2025-12-27
30 分钟Hello everyone.
I'm Stephen West.
This is Philosophize This.
Patreon.com slash Philosophize This.
Philosophical Writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there.
I hope you love the show today.
So today we're talking about the play Hamlet by Shakespeare.
And this being the third episode we've done on his work, I want to do something a little more inspirational this time.
So usually we talk about the events of the play, we give analysis from people
who have dedicated their lives to Shakespeare, and both those will certainly be in this episode.
But the thing I want to do that's a bit more today is to inspire
you to read classic literature like this a bit differently.
I want to talk about reading this play more like a philosopher might be reading it.
If part of the job of a philosopher is to take concepts that seem really familiar to us,
something like love or justice, and if part of what they do is work through
them and show us a whole other side of the thing that can help us see the world in a new way,
well then Hamlet is a very familiar play from classic literature, right?
So what if a philosopher reworked an entire play to similarly give us an exciting
new way of seeing it that breathes life into the work and makes it even more relevant?
Building on what Nietzsche, Hegel, Benjamin and others thought about Hamlet as a play,