Send donations via Zelle to: donate@philosophersforum.org

Send donations via Venmo to: Dallas Philosophers

Lectures start promptly at 7:30PM and are held on the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays of each month September 2026 through December 8, 2026.   Our meetings are held at the New New Chinese Buffet,  3822 Belt Line Road, Addison, TX 75001 (972) 243-1198,   Zoom access will NOT be available. 

9-8-2026   Moral Luck: You Are Not responsible for Anything

Speaker: Jack Sezer

Moral luck is the idea that there are things we are morally praised or blamed for that are outside of our control. For example, you might be morally condemned for how you interacted with someone from another culture without knowing what that culture deems offensive. Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel first explored moral luck, but it has now exploded into a debate that explores free will, moral responsibility, control, and societal and economic reform. In my presentation, I'll examine our internal capacity to self-reform and our ability to evaluate external contingencies. I plan to demonstrate that much of our lives is textured by luck and that luck is an infection that damages nearly all notions of moral responsibility and notions of free will. Of course, where there is disagreement, the Q&A will supply plenty of time to iron out such disagreements. 

To listen to the talk, click the link below and remember to copy and paste the passcode

https://ccsb.zoom.us/rec/share/Eu0MtnepYDlPjzHjqQ1qzxEKXb6ruvmHxSkTnMWRPJIBEHDaR9fnWoSvZXR1E-rM.Lk3O7SCJASP3mPcU

9-22-2026 Deconstructing Ideological Narratives: The Sources of Their Psychological Potency

Speaker: Michael Lundie

Why do certain ideological narratives attract devoted adherents while others remain marginal? One straightforward answer is that people embrace an ideology because they believe its account of reality is true and its moral prescriptions are justified. Yet this explanation does not fully account for the psychological potency of ideological belief, including its ability to spread widely, withstand refutation, and motivate actions that might otherwise appear extreme or morally repugnant. To address this explanatory gap, I will argue that the most potent ideologies appeal to our desire to experience our lives as significant, often by assigning adherents a consequential role within a transcendent moral struggle. This account may also elucidate why factual refutation is frequently insufficient to dislodge ideological commitment. By deconstructing ideological narratives into their ontological, moral, and psychological components, this talk will examine how these systems of belief harness the human need for significance and translate belief into action within mass movements. 

10-13-2026  The Philosopher Who Changed History: Meet Hegel

Speaker: Rob Olson

What if history isn't simply a series of events, but a process with a direction and a logic of its own? That was the extraordinary—and controversial—idea of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era.  In this talk, we will meet the real Hegel behind the intimidating reputation. We will explore his revolutionary view that human history is a dynamic process driven by conflict, contradiction, and the struggle for freedom. Along the way, we will unpack Hegel's famous—and often misunderstood—idea of the dialectic, and ask what he meant when he described history as the unfolding of human freedom and self-consciousness. Most remarkably, Hegel's philosophy did not remain in the philosophy department. His ideas profoundly influenced Karl Marx, socialism, communism, nationalism, existentialism, and even later thinkers who rejected Hegel. Marx famously turned Hegel "upside down," while philosophers from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche and beyond defined themselves partly in opposition to him.

10-27-2026 Veridical Perception in Near Death Experiences: When NDE Perceptions Seem Not Only Subjectively, but also Objectively Real

Speaker: Janice Holden, Ed.D.

Although most near-death experiences (NDEs) are private subjective experiences, some experiencers’ perceptions can be assessed for their objective accuracy. Under certain circumstances, accurate perceptions indicate apparently non-physical veridical perception (AVP) that point to mind or consciousness functioning lucidly and complexly in the absence of brain function normally considered necessary for such functioning. In this presentation, Dr. Holden will summarize the history and current status of the study of AVP and its implications for the relationship between mind and brain and for the question of the existence of consciousness prior to and following physical life.

11-10-2026  The Resurrection of the Body: Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī's Philosophical Solution and Its Place in a Global Conversation

Speaker:  Javad Fakhkhar Toosi, Ph.D.

Can the "self" that dies be the very same self that rises again? This question has occupied religious philosophers for over a millennium, but few solutions to it are as philosophically striking as the one offered by Mullā Ṣadrā (Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, d. 1640), the founder of the school known as "Transcendent Philosophy" )al-Ḥikmah al-Mutaʿāliyah(— one of the three major schools of Islamic philosophy, and the only one to emerge from within Twelver Shia intellectual tradition. This talk focuses on Sadra's theory of "substantial motion", which offers a radical account of how the soul itself generates its own resurrected body, rather than depending on God to physically reassemble scattered matter after death. We will examine why Ṣadrā rejected both the purely spiritual afterlife proposed by earlier Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna and the strict material literalism of Islamic theologians, arguing instead for an entirely different metaphysics of what makes a body — and a self — the same across time. Along the way, the talk will briefly note, without dwelling on it, that this same puzzle about bodily identity has troubled Western philosophers too, from Aquinas to contemporary analytic philosophy of religion — underscoring that Ṣadrā's solution belongs to a genuinely universal philosophical problem, even as it is developed here as a self-contained argument within Islamic philosophy.

11-24-2026  Empathic Reason: Imagination, Morality, and the Minds of Others

Speaker: Luke Roelofs, PhD

People often worry that without God or similar supernatural source of authority, moral beliefs will end up being subjective, ultimately no more than expressions of strong feeling or ingrained cultural habits. I argue that this doesn't follow: morality can be rationally grounded in the experience of empathy for others, once we recognise the essential role that empathy, and imagination more broadly, plays in rational thought. 

12-8-2026  Being and Time: One Hundred Years Later 

Speaker:  Katherine Davies, Ph.D.

In 1927, Martin Heidegger published his unfinished treatise Being and Time. In the hundred years since its appearance, this text has indelibly shaped the trajectory of continental philosophy and many other topical fields of study, both within philosophy and beyond. This presentation introduces the philosophical aspiration of Being and Time—to “raise anew the question of the meaning of being”—as well as the significance of the text’s unique terminology and philosophical grammar, including “ontological difference”, “Dasein”, and “Being-in-the-World”. Considering recent responses, this presentation will then examine contemporary philosopher Mariana Ortega’s Latina feminist phenomenological engagement with and critique of Heidegger’s approach.