Kaarina Beam
Joining Us 12/11/02025 to ask: What Does Public Philosophy Do?
Kaarina Beam works in the places where philosophy meets everyday life. Her grounding in social and political philosophy, applied ethics, and philosophy of education gives her a way of seeing how communities form, how people live alongside one another, and how our choices shape the shared world we move through. Her questions grow from lived experience: how values emerge, how they shift, and how people learn to understand perspectives different from their own.
Her comparative work adds depth and texture to that inquiry, especially her time spent studying and traveling to Bhutan. This region has become a meaningful touchstone for her. She is drawn to the ways Bhutanese culture ties truth, trust, and death together, treating them as interconnected rather than isolated concepts. The Bhutanese emphasis on contentment and reciprocal responsibility speaks to her in a way few traditions do. It offers a vision of communal life that is grounded, sustainable, and honest about the impermanence and interconnection that shapes human existence.
Kaarina in Bhutan
Kaarina’s teaching in China, Nepal, India, and Bhutan has led her to explore how different societies navigate responsibility, belonging, and ethical life. These encounters broaden her sense of what communities can become. They reveal how ideas shift when they travel across cultural landscapes, and how philosophical insight grows when people are willing to learn from the practices of others.
She is especially attentive to the moments when philosophy becomes woven into ordinary experience. She pays attention to how people grow into their own thinking, where they feel stretched, and what becomes possible when those tensions are explored with others. Her work turns toward the public: toward classrooms, conversations, and gatherings where ideas move between people and become part of communal life.
A Talk That Began in Astoria
These interests eventually led her to develop a talk that would take on a life of its own.
The earliest threads of “Is Truth Dead?” began forming while Kaarina was reflecting on the political circumstances of the day. Then, her comparative instincts began kicking in and her studies of Bhutan’s cultural philosophies began to crossmojinate in her thinking. She was reflecting on how Bhutan ties truth, trust, and mortality together, and how the daily practice of contemplating death strengthens honesty and a sense of reciprocal responsibility. These ideas didn’t yet form a finished position, but they opened a path toward larger questions about truth as something carried within a community rather than chosen individually.
As her reflections deepened, they began to connect with her ongoing work in social and political philosophy:
How do communities sustain trust?
What encourages people to hold responsibility as something shared?
What happens to public life when truth is treated as personal preference rather than a common commitment?
In January 2017, she brought these emerging ideas into a lecture for Philosofarian’s Wit & Wisdom series at Fort George. That first version explored how we could shed light on the challenges facing our own society, where toxic individualism often merges with the belief that competing realities can be selected like options. The Astoria lecture marked the first of several strands she would weave together.
About a year later, she expanded the material into a second lecture at Linfield, followed by a third academic presentation that widened the frame even further. Across each version, she explored what sustains truth in a community, and what might we learn from cultures that approach responsibility as a shared foundation rather than a private burden?
A video from Linfield University promoting Kaarina Beam’s second talk exploring the nature of truth.
The poster from her Wit & Wisdom talk with Philosofarian.
Kaarina teaching.
How Her Perspective Meets Seth’s
Kaarina and Seth have been thinking alongside one another for nearly twenty years. Their friendship began at Linfield, where they taught together, traded ideas, and discovered a shared commitment to helping people trust their own thinking. Both approach philosophy as something lived in real time — something that grows through dialogue, careful listening, and the willingness to follow a question wherever it leads.
Kaarina’s interest in communal responsibility, truth, and the forces that hold communities together resonates deeply with Seth’s work in comparative philosophy and his long study of how people learn through conversation. Seth often describes Kaarina as one of the most powerful teachers he has ever worked with; she brings a rare mix of clarity, depth, and care to the process of helping people understand their own ideas.
Their perspectives meet naturally. Both of them treat philosophy as a shared practice rather than a solitary pursuit. Both have spent decades watching people light up when they discover that their thinking has real substance. And both are drawn to the questions that shape how communities live together.
Their upcoming conversation is a continuation of a dialogue that has been unfolding between them for years — one that now opens to the wider community through Wit & Wisdom. On Thursday, December 11, 02025 at Fort George Brewery.
