Big Thinkers: A Look Back

Back in 1999, ZDTV launched Big Thinkers, a week­ly cable TV pro­gram that fea­tured half-hour inter­views with thinkers on the bleed­ing edge of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy. The show did­n’t have the longest run. But it did man­age to shine the spot­light on some impor­tant minds – Michio Kaku (the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist), Sher­ry Turkle (MIT psy­cho­an­a­lyst), Lawrence Lessig (law pro­fes­sor & free cul­ture advo­cate), and Esther Dyson (tech­nol­o­gy investor), to name a few. Big Thinkers was per­fect Open Cul­ture mate­r­i­al before the days of Open Cul­ture. So we’re pay­ing a lit­tle trib­ute to the show. Above, you will find an episode ded­i­cat­ed to Daniel Den­nett, the Amer­i­can philoso­pher and cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist who has done exten­sive research on the phi­los­o­phy of mind. Part 1 appears above, and Part 2 and Part 3 here. Final­ly, you can watch oth­er Big Thinkers episodes (includ­ing those men­tioned above) on this YouTube chan­nel.