To a viewer on the internet, TED Talks and TEDx talks may seem more or less the same. That makes sense, since the main difference between them isn’t of format, but physical location: TED talks take place at official TED conferences, and TEDx talks at TED-licensed but independently-organized events. The latter are more numerous, and also more geographically varied. Take the talk above from TEDxAthens, the ideal place for speaker Massimo Pigliucci to deliver his opening historical sketch, which he begins by asking his audience to “imagine, if you will, that you’re walking down the streets of Athens 24 centuries ago, give or take.”

In such a setting, “you might meet this guy: Zeno of Citium.” A once-prosperous merchant stranded by a shipwreck, he’d wound up in the Greek metropolis, where he spent his days hanging around bookstores. One day “he read Xenophon’s Memorabilia, which is a book about Socrates, and he was so intrigued that he turned to the bookseller and said, ‘Where I can find me one of these people, one of these philosopher folks?'” Luckily for Zeno, the streets of Athens were crawling with philosophers at the time, and it was under their tutelage that he developed his own philosophical acumen to a level that prepared him to found his own school: Stoicism, so named because its members met in the stoa, where the markets set up.

The early Stoics were concerned with everyday life, and how it can be lived “according to nature”: the world’s nature, but also our own. Then, as now, a great many people suffered unnecessarily out of confusion as to where the world ended and they began. They had, in other words, no clear sense of what was under their control and what wasn’t, a condition that the core teachings of Stoicism are designed to rectify. “The idea is that you can do things, you can make decisions about your health, your reputation, et cetera, et cetera, but ultimately, you don’t control the outcome,” Pigliucci explains. In practice, this means that “we should try to walk through life by internalizing our goals — not worry about the outcomes, because those are outside our control, but worry about our intentions and our efforts, because those are very much under our control.”

“Worry” may not be quite the appropriate term. It connotes, in any case, a self-defeating habit that would hardly be condoned by history’s best-known proponents of Stoicism, like the first century Roman statesman and man of letters Seneca, the second-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, and especially the Greek ex-slave Epictetus, whose life bridged those eras. Epictetus believed, as Pigliucci puts it, that “a great part of happiness lies in the serenity,” in “the idea that you always walk through life by knowing that you’ve done your best, and that nothing else could be done on top of that.” We can learn more about how, exactly, to do our best from the work these Stoics left behind, all of which is free online: Epictetus’ Enchiridion, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, the collection of Seneca’s writings previously featured here on Open Culture.

Of course, we could also read Pigliucci’s own book, How to Be A Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life, or even watch “Think Like a Stoic: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World,” his series from The Great Courses (which is also available through Audible free to its members). Pigliucci is but one of the host of practitioners willing to introduce us to the principles of Stoicism, even these 24 centuries — give or take — after its invention. But whether on the streets of ancient Athens or in the digital labyrinths of the 21st century, the best teachers of this particular philosophy are the vicissitudes of life itself. Whether we can meet them with virtue and equanimity is up to us — and indeed, to put it Stoically, the only thing that’s ever been up to us.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Note: Over the weekend, the Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt passed away at the age of 94. After a long career, he became the author of the surprise bestselling book, On Bullshit, which we featured in 2016. Please revisit our original post below.

We live in an age of truthiness. Comedian Stephen Colbert coined the word to describe the Bush administration’s tendency to fudge the facts in its favor.

Ten years after the American Dialect Society named it Word of the Year, former president Bush’s calendar is packed with such leisure activities as golf and painting portraits of world leaders, but “truthiness” remains on active duty.

It’s particularly germane in this election year, though politicians are far from its only practitioners.

Take global warming. NASA makes a pretty rock solid case for both its existence and our role in it:

97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.

In view of such numbers, it’s understandable that a suburban Joe with a freezer full of factory-farmed beef and multiple SUVs in his garage would cling to the position that global warming is a lie. It’s his last resort, really.

But such self-rationalizations are not truth. They are truthiness.

Or to use the old-fashioned word favored by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, above: bullshit!

Frankfurt–a philosopher at Princeton and the author of On Bullshit—allows that bullshit artists are often charming, or at their very least, colorful. They have to be. Achieving their ends involves engaging others long enough to persuade them that they know what they’re talking about, when in fact, that’s the opposite of the truth.

Speaking of opposites, Frankfurt maintains that bullshit is a different beast from an out-and-out lie. The liar makes a specific attempt to conceal the truth by swapping it out for a lie.

The bullshit artist’s approach is far more vague. It’s about creating a general impression.

There are times when I admit to welcoming this sort of manure. As a maker of low budget theater, your honest opinion of any show I have Little Red Hen’ed into existence is the last thing I want to hear upon emerging from the cramped dressing room, unless you truly loved it.

I’d also encourage you to choose your words carefully when dashing a child’s dreams.

But when it comes to matters of public policy, and the public good, yes, transparency is best.

It’s interesting to me that filmmakers James Nee and Christian Britten transformed a portion of their learned subject’s thoughts into voiceover narration for a lightning fast stock footage montage. It’s diverting and funny, featuring such ominous characters as Nosferatu, Bill Clinton, Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator, and Donald Trump, but isn’t it also the sort of misdirection sleight of hand at which true bullshitters excel?

Frankfurt expands upon his thoughts on bullshit in his aptly titled bestselling book, On Bullshit and its followup On Truth.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

Nobody who keeps up with current discourse could fail to notice that gender has become a fraught topic in recent years. This condition can hardly have gone unforeseen by the theorist Judith Butler, who published the now-well-known volume Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity back in 1990. “Everybody has a theory of gender,” Butler says in the new Big Think video above. “Everybody has certain assumptions going about what gender is or should be. And at a certain point in life, we ask ourselves, ‘Wow, where’d that assumption come from?'” Butler’s career has, in part, focused on the search for the roots of these very assumptions.

This experience places Butler well to comment on the heated arguments about gender being stoked even now in the political realm, on social media, and elsewhere besides. “We have a whole range of differences, biological in nature, so I don’t deny them, but I don’t think they determine who we are in some sort of final way.”

As with many controversies — not least philosophical ones — a core problem has to do with differing definitions of words and concepts. At issue here in particular is “the distinction between sex and gender,” achieving a full understanding of which, to Butler’s mind, requires delving into all the relevant history, including the work of theorists like Gayle Rubin, Juliet Mitchell, and Simone de Beauvoir.

According to Butler, the “basic point” of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is that “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one, that the body is not a fact.” This possibility opened by de Beauvoir — that of “a difference between the sex you’re assigned and the sex you become” — has been much explored since the book’s publication nearly three quarters of a century ago. Some of those explorations have involved the idea of the “performative.” “We do enact who we are,” Butler says. “There are performances that we do in our lives that are not mere performance; they’re not fake.” Following on that, “what if we were to say that, in acting our lives as a particular gender, we are actually realizing that gender anew?” For many readers of gender theory, this raises a host of thrilling new possibilities, but behind it lies perhaps the oldest philosophical question of all: what, now, will you do?

Related content:

Theorist Judith Butler Explains How Behavior Creates Gender: A Short Introduction to “Gender Performativity”

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

As children’s television has demonstrated since the beginning of the medium, sometimes the best way to make an unfamiliar concept understandable is to articulate it through the mouth — and the body — of a puppet. Most all of us alive today had some experience with that back when we were still getting our ABCs and 123s down. Yet even in adulthood, we continue to find ourselves confronted with ideas we may find difficult to grasp, especially in the domain of philosophy, with no explanation offering-puppets to be found — or at least there weren’t, not before the launch of Theoretical Puppets on Youtube.

Each month, Theoretical Puppets brings on a notable thinker or two, the current lineup of whom includes the likes of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, all of them reconstructed out of cloth and wire.

These puppets are recognizable as the individuals who inspired them, and also recognizable as homages to the puppet aesthetic popularized by a certain long-running program on American television — a form of broadcasting, incidentally, that Benjamin never knew. He did, however, have serious thoughts about radio, the mass media of his day, some of which he — or rather, his puppet — articulates in the video just above.

Other episodes of Theoretical Puppets include Foucault on discourse, Deleuze on Power, Arendt on natality (and smoking), and even the late Bruno Latour on actor-network theory. Among the channel’s most-viewed videos are meetings of the minds both historical and fictional: between Deleuze and Foucault, (a re-creation of a 1963 radio interview), between Foucault and Benjamin, between Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dalí (which includes a discussion of the latter’s depiction of the former’s head as a “snail-like structure”). To varying extents, these dialogues are rooted in the words these figures wrote and spoke in their lifetimes; like most puppet-based productions, they also take place in the realm of fantasy. There’s humor in the incongruity, to be sure, but then, it must have demanded no small amount of imagination to produce such enduring bodies of theory in the first place.

Related content:

When Salvador Dali Met Sigmund Freud, and Changed Freud’s Mind About Surrealism (1938)

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The Hand Puppets That Bauhaus Artist Paul Klee Made for His Young Son

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A Young Jim Henson Teaches You How to Make Puppets with Socks, Tennis Balls & Other Household Goods (1969)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.