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 guestJim Henderson. The mutual respect is refreshing. Henderson makes it his mission to seek out influential people who are “unusually interested in others,” and willing to “stay in the room with difference.” Glass’ relaxed and chatty demeanor translates to mission accomplished.
The non-believing child of secular Jews does his tribe proud by volunteering the opinion that Christians get a bum rap in the national media. The portrayal of Christians as “doctrinaire crazy hothead people” doesn’t square with fond recollections of former public radio colleagues who kept Bibles on their desks and invited him to screenings of Rapture movies (At WBEZ? Really?).
The civility of the discourse could renew your faith in mankind, whatever your beliefs.
Love him or hate him, many of our readers may know enough about Daniel C. Dennett to have formed some opinion of his work. While Dennett can be a soft-spoken, jovial presence, he doesn’t suffer fuzzy thinking or banal platitudes— what he calls “deepities”—lightly. Whether he’s explaining (or explaining away) consciousness, religion, or free will, Dennett’s materialist philosophy leaves little-to-no room for mystical speculation or sentimentalism. So it should come as no surprise that his latest book, Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, is a hard-headed how-to for cutting through common cognitive biases and logical fallacies.
In a recent Guardian article, Dennett excerpts seven tools for thinking from the new book. Having taught critical thinking and argumentation to undergraduates for years, I can say that his advice is pretty much standard fare of critical reasoning. But Dennett’s formulations are uniquely—and bluntly—his own. Below is a brief summary of his seven tools.
1. Use Your Mistakes
Dennett’s first tool recommends rigorous intellectual honesty, self-scrutiny, and trial and error. In typical fashion, he puts it this way: “when you make a mistake, you should learn to take a deep breath, grit your teeth and then examine your own recollections of the mistake as ruthlessly and as dispassionately as you can manage.” This tool is a close relative of the scientific method, in which every error offers an opportunity to learn, rather than a chance to mope and grumble.
2. Respect Your Opponent
Often known as reading in “good faith” or “being charitable,” this second point is as much a rhetorical as a logical tool, since the essence of persuasion involves getting people to actually listen to you. And they won’t if you’re overly nitpicky, pedantic, mean-spirited, hasty, or unfair. As Dennett puts it, “your targets will be a receptive audience for your criticism: you have already shown that you understand their positions as well as they do, and have demonstrated good judgment.”
3. The “Surely” Klaxon
A “Klaxon” is a loud, electric horn—such as a car horn—an urgent warning. In this point, Dennett asks us to treat the word “surely” as a rhetorical warning sign that an author of an argumentative essay has stated an “ill-examined ‘truism’” without offering sufficient reason or evidence, hoping the reader will quickly agree and move on. While this is not always the case, writes Dennett, such verbiage often signals a weak point in an argument, since these words would not be necessary if the author, and reader, really could be “sure.”
4. Answer Rhetorical Questions
Like the use of “surely,” a rhetorical question can be a substitute for thinking. While rhetorical questions depend on the sense that “the answer is so obvious that you’d be embarrassed to answer it,” Dennett recommends doing so anyway. He illustrates the point with a Peanuts cartoon: “Charlie Brown had just asked, rhetorically: ‘Who’s to say what is right and wrong here?’ and Lucy responded, in the next panel: ‘I will.’” Lucy’s answer “surely” caught Charlie Brown off-guard. And if he were engaged in genuine philosophical debate, it would force him to re-examine his assumptions.
5. Employ Occam’s Razor
The 14th-century English philosopher William of Occam lent his name to this principle, which previously went by the name of lex parsimonious, or the law of parsimony. Dennett summarizes it this way: “The idea is straightforward: don’t concoct a complicated, extravagant theory if you’ve got a simpler one (containing fewer ingredients, fewer entities) that handles the phenomenon just as well.”
6. Don’t Waste Your Time on Rubbish
Displaying characteristic gruffness in his summary, Dennett’s sixth point expounds “Sturgeon’s law,” which states that roughly “90% of everything is crap.” While he concedes this may be an exaggeration, the point is that there’s no point in wasting your time on arguments that simply aren’t any good, even, or especially, for the sake of ideological axe-grinding.
7. Beware of Deepities
Dennett saves for last one of his favorite boogeymen, the “deepity,” a term he takes from computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. A deepity is “a proposition that seems both important and true—and profound—but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous.” Here is where Dennett’s devotion to clarity at all costs tends to split his readers into two camps. Some think his drive for precision is an admirable analytic ethic; some think he manifests an unfair bias against the language of metaphysicians, mystics, theologians, continental and post-modern philosophers, and maybe even poets. Who am I to decide? (Don’t answer that).
You’ll have to make up your own mind about whether Dennett’s last rule applies in all cases, but his first six can’t be beat when it comes to critically vetting the myriad claims routinely vying for our attention and agreement.
The Philosophy section of our big Free Online Courses collection just went through another update, and it now features 100 courses. Enough to give you a soup-to-nuts introduction to a timeless discipline. You can start with one of several introductory courses.
Philosophy for Beginners – iTunes – Web Video – Marianne Talbot, Oxford
The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps - Multiple Formats– Peter Adamson, King’s College London
Then, once you’ve found your footing, you can head off in some amazing directions. As we mentioned many moons ago, you can access courses and lectures by modern day legends – Michel Foucault, Bertrand Russell, John Searle, Walter Kaufmann, Leo Strauss, Hubert Dreyfus and Michael Sandel. Then you can sit back and let them introduce you to the thinking of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Hobbes, Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre and the rest of the gang. The courses listed here are generally available via YouTube, iTunes, or the web.
John Rawls’ 1971 book A Theory of Justice—with its famous illustration of “the veil of ignorance”—is a rigorous attempt to make egalitarian principles normative in political philosophy. The work remains a high watermark for liberalism and a meaningful challenge to right-libertarians, meaning that it’s generally taken seriously by critics and admirers alike. Well, almost…. One cadre of admirers, the writers and producers of A Theory of Justice, the Musical (trailer above), decided to have a little fun with the very publicity-shy Rawls (who died in 2002), imagining him on a time-traveling adventure where he meets with Plato, Locke, Rousseau, Mill and others to draw inspiration for his magnum opus. Along the way, Rawls must dodge the “evil designs” of his libertarian antagonist Robert Nozick and “his objectivist lover, Ayn Rand” (Rand and Nozick were, to my knowledge, never so involved, but the idea is amusing).
The farcical production promises “a musical score that covers everything from rap battles to power ballads.” I would imagine that the appeal of Rawls, The Musical might be rather limited to a special subset of people who get the bookish references and love musical theater. But maybe that group is larger than I think. Since the January 30th premier in Oxford this year, A Theory of Justice, the Musical—praised by philosopher Nigel Warburton as “brilliant: hilarious witty and profound”—received several five star reviews and the initial theater run sold out a week before opening. But of course, that was Oxford, not New York. The show’s producers do plan to take the show on the road—to London, Scotland, and the U.S. (and they are actively fundraising; a complete viewing of an Oxford performance will cost you $9.99, and other groups wishing to perform the show must purchase a license).
The widespread appeal of Rawls is understandable given that he best articulates the idea of equality as an inherently ethical value in political life. His is a position that revises so much classical political theory and informs or infuriates so many current political combatants. While opponents of distributive justice will no doubt find reasons to disagree with Rawls on principle, careful critical thinkers will at least consider the arguments before making objections. But if you don’t have time to read all five-hundred plus pages of Rawls’ masterwork, you could certainly do worse than watch Harvard’s Michael Sandel explain Rawls’ theories in his lecture above (featuring some smart student critics of Rawls). The lecture is eighth in a course called “Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do,” which was released by edX as a MOOC this past March.
Below you can find the soundtrack for the London production.
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard—often considered the first existentialist—was born 200 years ago this past Sunday in Copenhagen. Writing under pseudonyms like Johannes Climacus and Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard attacked both the idealism of contemporary philosophers Hegel and Schelling and the bourgeois complacency of European Christendom. A highly skilled rhetorician, Kierkegaard preferred the indirect approach, deploying irony, ridicule, parody and satire in a paradoxical search for individual authenticity within a European culture he saw as beset by self-important puffery and unthinking mass movements.
While millions of readers have embraced Kierkegaard’s probing method, as many have also rejected his faith-based conclusions. Nevertheless, his strikingly eccentric skewering of the tepidly faithful and overly optimistic breathed light and heat into the nineteenth century debates among modern Christians as they confronted the findings of science and the challenges posed by world religions and materialist philosophers like Karl Marx.
Marx and Kierkegaard’s many contrasts and contradictions are well represented in Episode 4 of the BBC documentary series Sea of Faith, “Prometheus Unbound” (part one at top, part two immediately above). The 1984 six-part series—named in reference to Matthew Arnold’s famous poem “Dover Beach” and hosted by radical theologian Don Cupitt—examines the ways in which the Copernican and Darwinian scientific revolutions and the work of critics of religious doctrine like Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Strauss, and Schweitzer shook the foundations of orthodox Christianity. Here, Kierkegaard is played in reenactments with appropriate intensity by British actor Colin Jeavons.
You can learn more about the documentary series (and purchase DVDs) here. And for more on Kierkegaard, you would be well-served by listening to Walter Kaufmann’s lecture above. For a lighter-hearted but still rigorous take on the philosopher, be sure to catch the well-read, irreverent gents at the Partially Examined Life podcast in a discussion of Kierkegaard’s earnest and often disturbing defense of existential Christianity, The Sickness Unto Death.
Andy Stewart builds boats with his own hands for life-affirming reasons. It’s a way to make inanimate objects come alive, to breathe new life into our world. But Stewart also enjoys the challenge of it all. The sea, he tells us, is the “final arbitrator” of your work. Quite decisively, it tells you whether a boat has been crafted with precision, whether every piece of wood contributes to the larger hull/whole. If your boat can stand the rigorous tests of nature and time, you know you’ve mastered your craft. The short documentary above, Shaped on all Six Sides, was directed by Kat Gardiner.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whom readers of post-structuralist theory have to thank for popularizing the ubiquitous phrase “always already,” was a very labored writer who coined much of his own terminology and gave many a translator migraines. His prose betrays an obsession with the power of language that many of his students and successors, such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, inherited in the construction of their own elaborate theories. While Heidegger’s first book Being and Time (1927) had enormous influence on Existentialist and Phenomenological thought, he also wrote extensively on technology, theology, and art and poetics, engaging with the ideas of Edmund Husserl, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the romantic German poet Friedrich Hӧlderlin.
In the short film above, see the man himself in excerpts from a lecture and three different interviews. The footage comes from a 1975 documentary called Heidegger’s Speeches. Heidegger first discusses some theory of language, quoting Goethe, then, in an interview, talks about how he came to the central preoccupation of his philosophical career: the “question of being,” or Dasein. The third interview concerns Heidegger’s thoughts on Karl Marx. He quotes Marx’s radical dictum, “philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it,” and offers a critical perspective based in hermeneutics. In the fourth and final interview segment, Heidegger proffers some thoughts on religion and communism.
For a much fuller picture of Heidegger’s life and work, watch the BBC documentary above, from their Existentialist series “Human All Too Human” that begins with Nietzsche and ends with Sartre. And this page also has video of a number of philosophers discussing Heidegger’s work, which left such a lasting impression on the character of late modern and postmodern thought that it’s hard to find a contemporary philosopher who doesn’t owe some sort of debt to him.
It may be impossible to overstate Heidegger’s importance to twentieth century European philosophy in general, and upon several prominent Jewish thinkers in particular like his former student and lover Hannah Arendt and ethicist Emmanuel Levinas. But it also must be said that Heidegger’s legacy is tainted with controversy. While it’s typically good form to separate a thinker’s work from his or her personal lapses, Heidegger’s lapses of judgment, if that’s what they were, are not so easy to ignore. As the documentary above informs us, Heidegger was a Nazi. A reviewer of a recent biography colorfully sums up the case this way:
Let’s be clear about this: Martin Heidegger, a thinker many regard as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, was indeed a bona-fide, arm-aloft, palm-outstretched Nazi. Zealously renewing his party membership every year between 1933 and 1945, his commitment to the National Socialist cause was unstinting. Nowhere was this more in evidence than in his public role as rector of Freiburg University, where he praised ‘the inner truth and greatness’ of Nazism in his 1933 rectoral address, and later penned a paean to murdered Nazi thug Leo Schlageter. Heidegger was no token fascist; he was jack-booted and ready. Wearing a swastika on his lapel at all times he, alongside his proud, virulently anti-Semitic wife, also practised private discrimination against Jews, from fellow existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers to his one-time mentor Edmund Husserl. Not that he was without friends. In fact his friendship with Eugene Fischer, director of Berlin Institute for Racial Hygiene, lasted years.
Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies are hardly evident in his philosophical work, yet it is still difficult for many readers to reconcile these facts about his life. Some refer to a 1966 Der Spiegel interview in which the philosopher explained away his Nazism as exigent circumstances. Sort of what we call today a non-apology apology. Others, like onetime admirer Levinas, don’t find the task so easy. In a commentary on forgiveness, Levinas once wrote, “One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger.”
Who’s ready for a lesson on “Eggsalentlalism?” How about “Exatentalum?” Sound like fun? Great! Pull up a tiny chair, grab a toy, and get ready to have Nietzsche explained like you’re five with “Explain Like I’m Five: Existentialism and Friederich Nietzsche.” A web series inspired by a subreddit, “Explain Like I’m Five” has explained other complicated subjects to five year-olds, including the crisis in Syria and the volatility of the stock market. In this episode, our two presenters prime their students for a discussion on slave morality with the question “who here thinks they’re a good boy or a good girl?”
All the kids eagerly raise their hands, and after some Socratic dialogue are told that Existentialism means “there is no universal morality that governs all of us.” I’ll leave it to the philosophers out there to assess this definition. The kids don’t respond well. They hate Nietzsche. One vociferous young critic proposes tossing him on the street and stepping on him. Like good 19th century German burghers, they can’t imagine a world without rules. I imagine these kids’ parents would also like to toss Nietzsche in the street when their angels come home paraphrasing Beyond Good and Evil.
Some of the popular responses to Nietzsche among adults can also be overly emotional. First there is fear: of the supposed nihilist who proclaimed the death of God and who—thanks to the machinations of his unscrupulous and anti-Semitic sister—became erroneously associated with Nazi ideology after his death. Then there’s the enthusiastic embrace of Nietzsche’s work by unsophisticated readers who see him only as an antiestablishment romantic rebel, hellbent on undermining all authority. Some of these impressions are valid as far as they go, but they tend to stop with the style and leave out the substance.
What people tend to miss are Nietzsche’s sustained defense of a pragmatic naturalism and his tragic embrace of individual human freedom, which is not won without great personal cost. The unusual thing about Existentialism is that it’s a philosophy so broad, or so generous, it can include the anti-Christian Nietzsche, radically Christian Kierkegaard, and the Marxist Sartre. A more serious treatment of the subject—1999 three-part BBC documentary series “Human All Too Human”—also includes Martin Heidegger, who actually did truck with Nazi ideology. The series, which profiles Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, begins with the Nietzsche doc below (this one with Portuguese subtitles).
If you’re new to Nietzsche, and not actually a five-year-old, it’s worth an hour of your time. Then maybe head on over to our collection of venerable Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann’s lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Sartre. For additional serious resources, Dr. Gregory B. Sadler has an extensive YouTube lecture series on Nietzsche, Existentialism, and other philosophical topics. And if all you want is another good chuckle at Nietzsche’s expense, check out Ricky Gervais’ take on the woefully misunderstood philosopher.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
