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 Program (later 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 focused on 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 that includes links to some 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 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)

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies 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...

Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics" (The New Yorker, February 26, 1967, p. 78)

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie -- a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days -- but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

Hannah Arendt, Interview with Roger Errera (1973)

Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away -- when it is ripped from our hands -- we become vulnerable to the appetites of whatever monster screams the loudest...

Mon Mothma, speech to Imperial Senate after the Ghorman massacre and the Galactic Empire's framing of the events as an insurrection quelled by heroic Imperial intervention. (Andor, Season 2, episode 9, "Welcome to the Rebellion")

It's confusing, isn't it? So much going on, so much to say, and all of it happening so quickly. The pace of repression outstrips our ability to understand it; and that is the real trick of the Imperial thought machine. It's easier to hide behind forty atrocities than a single incident.

Karis Nemik (Andor, Season 1, episode 5, "The Axe Forgets")