Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Landsberg, Paul Ludwig

  • Kant on Suicide

    Substack latest, with quotations from the forgotten Paul Ludwig Landsberg.

  • Temptation

    A striking one or two sentence formulation taken from a wider context is not an aphorism, strictly speaking.  But I'm in a loose and liberal mood.  So I present for your consideration and delectation the following sentence from Paul Ludwig Landsberg (1901-1944).  It is from his essay "The Moral Problem of Suicide," translated from the French by…

  • Paul Ludwig Landsberg on Two Types of Philosophy

    The following quotation is from John M. Oesterreicher, The Walls are Crumbling: Seven Jewish Philosophers Discover Christ, London: Hollis and Carter, 1953, p. 195. Oesterreicher is glossing Landsberg's doctoral thesis Wesen und Bedeutung der Platonischen Akademie, 1923:  . . . there are two types of philosophy: the autonomous, patterned after Plato's, which undertakes to bring about man's…

  • Kant on Suicide

    Is suicide ever morally permissible? Cutting against the Enlightenment grain, Kant delivers a resoundingly negative verdict. Suicide is always and everywhere morally wrong. This entry is part of an effort to understand his position. Unfortunately, Kant's treatment is exceedingly murky and one of his arguments is hard to square with what he says elsewhere. In his Lectures…