Critical Phenomenology

Simone de Beauvoir is often placed in the shadow of Sartre, read first and foremost as an existentialist first. But what if we’ve been missing something crucial? In this episode of Daybreak, we uncover Beauvoir’s critical phenomenology—a method that doesn’t just describe experience but interrogates the structures of power, embodiment, and oppression that shape it. This episode explores a recent paper by Johanna Oksala, “The Method of Critical Phenomenology: Simone de Beauvoir as a Phenomenologist”. With Tobias Keiling, Clarissa Müller-Kosmarov, and Andrew Cooper, Johanna identifies how Beauvoir reworks phenomenology to account for gender, freedom, and lived experience in ways that surpass Husserl and Heidegger. What does it mean to approach philosophy as both description and critique? And why is Beauvoir’s method still urgent today? Here's a link to Johanna’s paper [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ejop.12782].

Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic Unpacked

In this episode we chat with Joe Saunders to tackle one of philosophy’s most enduring and provocative ideas: Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Central to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the master-slave dialectic captures the struggle for recognition, the dynamics of power, and the evolution of self-consciousness through conflict. In his talk at the Warwick Post-Kantian Seminar, Joe explores what is morally wrong with the master’s dominance over the slave. Tune in for an engaging examination of Hegel’s philosophy and its far-reaching implications for human relationships, societal structures, and political life. Here's a link to Joe’s research [https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/joe-saunders/].