'Hans D. Sluga (German; born April 24, 1937) is a German academic, who has served as a lecturer in philosophy at University College London and is now a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1970. He teaches and writes on topics in analytic philosophy as well as on political philosophy and has been particularly influenced by the thought of Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault' (from wikipedia entry; accessed May 25 2018). Sluga blogs here. One of the interesting things about the three philosophers featured on this webpage (Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Foucault), is that they all changed their minds one or more times through there lives on major philosophical positions they held, yet today each iteration of their works remains influential
| Date | Source | Topic | Media files |
| May 4, 2018 | Philosopher's Zone (ABC RadioNational) | This session is on the notion of 'Common Good'. From the podcast's website: "The idea of the common good drove some of the most important social developments of the 20th century: Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal, civil rights, the United Nations, the European Union. Today, as western societies become more fragmented and organisations like the EU begin to fray at the edges, we ask whether nations and individuals are beginning to lose faith in the common good." | audio |
| May 20, 2017 | Entitled Opinions | In this interview Sluga discusses Trump and our current moment. He (slightly) contrasts his views from those of Wendy Brown (also at UC Berkeley) by placing a greater emphasis on plutocracy than on neoliberalism. He believes we are experiencing plutocracy globally, and he and Harrison wonder where we head from here. Two books mentioned are "Dark Money", by Jane Mayer and "Triumphant Plutocracy" by R. Pettigrew. | audio |
| October 14, 2015 | Entitled Opinions | This interview covers politics. It includes some of the same material as the Philosopher's Zone interview (posted above), but in greater depth. In it, Sluga divides political thought into normative (which seeks to discover universal apriori essential principles) and diagnostic (which accepts that there can be principles, rules, conventions, but doesn't accept an apriori basis, rather emphasizing historical development and the importance of the current moment on their formation). He discusses thinkers who, at least partly, followed a diagnostic paradigm (in the past Aristotle and Machiavelli, and more recently Benjamin Constant, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault); in their diagnoses, they brought in, among other things, effects of conflict, modes of communication, and asymmetries in power. He and Robert Harrison end the podcast with talking about "TPE syndrome", which relates to the effects of technology, population and environment on the current political moment. | audio |
| October 7, 2015 | Entitled Opinions | This interview is on Ludwig Wittgenstein, who may be one of the two or three greatest philosophers of the 20th century. While there is much available on the internet on Wittgenstein, most offerings in audio or video don't cover his intellectual development in detail, nor on how his thought may be applied to our current situation. Wittgenstein's intellect simmered in the stew of late 19th and early 20th century Europe, a period sometimes referred to as "fin de siecle", a time of tumult and of tremendous cultural, philosophic, and artistic fecundity before the great war (in which Wittgenstein fought, and was injured and decorated). He had two major intellectual periods, exemplified by "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" and "Philosophical Investigations", respectively, both highly influential despite Wittgenstein's own repudiation of much of his earlier work. Yet for Sluga, the most important aspect of Wittgenstein may not be any specific claim he made in his works, but his approach, which was a deep, incisive, and constant investigation with resistance to dogma. This approach, Sluga believes, can be applied to political philosophy today, and this is what he attempts in his book on the common good, which is the subject of his interview with Robert Harrison on the Entitled opinions podcast of Oct 14, 2017. This is what Sluga gets in to here. | audio |
| April 18, 2012 | Entitled Opinions | This interview covers the philosophy of Michel Foucault, who remains one of the most cited authors in academic literature in the humanities. In many ways, his philosophy is even more pertinent now than it was in 1984 when he died, with its exploration of power, social control, and surveillance. Yet Foucault can be dense, circumstantial, and inaccessible. A pithy and systematic introduction is what Sluga provides us here, and in the process covers Foucault's influencers (particularly Nietschze and the Greeks), and where Foucault may have taken us today, were he still alive. | audio Other Foucault media: Badiou interviews in 1965 (auto-translate may need to be turned on)Debate with Chomsky in 1971 Howison Lectures 1980 Other 1980's lectures Paul Rabinow discusses Foucault. Rabinow spent a considerable amount of time with Foucault, and explores Foucalt's relevance today. An interesting book mentioned on the podcast is Dragnet Nation by Julia Angwin, which describes our surveillance economy today; which directly resonates with topics Foucault foreshadowed Selected books:
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