The Eclipse of Wisdom: How the Aim of Philosophy Has Been Obscured in Modern Thought
Speaker: David Arndt
Philosophy in the West used to mean love of wisdom, yet today wisdom has been eclipsed as the aim of academic philosophy. Why this eclipse? What has happened? This talk will try to think through these questions in three steps. First, we will try to explicate the understanding of wisdom implicit in Plato’s Apology and Republic, focusing on the senses in which wisdom is true, good, and beautiful. Then we will try to trace how this understanding was obscured by the emergence of modern concepts of beauty, goodness, and truth, and the dis-integration of philosophical thought into the fields of aesthetics, moral philosophy, and epistemology. Finally, we will try to rethink the basic concepts of these fields—truth, goodness, and beauty—in order to conceive more clearly the nature of wisdom. After the talk, we hope to have a dialogue on different views of wisdom in Buddhism and western philosophy.
About the speaker
David Arndt is a Tutor in the Integral Program of Liberal Arts at Saint Mary’s College of California. After a B.A. in Literature summa cum laude from Yale, he earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine, where he studied with the philosophers Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, and worked for three terms as Derrida’s research assistant. His books include Arendt on the Political (Cambridge, 2019) and Philosophy of Writing (Bloomsbury, 2026). In the past, he has lived in India (two years), Sri Lanka (two years), France (a year), and Turkey (five years). He now lives in Oakland, and is currently serving a life sentence in academia.
Date: Monday, September 21
Time: 12:15–1:45 PM
Location: DRBU SW 2nd Floor Lounge