Monday Night Philosophy explores ideas in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Will to Power, and a variety of other Nietzschean insights into philosophy’s perennial problems, as Hammond steps in to replace a taken-ill-at-the-last-minute speaker.

It’s April again, and Americans are complaining about the weather (outside California) and about taxes. While the weather can’t yet be cured, our tax policies are self-inflicted wounds. As a minor solace, hear and discuss Hammond’s proposed one-paragraph law that replaces all current forms of taxation and redistribution and simultaneously incorporates into redistribution policy what Hammond contends is a means of knowing what is affordable policy without bankrupting current institutions and future generations.

“The reports of my death are exaggerated,” wrote Twain, and they have been for a century. Join us in a literary celebration of his writing on the 100th anniversary of his death. Bring along your favorite quotations, or paragraphs from stories or essays, and share them with other Twainiacs, or just sit back and enjoy the original observations and clever humor of this American icon and iconoclast.

Monday Night Philosophy returns to The Club with a new format. This lecture serves to preview what to expect from the new series. On the first Monday of each month, a different speaker will describe his or her fascination with a distinct philosophical issue, and then engage in a Socratic dialogue with Hammond to explore that issue’s strengths and weaknesses, followed by an open Q&A.

In this lecture George impersonates a 536-year-old Copernicus, who recently gained access to the internet and has caught up on 20th Century theoretical physics. Copernicus makes several predictions about which current theories will end up as epicycle dead-ends, and which will lead to a new Copernican Revolution. This lecture was given on October 3, 2009 at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco as part of the Humanities West program on Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler: Redefining Our Place in the Universe.

In this lecture, given on May 3, 2008 at Humanities West’s Athens in its Golden Age program at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, George describes the intellectual influence of Pythagoras on Periclean Athens, and then dramatizes Pythagoras’s return home to Samos, Greece in 550 B.C. after years of educational travel in Egypt and Babylon.

The legendary trial of Plato in 361 B.C. by the citizens of Syracuse, at the behest of Dionysius the Younger, Tyrant of Syracuse, is the setting for a verbal description of the world of Magna Graecia. This lecture given on February 25, 2006 at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, to an audience of 750 Humanities West seminar attendees, included an imagined version of Plato’s defense (both of the crimes he is accused of and of his ideas).

Very few dispute the idea that the pursuit of happiness is a fundamental source of all our decisions, but among idealists it remains suspect as a selfish motivation. This lecture will present the author’s ideas on what all varieties of the emotion happiness have in common and how to make its pursuit more effective.