Sam Harris — he wrote the bestsellers The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. He’s also one-fourth of the New Atheist quartet informally called The Four Horsemen (where you’ll also find Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.) And he has most recently argued that neuroscience can eventually answer all moral questions. Sam Harris is very much a public intellectual. He’s out there and in the mix. And he’s now answering questions from Reddit.com users. Give Harris 54 minutes and he’ll tell you how to promote public rationality, why meditation can change your life, and much, much more …
But, no matter, you have to separate the philosophy from the person … or so many acolytes of flawed thinkers have argued. Right fans of John Edwards? All three of you? So here you have it, The Selfish Path to Romance, a love manual based on Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. The video almost screams parody, but it’s apparently not. You can snag a copy of the book on Amazon here…
Time to roll out a new media collection — a big collection of Cultural Icons. Here you will find great writers, dazzling filmmakers and musicians, brilliant philosophers and scientists — figures who have changed our cultural landscape throughout the years. You’ll see them in video, or hear their voices in audio.
The list currently features 230 icons, all speaking in their own words. The collection will inevitably grow as we add more material, or as you send suggestions our way. For now, how about we whet your appetite with 10 favorites? Then you can rummage through the full collection of Cultural Icons here.
(Note: Down the road, you can access this collection by clicking “Cultural Icons” in the top navigation bar.)
Salvador Dali - Video – Surrealist artist appears on “What’s My Line?” (1952)
Johnny Depp - Video – The versatile actor reads a letter from Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
Anne Frank - Video – It is the only known footage of Anne Frank, author of the world’s most famous diary, and it’s now online.
Patti Smith — Video — The “godmother of punk” recalls her friendship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe.
Quentin Tarantino - Video – Pulp Fiction director lists his favorites films since 1992.
Leo Tolstoy – Video – Great footage of the last days of the towering Russian novelist. 1910.
Mark Twain – Video – America’s fabled writer captured on film by Thomas Edison in 1909.
Andy Warhol - Video – In 1979, Warhol created public access television programs. In this episode, he chats with Bianca Jagger & Steven Spielberg.
Tom Waits - Video – The raspy singer reads “The Laughing Heart” by Charles Bukowski.
Virginia Woolf — Audio — Recording comes from a 1937 BBC radio broadcast. The talk, entitled “Craftsmanship,” was part of a series called “Words Fail Me.” The only known recording of her voice.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has posted a nice set of portraits called “Gallery of Minds,” featuring images of 10 world-famous philosophers, including Richard Rorty, David Chalmers, and renowned philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto, who also wrote a compelling introduction. Danto focuses on the visual artistry of the series’ photographer Steve Pyke, a long-time staff member at the New Yorker, but we found the great thinkers’ own statements — their answers to the “why” of their chosen pursuits — equally, if not more, compelling. Here is MIT’s feminist metaphysician Sally Haslinger:
Given the amount of suffering and injustice in the world, I flip-flop between thinking that doing philosophy is a complete luxury and that it is an absolute necessity. The idea that it is something in between strikes me as a dodge.
And Robin Jeshion, best known for a theory of singular thought which she calls Cognitivism, has this to say:
Philosophy’s distinguishing value? For me, it resides not so much in the big questions’ multifarious answers, themselves, nor, alas, in wisdom attained through the exacting process of answering them, but rather in how it invariably reminds us how little we really do know. Philosophy is, or should be, humbling — and is, for this, ennobling.
To the best of my recollection, I became a philosopher because my parents wanted me to be a lawyer. It seems to me, in retrospect, that there was much to be said for their suggestion.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
In 1949, Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish emigré, landed at The University of Chicago, where he spent decades teaching and writing on political philosophy, especially the political thought of the Ancients. Strauss’ thinking skewed conservative, and if he was sometimes controversial while alive, he has become only more so in death (1973). Nowadays he’s considered rightly or wrongly the “intellectual godfather of the neo-conservative political movement,” if not an “intellectual force behind the Bush administration’s plan to invade Iraq.” Although Strauss commented occasionally on contemporary politics (Harper’s has more on that), he spent most of his time working through major philosophical texts, and through his commentaries, developing his own philosophical positions, which were generally hostile to the Enlightenment project and modern individualism/liberalism.
Strauss was unquestionably an influential figure even if he still divides us, and now, courtesy of U. Chicago, you can listen to 15 of his philosophy seminars online. They were recorded between 1959 and 1973, and some representative titles include Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (a course that Paul Wolfowitz took during the early 70s), Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Hobbes’ Leviathan, and Hegel’s The Philosophy of History.
More seminars will be coming online. For now, we have catalogued all 15 existing seminars in the Philosophy section of our big collection of 1100 Free Online Courses.
A few weeks ago we directed you to a wonderful three-part BBC documentary about modern philosophy called Human, All Too Human, adding that we considered the chapter on Jean-Paul Sartre the most satisfying of the three.
Now we give you a light-hearted chaser for that documentary’s strong spirits: The French philosopher’s teachings as interpreted by the science fiction overlord Darth Vader. Perhaps more than any other 20th century supervillain, the disgraced Jedi knight tragically and perfectly embodies the Sartrian notion that “Freedom is what you do with what has been done to you.”
For those who might consider the Joker a better candidate, we humbly submit that with the Joker, it’s more of a Nietzschean thing.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls David Hume (1711–1776) “the most important philosopher ever to write in English,” and this week the philosophy world celebrates the 300th birthday of the great Scottish empiricist/skeptic. Around the web, you can find more serious commentary on Hume’s philosophy. Just head over to The Philosopher’s Zone,Philosophy Bites, or The Partially Examined Life to listen to their enlightening podcasts. And then you have this: Hume’s philosophy summed up in three slightly ribald minutes. It’s part of a series of YouTube clips that offer idiosyncratic summaries of the philosophy of Aristotle, Kant, Descartes and other giants.
Meanwhile, let us note that you can download free versions of Hume’s major works online. Let us list a few for you:
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Audio — Text
Dialogues Concerning Natural ReligionAudio — Text
“Human, All Too Human” is a three-hour BBC series from 1999, about the lives and work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The filmmakers focus heavily on politics and historical context — the Heidegger hour, for example, focuses almost exclusively on his troubling relationship with Nazism.
The most engaging chapter is “Jean-Paul Sartre: The Road to Freedom,” in part because the filmmakers had so much archival footage and interview material (Check out a still lovely Simone de Bouvoir at minute 9:00, giggling that Sartre was the ugliest, dirtiest, most unshaven student at the Sorbonne).
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
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.
