The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ 2 Comments
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was an enormously influential French philosopher who wrote, among other things, historical analyses of psychiatry, medicine, the prison system, and the function of sexuality in social organizations. He spent some time during the last years of his life at UC Berkeley, delivering several lectures in English. And happily they were recorded for [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, e-books, Literature | ≅ 2 Comments
Neil Gaiman is one of the handful of writers who has made comics respectable over the past several decades. He has written some classic children’s stories, plus a novel that will be adapted by HBO. A great deal of his output, though, has been in the form of short stories, and we have pulled together some free [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy, Podcast Articles and Resources | ≅ Leave a Comment
How many of the great philosophers have you actually heard speak? This clip comes from the 1976 documentary Sartre by Himself, which features discussions with Jean-Paul Sartre and his near-equally famous wife Simone de Beauvoir, among others. The film was released with English subtitles in 1979, a year before Sartre died. In this clip, Sartre criticizes modern intellectuals [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ 1 Comment
In 1973, Orson Welles narrated this animated short, which features somewhat surreal artwork by Dick Oden. You can see more of Oden’s work here. The Allegory of the Cave illustrates Plato’s view of knowledge as presented in Book VII of The Republic: in ordinary experience, we see only shadows of the true world, which we [...]
≡ Category: Online Courses, Philosophy, Politics | ≅ 1 Comment
Stephen B. Smith, a political science professor at Yale University since 1984, has made available a 24-lecture course, Introduction to Political Philosophy, which covers Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. His approach is highly literary. In his Republic lectures, for instance, he spends a good chunk of the time discussing the metaphors and [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Philosophy, Religion | ≅ 3 Comments
Comedian Stephen Fry has the classic British intellectual voice, much like philosopher Bryan McGee. It turns out that he knows something about philosophy, and this clip is a shortened version of a longer video called “The Importance of Unbelief.” A more gentle version of George Carlin, Fry’s views appear heartfelt while partaking of serious irony. He [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ 4 Comments
Here we have philosopher Daniel Dennett applying Darwinian thought to human thinking, all of which gets him into the intriguing concept of “memes,” infectious ideas that can subvert our survival instincts and threaten whole cultures. It’s another good bit of thinking from TED Talks. Mark Linsenmayer is a writer and musician who hosts the podcast The Partially [...]
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