Ted Gioia warned this would be a tough week—and he wasn’t kidding. Week 33 of the Immersive Humanities Project had me wrestling with three giants of philosophy: Descartes, Kant, and Spinoza. I started with Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, where his famous “I think, therefore I am” felt surprisingly direct and human. His four rules for reasoning—question, divide, simplify, and review—made him seem less like an abstract philosopher and more like a kind, curious friend.
Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals was another story. Dense and demanding, it centers on the “Categorical Imperative”: act only according to principles you’d accept as universal law. It’s a moral system built purely on duty, not emotion.
Then came Spinoza’s Ethics, written like a geometry proof. His radical idea—that God and Nature are one—left little room for the supernatural or free will.
When reading failed, I turned to the 1987 Great Philosophers series with Brian Magee, which unlocked everything. These thinkers—Continental Rationalists all—believed reason alone could uncover truth, unlike the British Empiricists who demanded evidence. It was a mentally exhausting but fascinating stretch, and next week I’m relieved to return to fiction with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.
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