On Carl Jung's "Approaching the Unconscious" from Man and His Symbols, written in 1961.

What's the structure of the mind? Jung followed Freud in positing an unconscious distinct from the conscious ego, but Jung's picture has the unconscious much more stuffed full of all sorts of stuff from who knows where, including instincts (the archetypes) that tend to give rise to behavior and dream imagery that we'd have to call religious. We neglect this part of ourselves at our psychological peril!

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On Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" (1949).

What's our place in the world? What is it, really, to be human? Heidegger thought that being human hinges on having a proper relationship to Being, which is more basic than particular beings like people and tables and such, yet it being so close, Heidegger thinks it's hardest to see, and easy to be distracted from.

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Eva Brann discusses her book The Logos of Heraclitus (2011).

On Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1967) and "The Objectivist Ethics" (1961).

First Rand grounds everyday human knowledge, largely by dismissing the concerns of other philosophers (even those whom she unknowingly parrots) as absurd. Then she uses this certainty to argue for her semi-Nietzschean vision of Great Men who master their emotions and rely only on themselves. 

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On George Santayana's The Sense of Beauty (1896).

What are we saying when we call something "beautiful?" Are we pointing out an objective quality that other people (anyone?) can ferret out, or just essentially saying "yay!" without any logic necessarily behind our exclamation? The poet and philosopher Santayana thought that while aesthetic appreciation is an immediate experience--we don't "infer" the beauty of something by recognizing some natural qualities that it has--we can nonetheless analyze the experience after the fact to uncover a number of grounds on which we might appreciate something.

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On Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's What Is Philosophy? (1991). How is philosophy different from science and art? What's the relationship between different philosophies? Is better pursued solo, or in a group? Deleuze described philosophy as the creation of new concepts, whereas science is about functions that map observed regularities and art is about creating percepts and affects. With guest Daniel Coffeen. Get the full discussion at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

On Jacques Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" (1956), Jacques Derrida's "The Purveyor of Truth" (1975), and other essays in the collection The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. How should philosophers approach literature? Lacan read Edgar Allen Poe's story about a sleuth who outthinks a devious Minister as an illustration of his model of the psyche, and why we persist in self-destructive patterns. Derrida thought this reading not only imposed a bunch of psychobabble onto the story, but demonstrated that Lacan just didn't know how to read a text. Get the full discussion at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

On Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject (1996) and Lacan's "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience" (1949). What is the self? Is that the same as the experiencing subject? Lacan says no: while the self (the ego) is an imaginative creation, cemented by language, the subject is something else, something split (at least initially) between consciousness and the unconscious. Lacan mixes this Freudian picture with semiotics--an emphasis on systems of linguistic symbols--using this to both create his picture of the psyche and explain how psychological disorders arise. Get the full discussion at partiallyexaminedlife.com.