Ronald Gerard Smith
I was born in California. I earned a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor ( studying mainly Kant, Hegel and Marx) and attended Philosophy Graduate School at the University of Southern California, stopping at the Master’s level because of frustration with analytic philosophy and the discovery of the creative work of Jean Paul Sartre. This marked the beginning of my drama writing career, realizing Philosophy was better served by this artistic form. About me, from College of San Mateo newspaper.
A few years later in 1982, I founded the Original Players drama production company in San Francisco. Around that time I began to teach Philosophy at the College of San Mateo, California focussing on, among others, Rorty, Arendt, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Martin Luther King, Lame Deer. I also began to read seriously Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Emerson. A number of my dramas were produced and critiqued in the San Francisco Bay Area, two of which were made into films (and broadcast on PBS). I then began to read Nietzsche very seriously, culminating in my drama adaptation of the first three parts of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, realized first on the stage and then made into a film.
I studied Philosophy briefly in New York City with Reiner Schurmann and Richard Bernstein at the New School for Social Research. My view of Philosophy in a “critical” paper can be found in the published piece “My Zarathustra and Beyond: Art as the Only Post-Modern Articulation”, in E. Kiss/U. Nussbaumer-Benz (eds.), 2000 . Nietzsche, Postmodernity and after, Cuxhven & Dartford: Traude Junghans Verlag. (where I explain, that after Nietzsche, Philosophy can only be Art).
Because of love, my work in Philosophy, and politics in America, I moved to France in 1998, where I currently live with my family.
My work continues to explore perspectivism through the camera (as is true of my earlier film, “The Holy Family” – for a succinct update of this view see Philosophy and Film: Note of Intention). “The Marshall Plan or Foodies in the Time of Big Data” satirically examines our current obsession with food, public judgement on everything, and the need for something absolute.
For me, with Philosophy as Art, dialectical intellectualisations don’t age as well as parables. I like things that last. Imagination is needed for morality.
Ronald Gerard Smith
I was born in California. I earned a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor ( studying mainly Kant, Hegel and Marx) and attended Philosophy Graduate School at the University of Southern California, stopping at the Master’s level because of frustration with analytic philosophy and the discovery of the creative work of Jean Paul Sartre. This marked the beginning of my drama writing career, realizing Philosophy was better served by this artistic form. About me, from College of San Mateo newspaper.
A few years later in 1982, I founded the Original Players drama production company in San Francisco. Around that time I began to teach Philosophy at the College of San Mateo, California focussing on, among others, Rorty, Arendt, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Martin Luther King, Lame Deer. I also began to read seriously Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Emerson. A number of my dramas were produced and critiqued in the San Francisco Bay Area, two of which were made into films (and broadcast on PBS). I then began to read Nietzsche very seriously, culminating in my drama adaptation of the first three parts of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, realized first on the stage and then made into a film.
I studied Philosophy briefly in New York City with Reiner Schurmann and Richard Bernstein at the New School for Social Research. My view of Philosophy in a “critical” paper can be found in the published piece “My Zarathustra and Beyond: Art as the Only Post-Modern Articulation”, in E. Kiss/U. Nussbaumer-Benz (eds.), 2000 . Nietzsche, Postmodernity and after, Cuxhven & Dartford: Traude Junghans Verlag. (where I explain, that after Nietzsche, Philosophy can only be Art).
Because of love, my work in Philosophy, and politics in America, I moved to France in 1998, where I currently live with my family.
My work continues to explore perspectivism through the camera (as is true of my earlier film, “The Holy Family” – for a succinct update of this view see Philosophy and Film: Note of Intention). “The Marshall Plan or Foodies in the Time of Big Data” satirically examines our current obsession with food, public judgement on everything, and the need for something absolute.
For me, with Philosophy as Art, dialectical intellectualisations don’t age as well as parables. I like things that last. Imagination is needed for morality.