≡ Category: Life, Philosophy | ≅ Comments
News broke today that Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of France’s towering intellectuals, has died. He was 100 years old. The New York Times has a lengthy obit that covers the career of the anthropologist who brought us “structuralism” and helped us look at diverse cultures in new ways. NPR has also aired a short piece (in [...]
≡ Category: Harvard, Philosophy | ≅ Comments
Lecture 3 of Michael Sandel’s ever popular course on Justice is now online. Here’s the summary of material covered by the newly added lecture. It’s provided by Harvard’s course web site:
Part 1 — FREE TO CHOOSE: With humorous references to Bill Gates and Michael Jordan, Sandel introduces the libertarian notion that redistributive taxation—taxing the rich [...]
≡ Category: Education, Harvard, Philosophy | ≅ Comments
That’s the question that The Ethicist asks in The New York Times. Below, I present the issue and part of the answer. Read through it all and tell us where you stand on the issue.
The Issue
The fiscal year for major university endowments ended June 30, and schools have been reporting their results: not good. In [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ Comments
Harvard has rolled out Week 2 of Michael Sandel’s course on Justice. Courtesy of the course web site, here’s a synopsis of what you can expect from Episode 2. New lectures are getting rolled out weekly. Check the Harvard web site for new additions.
Part 1 — PUTTING A PRICE TAG ON LIFE: Sandel presents some [...]
≡ Category: Online Courses, Philosophy | ≅ Comments
We happened to mention Michael Sandel last week, and then I came across this…
Harvard University and WGBH Boston have posted online Sandel’s very popular course, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” How popular is it? Over 14,000 Harvard students have taken this course over the past 30 years. The course takes a close look [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ Comments
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Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel appeared on the Today Show this morning, and got four minutes to make the case for philosophy. If you’re not familiar with him, Sandel is a very popular Harvard professor. Some 15,000 students have taken his courses over 30 years, [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy, Random | ≅ Comments
What happens when Socrates tries to land a job at a university? It doesn’t go so well. Below, we have the comments returned by the interview committee, as imagined by THE (Times Higher Education). In this piece, you’ll also find Tolstoy, Kafka, Jane Austen and other geniuses coming up short with the search committees. Now to [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy, Science | ≅ Comments
Why did so many find Charles Darwin’s concept of natural selection so subversive and disconcerting straight from the beginning? American philosopher Daniel Dennett explains. To get to the meat of things, you might want to skip to 1:16.
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ 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 Examined [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ Comments
Philosophy doesn’t have to be daunting. Thanks to the Continuing Education program at Oxford University, you can ease into philosophical thinking by listening to five lectures collectively called Philosophy for Beginners. (Find them on iTunesU in audio and video). Taught by Marianne Talbot, Lecture 1 starts with a “Romp Through the History of Philosophy” and [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Philosophy, Politics | ≅ Comments
A quick heads up: The BBC is featuring a series of lectures with Michael Sandel (Harvard Professor of Government) that will collectively talk about “the prospects of a new politics of the common good.” Sandel is a very popular professor at Harvard. Some 15,000 students have taken his courses over 30 years. In the first lecture, [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy, Religion | ≅ Comments
When the Dalai Lama paid a visit to Emory University, he offered an introductory lecture to Tibetan Buddhism. The lecture is not exactly what you’d normally get in the university classroom. The talk is not entirely linear. And he spends some time speaking in English, then speaks in his native tongue (with the help of an interpreter). [...]
≡ Category: History, Literature, Philosophy, Stanford | ≅ Comments
A new season of Entitled Opinions (iTunes Feed Web Site) recently got off the ground, and it doesn’t take long to understand what this program is all about. Robert Harrison, the Stanford literature professor who hosts the show, opens the new season with these very words:
Our studios are located below ground, and every time I go down [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Philosophy, Television | ≅ Comments
I’m no fan of Ayn Rand, but I found this footage intriguing. Back before 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace had his own TV interview show, The Mike Wallace Interview, which aired from 1957 to 1960. And what you get is Mike Wallace asking probing questions to celebrities of the day (and peddling cigarettes). An archive of [...]
≡ Category: History, Life, Literature, Philosophy | ≅ Comments
Writing in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier offers a response to the Feb 25 piece in the NYTimes: In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth. His argument is worth a read, and here is one lengthy money quote:
The complaint against the humanities is that they are impractical. This is true. They will not change the [...]
≡ Category: Life, Philosophy | ≅ Comments
If you’re not familiar with him, Peter Singer is an Australian-born philosopher who teaches at Princeton and who wrote Animal Liberation in 1975, helping to launch the animal rights movement. A practitioner of applied ethics, he has also taken controversial positions on euthanasia. Nowadays, he’s working on less sensitive issues. His latest book is called [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ Comments
Allan Bloom, perhaps best remembered for his controversial bestseller The Closing of the American Mind, spent his career studying and lecturing on the great books, writing extensively on Plato, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Hegel and others. Perhaps not terribly surprisingly, some of his lectures have popped up on YouTube. (What doesn’t eventually pop up there?) The lectures [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Philosophy | ≅ Comments
Ayn Rand’s classic gets dusted off and humorously brought into 2008 over at McSweeney’s. Worth a read.
As a side note, you may want to revisit the New York Times 2007 piece, Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism, which talks about the influence that Atlas Shrugged (and its free market philosophy) has had on Fortune 500 CEOs and [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ Comments
Nietzsche’s final days weren’t ones that you’d wish on anyone. Some biographers speculate that he contracted syphilis, which eventually triggered his decline into madness in 1899. Two strokes followed, then pneumonia and it was all over in August, 1900. The footage below is apparently from 1899, and we’re now adding it to our YouTube Favorites, which currently [...]
≡ Category: Economics, Online Courses, Philosophy | ≅ Comments
David Harvey, an important social theorist and geographer, has got the right idea. Take what you know. Teach it in the classroom. Capture it on video. Then distribute it to the world. Keep it simple, but just do it.
In launching this new web site, Harvey is making available 26 hours of lectures, during which he [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ Comments
As I write, the most emailed article from today’s New York Times is this piece, which talks about the revival of philosophy on American college campuses. The reasons for this revival are varied — Some see philosophy offering “good training for looking at larger societal questions, like globalization and technology.” Others see it building skills [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Philosophy | ≅ Comments
On the eve of Super Tuesday, things are getting ugly. Immanuel Kant has gone negative on Friedrich Nietzsche (see below), and the Nietzsche campaign has wasted no time responding. These enlightened attacks ads have been added to our YouTube Playlist.
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≡ Category: Art, Philosophy, Science | ≅ Comments
Speaking of Einstein–have you ever wanted to explain the world on a napkin? The Edge, self-described as “an online collective of deep thinkers,” has teamed up with the Serpentine Gallery in London to participate in a month-long Experiment Marathon. The Serpentine has been asking leading scientists and thinkers “What Is Your Formula?” and the Edge [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ Comments
Back when we started out, we mentioned a radio show — and now podcast — coming out of Stanford that offers a “down-to-earth and no-nonsense approach” to philosophy that’s engaging, if not entertaining. It’s called Philosophy Talk, and you can catch some of the old programs on iTunes.
Now, about 6,000 miles and eight time [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ Comments
The prince of pragmatism and a lion of Stanford, Richard Rorty, died last week in Palo Alto at age 75. Rorty was most famously a philosophical pragmatist, believing that the philosopher’s role in life is to answer our pressing everyday questions, not to get lost in abstract theories. According to his obituary, in his later [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ Comments
For those who dug our recent piece on UC Berkeley’s 59 courses available on iTunes, here’s another little item for you. Susan Stuart, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, recently taught a course on the epistemology (or theory of knowledge) of the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. And figuring that it might help her [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy, Religion | ≅ Comments
It’s not quite “Car Talk,” but it’s not terribly far away. Philosophy Talk, a weekly public radio program presented by two Stanford philosophy professors, offers a “down-to-earth and no-nonsense approach” to philosophy that’s engaging, if not entertaining. The show, which can be streamed from the web site, tends to range widely. In recent weeks, they’ve [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ Comments
If you have some time on your hands, you can download and listen to a complete audio version of Plato’s Republic on your iPod. Divided into 12 installments, this monument of political theory is written in dialogue form. And it certainly helps that these dialogues are read by an actor. This nice touch helps hold [...]
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