Free Course: “Darwin and Design” Examines Philosophical Questions of Intelligence and Human Behavior

in Education, Philosophy, Science | March 12th, 2014

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection provided a scientific answer to a philosophical question: must design imply a designer? To the dismay and disbelief of many of Darwin’s contemporaries, and a great many still, his theory can answer the question in the negative. But there are many more questions yet to ask about seemingly designed systems, such as those posed by Alan Turing and John Searle: might such organized systems, natural and manmade, themselves be intelligent? The history of these inquiries among philosophers, scientists, and writers is the subject of Prof. James Paradis’ MIT course, “Darwin and Design.” The class explores such a diverse range of texts as Aristotle’s Physics, the Bible, Adam’s Smith’s Wealth of Nations, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and of course, Darwin’s Origin of Species.

Alongside the scientific conclusions so-called “Darwinism” draws are the implications for human self-understanding. Given the thousands of years in which humanity placed itself at the center of the universe, and the few hundred in which it at least held fast to concepts of its special creation, what, asks Prof. Paradis, does Darwinism mean “for ideas of nature and of mankind’s place therein?” The class explores this question through “manifestations of such undesigned worlds in literary texts” both classical and contemporary. See the full course description below:

Humans are social animals; social demands, both cooperative and competitive, structure our development, our brain and our mind. This course covers social development, social behaviour, social cognition and social neuroscience, in both human and non-human social animals. Topics include altruism, empathy, communication, theory of mind, aggression, power, groups, mating, and morality. Methods include evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology and anthropology.

Prof. Paradis taught the class in the Fall of 2010, but thanks to MIT’s Open Courseware, all of the lectures (above), assignments, and course materials are freely available, though you’ll have to purchase most of the texts (you can find some in our list of 500 free ebooks). You can’t register or receive credit for the course—so you can skip writing the papers and meeting deadlines of around 100 pages of reading per week—but if you work through some or all of the lectures and assigned readings, Prof. Paradis promises an enlightening “historical foundation for understanding a rich literary tradition, as well as many assumptions held by people in many contemporary cultures.” Given that this is an MIT course, Prof. Paradis assumes some familiarity on the part of his students with the basic Darwinian concepts and controversies. For a broad overview of Darwin’s importance to a wide variety of fields, take a look at Stanford’s online lecture series “Darwin’s Legacy.”

“Darwin and Design” is but one of over 800 free online courses we’ve compiled, including many on evolution, anthropology, philosophy, and cognitive science.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Monty Python Sings “The Philosopher’s Song,” Revealing the Drinking Habits of Great European Thinkers

in Comedy, Philosophy | March 11th, 2014

Did you know, student of dead white philosophers, that Heidegger was a “boozy beggar”? Wittgenstein a “beery swine” and Descartes a “drunken fart”? What about Plato, who, “they say, could stick it away; Half a crate of whiskey every day”? Neither did I until I saw members of Monty Python sing “The Philosopher’s Song,” above, from their 1982 live show at the Hollywood Bowl. Eric Idle, in what looks like an Australian bush hat strung with teabags, introduces the number, saying it’s “a nice intellectual song for those two or three of you in the audience who understand these things.” Then Idle, joined by Michael Palin and frequent Python collaborator Neil Innes, launches into a paean to drinking that colorfully calls the great philosophers crazed dipsomaniacs. Well, all but John Stuart Mill, who got “particularly ill” from “half a pint of shandy.”

It’s all nonsense, right? Maybe so, but the Pythons were no strangers to philosophy. Having assembled from the august bodies of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, they perpetually revisited academic themes, if only to mock them. And yet some philosophers take the work of Monty Python very seriously. In his Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge, Nudge, Think Think!, Philosophy Professor Gary Hardcastle refers to an essay called “Tractatus Comedio-Philosophicus,” which “wants us to know that the only difference between Monty Python and academic philosophy is that philosophy isn’t funny.” So there you have it. Skip the years of penury and overwork and go directly to Youtube for your higher education in the classics from the Pythons. Then listen to Professor Hardcastle—in Open Court’s “Popular Culture and Philosophy” podcast above—expound at length on the philosophic virtues of Cleese, Idle, Palin, Gilliam, and Jones. And finally, a bonus: below watch Christopher Hitchens sing “The Philosopher’s Song” from memory in a 2009 interview.

The song grew out of an earlier Python setup known as “The Bruce Sketch” (below). The sketch is pretty dated—some moments certainly come off as more offensive than perhaps deemed at the time. (Our English readers will have to let us know if “pommy bastard” smarts.) Four Australian philosophy professors at the fictitious University of Woolamaloo, all of them named Bruce, welcome a new member, Michael Baldwin (whom they insist on calling “Bruce”). The Bruces seem a nice bunch of chaps until they start in on their rules, revealing a contemptuous obsession with keeping out the “poofters.” It’s perfectly in keeping with this assembly of amiable right-wing nationalists: The Bruces inform their English colleague that he may teach “the great socialist thinkers, provided he makes it clear that they were wrong,” and then they get a visit from a shuffling caricature of an Aboriginal servant (whom one mustn’t mistreat, state the rules, “if there’s anyone watching”). In addition to bigotry, Australia, politics and prayer, the Bruces, their new member learns, seem mostly concerned with drinking rather than philosophy. In my personal experience of some academic quarters, this is at least one part of the sketch that hasn’t aged at all.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Oxford’s Free Course A Romp Through Ethics for Complete Beginners Will Teach You Right from Wrong

in Online Courses, Philosophy | March 4th, 2014

Oxford University professor Marianne Talbot has a number of excellent philosophy podcasts online, some of which we’ve previously featured on the site. Today, we bring you Talbot’s A Romp Through Ethics for Complete Beginners (Web — iTunesU — YouTube), which addresses one of philosophy’s central questions: what is the right way to conduct yourself in life?

The problem may, at first, seem somewhat trivial. “Live whichever way you want, as long as you’re going to be a good person,” you might say, shrugging off the question. But it’s really a great deal more complicated than that. What does being a “good” person entail? Should we emulate the actions of someone widely considered virtuous?

Does being good mean living by absolute rules? Say, never murder another human being? Or should we tailor our actions according to each situation, with the aim of achieving the greatest quantity of good as our only hard-and-fast rule? If the possibilities are making your head spin, you’re not alone: philosophers have done their best to figure out precisely what constitutes moral rights and wrongs since the days of Socrates.

Luckily, Talbot is ready to guide us through the complexities. True to its title, A Romp Through Ethics for Complete Beginners walks students through seven comprehensive lectures (watch them all above) on moral thought, providing a neatly-packaged survey of the field. Talbot begins by discussing some preconditions to moral reasoning, and then sets out Aristotle’s conception of righteous living, which consists of acting in a virtuous manner (if you smell something fishy about that statement, you’re on the right track). Talbot then proceeds to guide the class through some of philosophy’s most significant ethical paradigms, explaining Immanuel Kant’s idea of the inviolable categorical imperative and the moral calculus behind John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian thought.

A Romp Through Ethics for Complete Beginners is currently available on the University of Oxford website in both audio and video formats, and also on iTunesU and YouTube. You can find it listed in our collection of Free Online Philosophy Courses, alongside classes like Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Aristotle: Ethics, and Bioethics: An Introduction, all part of our collection 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writing at the Huffington Post.

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Oxford’s Free Course Critical Reasoning For Beginners Will Teach You to Think Like a Philosopher

in Online Courses, Philosophy | February 27th, 2014

When I was younger, I often found myself disagreeing with something I’d read or heard, but couldn’t explain exactly why. Despite being unable to pinpoint the precise reasons, I had a strong sense that the rules of logic were being violated. After I was exposed to critical thinking in high school and university, I learned to recognize problematic arguments, whether they be a straw man, an appeal to authority, or an ad hominem attack. Faulty arguments are all-pervasive, and the mental biases that underlie them pop up in media coverage, college classes, and armchair theorizing. Want to learn how to avoid them? Look no further than Critical Reasoning For Beginners, the top rated iTunesU collection of lectures led by Oxford University’s Marianne Talbot.

Talbot builds the course from the ground up, and begins by explaining that arguments consist of a set of premises that, logically linked together, lead to a conclusion. She proceeds to outline the way to lay out an argument logically and clearly, and eventually, the basic steps involved in assessing its strengths and weaknesses. The six-part series, which was recorded in 2009, shows no sign of wear, and Talbot, unlike some philosophy professors, does a terrific job of making the content digestible. If you’ve got some time on your hands, the lectures, which average just over an hour in length, can be finished in less than a week. That’s peanuts, if you consider that all our knowledge is built on the foundations that this course establishes. If you haven’t had the chance to be exposed to a class on critical thought, I can’t recommend Critical Reasoning For Beginners with enough enthusiasm: there are few mental skills that are as underappreciated, and as central to our daily lives, as critical thinking.

Critical Reasoning For Beginners is currently available on the University of Oxford website in both audio and video formats, and also on iTunesU and YouTube. You can find it listed in our collection of Free Online Philosophy Courses, part of our collection of 1100 Free Online Courses.

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writing at the Huffington Post.

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Enter the Hannah Arendt Archives & Discover Rare Audio Lectures, Manuscripts, Marginalia, Letters, Postcards & More

in Archives, Philosophy | February 27th, 2014

The work of Hannah Arendt has been in the press recently for two reasons in particular: first, the 50^th anniversary of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in 1963 from reports she filed for The New Yorker on the 1961 trial of the archetypal Nazi bureaucrat. Then there is Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 biopic Hannah Arendt, starring German actress Barbara Sukowa as the German Jewish philosopher. Recent coverage of the book and the film have focused on Arendt’s reputation as a philosophical journalist most closely identified with the famous descriptive phrase “the banality of evil,” a comment on Adolf Eichmann as an exemplar of genocidal murderers who, as the well-worn defense goes, were “just following orders.”

Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz argues that this reading of Arendt’s book is a profound misreading. Eichmann in Jerusalem was divisive, setting critics against each other in efforts to vindicate or castigate its author. The controversy, however, at the time of publication and again in the recent re-evaluation, has the unfortunate effect of obscuring the breadth of Arendt’s philosophical thinking apart from Eichmann and Nazism. Those interested in connecting with Arendt’s life, scholarship, and philosophical insight can find a wealth of archival materials online from the collections of Bard College and the Library of Congress. Today, we highlight several items in those collections that may be of interest, including the Library of Congress’s scanned copy of the final typescript of Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Part 1:

Part 2 (Q&A):

First, directly above, hear Arendt’s speech “Power & Violence.” The lecture re-iterates ideas Arendt expressed more fully in a lengthy 1969 essay published by the New York Review of Books as “Reflections on Violence” and as a book titled On Violence. In the lecture and the essay, Arendt references the work of thinkers like Friedrich Engels and, especially, Frantz Fanon in a critical discussion of the roles racism and ideology play in state violence.

That same year Arendt delivered a series of lectures for a Spring semester course at The New School for Social Research called “Philosophy and Politics: What is Political Philosophy.” This fascinating investigation grapples not only with political philosophy, but philosophy in general as a meaningful activity. You can view the full typescripts of her course lectures here.

The Library of Congress has also digitized much of Arendt’s correspondence and uploaded images of her letters, including some to and from such well-known figures as W.H. Auden, Lionel Trilling, and Alfred Kazin (most of Arendt’s letters are only available for viewing onsite at the Library of Congress, The New School University, or the University of Oldenburg).

Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Collection showcases many of Arendt’s personal books. We can see digitized images of her copies of—among many others—Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Leo Strauss, her friend poet Robert Lowell, Carl Schmitt, and, of course, her onetime mentor and lover, Martin Heidegger. Each of the uploads shows the pages in which Arendt underlined or marked key passages and left marginal notes.

In addition to the “Arendt Marginalia” section, Bard hosts a gallery that includes “inscribed books, journals & manuscripts,” “artwork & photographs,” and “postcards and other correspondence” (such as the above postcard from Walter Benjamin, addressed to “Hannah Stern,” her married name at the time).

Lastly, for an excellent overview of Arendt’s life and work that puts all of the above materials in context, see the Library of Congress’s “Biographical Note” and be sure to read “Three Essays: The Role of Experience in Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought” by Jerome Kohn, director of the New School’s Hannah Arendt Center. As many know, Arendt, and many other German Jewish intellectuals who fled the Nazis, found a home at New York’s New School for Social Research (now New School University). And we have the New School (and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant) to thank for the Library of Congress’s vast, digitized collection of Arendt’s papers, which preserves her legacy for generations to come.

Hannah Arendt’s Original Articles on “the Banality of Evil” in the New Yorker Archive

The Trial of Adolf Eichmann at 50

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Two Animations of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: One Narrated by Orson Welles, Another Made with Clay

in Philosophy | February 7th, 2014

The ever-flickering lights, the ever-present screen, the stupefied spectators immune to a larger reality and in need of sudden enlightenment—Plato’s allegory of the cave from Book VII of The Republic is a marketing department’s dream: it sums up an entire brand in a stock-simple parable that almost anyone can follow, one that lends itself to compellingly brief visual interpretations like those above and below. In the top video, Orson Welles narrates while the camera pans over some colorfully stylized illustrations of the fable by artist Dick Oden. This preserves the didactic tone of the text, but it is a little dry. In contrast, the award-winning three-dimensional renderings of the prisoners and their nonstop nickelodeon in the Claymation Cave Allegory below offers dramatic close-ups of the chained prisoner’s faces and the hypnotic movement of firelight over the cave’s rock walls.

Plato’s “brand” is a doctrine of idealism that posits a realm of ideal forms, of which everything we know by our senses is but an inferior copy. The ironically poetic Socrates relates the story to illustrate “the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature.”

And yet it does much more than this—Plato illustrates an epistemology that supports notions of the soul and immortality, and hence his ideas survived in theology long after they was supposedly vanquished by analytic philosophy.

Plato’s idea of reason as a perfect, unchanging realm of which we’re only dimly aware is intuitively compelling. Most of us are at some time conscious of how limited our perceptions truly are. But just because the allegory of the cave is fairly easy to communicate to philosophy 101 students doesn’t mean it’s easy to adapt to the screen like the two examples above. Mark Linsenmayer of The Partially Examined Life points us toward these 20 YouTube takes on Plato’s cave, “many of them,” he writes, “frightfully amateurish and some of them presenting a warped and/or incomprehensible version of the story.” I am particularly intrigued by the silent film version below. As always, your comments on the soundness of these various interpretations are most welcome.

Courses on Plato can be found on our list of 100 Free Philosophy Courses, a subset of our larger Free Online Course collection.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Student Asks Noam Chomsky for Dating Advice

in Life, Philosophy | January 30th, 2014

Noam Chomsky is a pretty unlikely celebrity. As a preeminent anarchist theorist, his political writing is full of passionate intensity, but in his numerous public appearances, he conforms much more to images associated with his day job as a preeminent academic and linguist. He’s very soft-spoken—I’ve never heard him raise his voice above the register of polite coffee-shop conversation—and frumpy in that elder scholar kind of way: uncombed gray hair, an endless supply of sweaters and corduroy jackets…

So, yes, it’s amusing when, in the short clip above, a young Chomsky fan asks the 85-year-old “father of modern linguistics” for advice on how to talk to women. Chomsky’s nonplussed response is honest and heartfelt. He has nothing to offer in this regard, he says: “I got out of that business 70 years ago.” If it seems like Chomsky’s math is a little off—he was married in 1949—consider that he and his wife Carol met when they were both just five years old.

Theirs was a quietly charming romance. Chomsky, who has always possessed an extraordinary ability to keep his personal, political, and professional lives separate, did not speak much of their marriage until after Carol’s death in 2008. In the excerpt above from a Big Think interview shortly after, Chomsky tells a story of group of peasants in Southern Columbia who planted a forest in his wife’s memory. He’s also asked to define love. This time, he has a much more interesting response than his reply to the would-be pick up artist above: “I just know it’s—has an unbreakable grip, but I can’t tell you what it is. It’s just life’s empty without it.”

via Critical Theory

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Nietzsche Dispenses Dating Advice in a Short Screwball Film, My Friend Friedrich

in Comedy, Film, Philosophy | January 27th, 2014

My Friend Friedrich opens on awkward, bespectacled Columbia student Nate having a heart to heart on the phone with his mother. Then, in a philosophy class, he almost succeeds in landing a date by lobbing an illustrated invitation at his love interest, Emma. All goes awry when a taller, more confident, bespectacled Columbia student cuts him off at the knees. So far, so very New York student film, but a conceit arrives to distinguish this story of Ivy League dating woes: the ghost of Friedrich Nietzsche appears before Nate to guide him towards self-actualization.

In what “seems to have been a senior project at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts,” according to Critical Theory (a Vimeo upload dates the film as “circa 2003), My Friend Friedrich gives us the typical undergraduate experience of the philosopher’s voice. Nietzsche instructs our young friend to regard the flashing lights, tall buildings, and “horseless carriages” of Times Square as meaningless. “Nihilism cares about nothing” he says and urges his pupil to will himself to power. It’s not too profound a portrayal of Nietzsche—though of course it’s only played for laughs—and seems to come mainly from a surface reading of his Will to Power, an unfinished manuscript published after the philosopher’s death. (His sister fraudulently pitched a mangled edition to the Nazis as Nietzsche’s underwriting of their ideology, cutting out all of her brother’s strong remarks against anti-Semitism.)

One could argue, if it’s worth explaining the humor, that this superficial take on Nietzsche is precisely the point, since it’s the diffident Nate’s slight reading of Will to Power at the outset that produces his hallucination-slash-visitation. Nietzsche helps Nate win an intellectual pissing contest by quoting Beyond Good and Evil chapter and verse, then goads him into some awkward outbursts and eventually overstays his welcome. The screwball conclusion is ripped right out of Wes Anderson.

It’s all in good fun, but if you find yourself eager for some more substantial Nietzsche resources, we’ve got them aplenty. You might begin with eminent Nietzsche scholar and Will to Power translator Walter Kaufmann’s lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre. In our list of free philosophy courses you’ll find Nietzsche courses by Leo Strauss, Rick Roderick, and others. Alain de Botton offers an introduction on Nietzsche as part of his Guide to Happiness, and BBC program Human, All Too Human presents Nietzsche’s life in a documentary series that also includes Sartre and Heidegger. Many works by Nietzsche can also be found in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collection.

And if it’s more Nietzsche humor you’re after, see this failed attempt to explain the philosopher to a group of 5‑year-olds.

via Critical Theory

Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche: Three Philosophers in Three Hours

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Free Course: “Darwin and Design” Examines Philosophical Questions of Intelligence and Human Behavior

Monty Python Sings “The Philosopher’s Song,” Revealing the Drinking Habits of Great European Thinkers

Oxford’s Free Course A Romp Through Ethics for Complete Beginners Will Teach You Right from Wrong

Oxford’s Free Course Critical Reasoning For Beginners Will Teach You to Think Like a Philosopher

Enter the Hannah Arendt Archives & Discover Rare Audio Lectures, Manuscripts, Marginalia, Letters, Postcards & More

Two Animations of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: One Narrated by Orson Welles, Another Made with Clay

Student Asks Noam Chomsky for Dating Advice

Nietzsche Dispenses Dating Advice in a Short Screwball Film, My Friend Friedrich

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