Remember that 1996 documentary The Cruise, chronicle of New City Tour guide Timothy “Speed” Levitch, who compressed encyclopedias full of references into a manic spitfire style? Well, “performance philosopher” Jason Silva’s monologues are a bit like Levitch’s, with a lot less Woody Allen and a lot more of Richard Linklater’s animated

“Wireless Philosophy,” or Wiphi, is an online project of “open access philosophy” co-created by Yale and MIT that aims to make fundamental philosophical concepts accessible by “making videos that are freely available in a form that is entertaining” to people “with no background in the subject.

Bertrand Russell was one of the most important logicians and mathematical philosophers of the early 20th century. He was also a tireless campaigner for peace and social progress.

Critical theorist and musicologist Theodor Adorno was a contrarian, almost contradictory figure—a committed Marxist thinker who was also a cultural elitist. Anyone who’s sat through a theory class will know his name (most likely through his seminal text Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Max Horkheimer).

Yesterday we featured Alain de Botton’s television broadcast on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Today, we feature another, earlier television broadcast on a much more recently active philosopher: Mike Wallace’s 1959 interview of Ayn Rand, writer and founder of the school of thought known as Objectivism.

In a famous scene from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, the biographer and his subject come to discuss the bizarre theories of Bishop Berkeley, who posited that everything is immaterial—nothing has any real existence; it’s all just ideal concepts held together by the mind of God.

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities, profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, and the wretchedness of the vanquished.

So, an atheist and a devout Christian walk into a Tacoma hotel restaurant-bar…
Wait, though, it’s not what you think! The atheist in question is public radio star Ira Glass, amiably sitting for an interview with amateur spiritual anthropologist and former This American Life guest Jim Henderson. The mutual respect is refreshing.

Want to spice things up in the bedroom? Regard your partner as deeply as Edouard Manet looking at asparagus.
That’s just one of the hot tips the balding, besweatered philosopher Alain de Botton puts forth above.

In Simone de Beauvoir’s 1945 novel The Blood of Others, the narrator, Jean Blomart, reports on his childhood friend Marcel’s reaction to the word “revolution”:
It was senseless to try to change anything in the world or in life; things were bad enough even if one did not meddle with them.