Peter Losin

I retired in December 2023 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, where I had worked since 1989. For many years (1992-2013) my late friend and NEH colleague Michael L. Hall and I taught in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, College Park. We taught two courses together until he retired in 2009, and I continued for some years afterward:

• HONR 218C, Western Intellectual Heritage: The Hero and Society (1992-2013)
• HONR 269J, The Beat Begins: America in the 1950s (1997-2007)

Prior to coming to the DC area I taught philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, the College of Charleston, and Gonzaga University. Most of my teaching and writing has dealt with Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle. Some of it is available elsewhere on this website.

I'm also a discographer. Since early 1995 I have maintained a website called Miles Ahead, focused on the music of Miles Davis. If you're interested in Miles Davis, especially his pre-1980s music, take a look. You'll find a discography, a session list, a query form to search the database, cover art, what's new?, and a bibliography with links to other Miles Davis websites, among other things. There's also a separate Charlie Parker session list and a rudimentary discography. I maintain a few other jazz-related pages that some might be interested in.

My other interests you can probably infer from the links at the top of this page.

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lie for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world -- and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end -- is being destroyed...

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951