Many people are convinced our lives, and all actions in the universe, are totally determined. One question remains: How did they make up their minds that that is true?

One decent definition of the difference between mind and matter is that minds make decisions. Even if you decide to let someone else make all your decisions for you, that itself is a decision. Which you can revoke at will.

Join us at Monday Night Philosophy to remind yourself (in the Platonic sense) that there are indeed many reasons to recover your own agency, to realize that you make decisions all the time that are not determined by—even if they are influenced by—outside forces, and to refresh your awareness of the inner control over your own life that everyone inherently possesses, whether they sense it or not, whether they feel it or not. Because when you have recovered your former certainty that you have free will, you will also understand that one of the most intriguing and ironic uses of our free wills are our always temporary decisions to believe that we don’t have it.

Who are we? Good question. But difficult to answer definitively. Still, it is a question that is philosophically fruitful to ask, because the flip side of the question (who aren’t we?) has several clear answers that narrow the search for an answer to the main question.

One example: It might be emotionally hard to accept, but it seems highly unlikely that we are the center of the universe, even though we all experience the totality of our lives through one perspective—our own—which has clearly made it very easy for almost all of us to fall for this illusion.

That is one reason Monday Night Philosophy returns to the Commonwealth Club (this time on a Tuesday) to re-ask these age-old questions, to analyze the most popular of their age-old answers, and to present the logic that points to a different answer to the ancient question: Who are we?

This rational perspective also makes it perfectly understandable why we experience the emotions we do, why we dream, why we’ve told ourselves these stories, how we try to egg ourselves on with them, why we have scared ourselves silly with them, and even how they explain away for us our otherwise embarrassing attraction to cruelty.

Monday Night Philosophy at The Commonwealth Club celebrates its 14th anniversary by revealing how 20th century scientific knowledge was used to revitalize the power of Pythagorean insights and Platonic ideals. Using ancient Greek principles that promote clear conceptual reasoning, Hammond spent his 20s reorganizing the concepts we all use into a more coherent whole, generating both philosophical wisdom about the patterns in our personalities and perhaps even a better scientific understanding of the universe as well.

Just as it did 2,500 years ago, focusing on the existence of the continuum of change and on the unchanging principles inherent in it reveals a cosmos of order rather than an impenetrable chaos. Surprisingly, the same thing can also be said about uncovering the patterns of order in our own individual―and admittedly apparently chaotic—personalities.  

Join George Hammond on his 70th birthday as he explains why he expects this civilizing force to get a big boost in the near future, and why he continues to focus on clarifying first principles first—and then setting them loose in the world.

It is hard for most of us to even imagine the confidence Socrates had. Or that Alexander or Mozart had. Much less live it. It is much easier, though, for us to imagine a top saleswoman’s confidence, even if we are inclined to blame it all on her over-praising mother. But there are patterns in the emotion we call confidence that make it clear this is not an unsolvable mystery—patterns that explain both the ephemeral confidence that leads to sales success and the seemingly unshakeable confidence that leads to political, military, artistic, scientific and intellectual high-end achievements.

But even when the elements of this emotion are parsed (it is caused by perceiving oneself as virtuous), it is still not immediately obvious how to achieve it in daily life, due to the subtleties of both the process of perceiving oneself and the definition of virtue (using the ancient understanding of virtue as strength or skillfulness). George Hammond will clarify those subtleties so that you can shift how you perceive yourself sufficiently to immediately feel more confident. And to understand how to keep that trend going by shedding the habitual thinking patterns that usually undermine confidence—until you have developed more confidence than you can currently imagine.

Monday Night Philosophy asks (on a Tuesday afternoon): What are we doing here? And answers: We are pursuing desires — because we are pursuing happiness, and happiness results from fulfilling a desire. But since unhappiness results whenever we don’t fulfill a desire, and since that happens so often, individual life is sometimes seen as a perilous journey, a valley of tears, or even a worthless endeavor, to be escaped via the nothingness of Nirvana, or by retreating to Heaven, or by merging with Oneness.

So what’s wrong with this picture? Just as right after a divorce, when it is common to forget all about the fun and enjoyment which came before, we lack perspective. We forget our judgment is untrustworthy in despair. So let’s step back, as philosophers love to do, and see how much more intelligently we could 1) pick which desires to pursue before we pursue them, 2) pick which motives to favor, and which to discard (because our motives are our deeper desires), 3) sort out our conflicting desires so we don’t face certain unhappiness, and 4) make contingent any desires that are dependent for their fulfillment on sources outside our control. And then see how much more happiness, and how much less unhappiness, we would experience.

Because the only way to get everything you want in life is to be very clever about what you want.

Monday Night Philosophy understands that we have explained life to ourselves in ways that have scared us silly for so long that it has become an engrained habit. Ironically, it’s a habit we rather enjoy because fear often keeps us more alert than we’d otherwise be. But there are other ways to remain intellectually alert to the nuances of life that are not so debilitating. So tonight, join us via live stream, and we’ll sort through those fears with the goal of understanding how unlikely it is that these fears are justified, eliminating those that are highly irrational and minimizing those that are merely ridiculous.

Monday Night Philosophy celebrates its 10th anniversary by making predictions about the future of our common wealth: the ideas and assumptions that underlie all human cultures. The Commonwealth Club is dedicated to finding truth and turning it loose in the world. But what is truth? Whatever it is, that ancient question remains provocative. To come closer to an answer, George Hammond distinguishes between those ideas that describe inherent patterns in life and those cultural ideals that are basically a group consensus on how to live life. Our 21st century cultures are rapidly increasing in cultural communication, competition, discussion and dispute. Could that set the stage for sorting out long-standing but still competing cultural assumptions about justice, virtue, the meaning of life, and the purposes of community, nation and civilization building? If so, which assumptions are headed for the discard pile? And which will prove enduring? Hammond’s predictions about where trends in how we pursue happiness are headed will probably surprise you.

Monday Night Philosophy analyzes the biblical roots of philosophical inquiry. Accepting your divinely ordained lot in life, as Job did (but ironically Lot did not), is often lauded in the Bible. A few dared negotiate with Jehovah (Abraham, Lot and Moses), and quite a few even tried to outsmart omniscience. But Jeremiah makes it clear he has a problem with the whole prophetic game, even as he was fulfilling his role as the messenger of dire and accurate prophecies. One element of his argument with Jehovah involves his passionate complaints about the uselessness of delivering precise but unpatriotic predictions. Even more fundamentally, Jeremiah’s hope for a future where organized religion disappears, along with its crucial concepts of sin and punishment, expresses his emotional frustration with the ineffectiveness of Jehovah’s ancient plan for instilling virtue. A god and his prophet might disagree on tactics, but it is something else to disagree about goals. Come hear why that is exactly the kind of fundamental disagreement that can lead to philosophical insights.

Monday Night Philosophy recognizes that reasoning has always been part of human life, but Plato played an influential, and quite radical, role in increasing our respect for reason’s power to cut through mythological beliefs and inaccurate opinions. He developed, and openly shared, his passionate enthusiasm for reason with the students of his Academy and with us in his philosophical dialogues.

Plato carried his ideas out of the shadows of the cave of secrecy where Pythagoras thought they were best protected, and spread them out in the sunlight for everyone to see. Plato even records Socrates arguing that philosophical discussions should not be recorded in writing because they would then be distorted and misunderstood.

Plato’s mischievous and knowing disobedience was based on his acceptance that distortions and misunderstandings would abound, but also on his conviction that it was crucial to make clear conceptual reasoning more popular if we are ever to succeed at understanding the world we inhabit. And Plato made the right bet. The popularity of his radical respect for reason is still in its infancy of influence on human culture. Peer ahead to see what is still to come.

George Hammond, Author, Mark Twain’s Visit to Heaven Monday Night Philosophy finds the fun in Mark Twain’s almighty fight for free will. Taking issue with analysts who believe that Mark Twain became a pessimist in old age due to his many personal tragedies, and finding the cracks of freedom in Mark Twain’s own deterministic conclusions about the “damned human race” in “What is Man?”, George will focus on the consistent, and consistently humorous, though sometimes painful and angry, philosophical fight Mark Twain waged from his youth to his dying breath against the stultifying fears and clearly false ideas about life that keep our otherwise free wills chained to “petrified opinion,” preventing us from dreaming “other dreams, and better.”