Last week, we added three philosophy courses by John Searle to our big list of Free Online Courses (now 300+ courses). This week, we’re bringing you five philosophy courses from America’s elite Catholic university, Notre Dame. You can access two courses in audio, and three in video via iTunes and the web. Here you go:
You can’t dabble in the world of philosophy very long without encountering John Searle. One of America’s most respected philosophers, Searle did important work on “speech act” theory during the 1960s, then later turned to consciousness and artificial intelligence, out of which came his famous “Chinese room” thought experiment. Searle has taught philosophy at UC-Berkeley since 1959, and, until recently, his courses were only available to matriculated students. But this fall semester, the good folks at Berkeley recorded three courses taught by Searle, and made them available online. We have added them to the Philosophy section of our big collection of Free Online Courses. Or, you can simply access the courses below, using your computer or your smart phone.
Philosophy of Language — iTunes — John Searle, UC Berkeley
Philosophy of Mind - iTunes — John Searle, UC Berkeley
Philosophy of Society — iTunes — John Searle, UC Berkeley
Note: All of these courses can also be accessed on YouTube (in audio format) using this big playlist.
We have free will. We make our own decisions. We have long taken these basic assumptions for granted. But what does neuroscience make of this? In this excerpt from the BBC Horizon special, “The Secret You,” Marcus Du Sautoy (Oxford University) participates in a brain imaging experiment conducted by John-Dylan Haynes, a neuroscientist based in Berlin. And the results? Well, they force us to rethink things a bit. Goodbye Descartes. Goodbye mind before matter. Goodbye to consciousness and free will, as we traditionally like to think about them. And welcome to the world of neurons, to brain activity that makes your decisions before your conscious self is even aware of them. To delve deeper into all of this, you can watch Haynes give a 90 minute lecture here called “Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain.”
It’s no secret. We love to highlight vintage video of cultural icons. This weekend, we showed you the last days of Leo Tolstoy to commemorate the centennial of the great writer’s death, and you expressed your appreciation. And it led us to think: why not dig through our archive, and revive some of the great treasures previously featured on Open Culture? And so here it goes: Below, you will find 45+ video & audio clips that record the words and actions of major figures from a bygone era. Artists, architects, filmmakers, actors, poets, novelists, composers, musicians, world-changing leaders, and those not easily categorized – they’re all here. So close, you can almost touch them. Enjoy the list, and if we’re missing some good clips, don’t hesitate to send them our way…
Ayn Rand — she’s often considered the intellectual darling of America’s political right. Rand’s free market thinking rubbed off on Alan Greenspan in a big way. At the Cato Institute, Stephen Moore writes, “Being conversant in Ayn Rand’s classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok [Atlas Shrugged] was practically a job requirement.” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledges a deep debt to The Fountainhead, Rand’s celebration of the individual, and makes his law clerks watch the 1949 film adaptation of the novel. Rand Paul, the new Tea Party senator, calls himself a fan of both books. And Ayn Rand book sales surged once Obama came into office. You get the picture.
Given this love affair, it’s a little incongruous to rediscover old footage (circa 1979) that features Rand coming out “against God,” calling faith an abdication of individual responsibility (so important to her philosophy), an insult to the human intellect, and a sign of psychological weakness. If she were alive today, Rand would easily give the “new atheists” (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, etc.) a very good run for their money. It’s not exactly the stuff that traditionally makes you a conservative saint, but stranger things have happened. Maybe.
A year-and-a-half ago, an old friend found me on Facebook and offered me a writing job and participation in a podcast. I took him up on both.
Mark Linsenmayer and I had been graduate students in philosophy at the University of Texas in Austin, but we both left before getting the PhD to try our hands at something more practical. Mark suggested we make that experience the theme of an ongoing philosophical discussion: we loved philosophy but preferred it as an avocation. There was something about the professionalization of philosophy that seemed to go against the spirit of it. We preferred the “partially examined life” to the examined life.
And so we decided to create a philosophy podcast with discussions that were informed but not overly academic, less like a classroom lecture and more like a conversation over drinks after class, and unified by the question of what makes philosophy worthwhile. We found another likeminded former colleague from the University of Texas, Seth Paskin, and began recording and publishing our discussions as The Partially Examined Life. (Find the podcast on iTunes here.)
May 12 was the one year anniversary of our first episode. During that time we’ve covered topics ranging from Plato’s conception of the examined life to Nietzsche’s immoralism, God and faith, to the philosophy of mind. Frankly I’m always amazed that there are people who want to listen to three guys talk about these things, but we seem to have a chemistry that works. One review—for better or for worse—pegs Mark as “the Jack Black-like musician,” Seth as the “sad one with calm voice who usually guides the rudder of the conversation back into the topic,” and me as “avuncular and wry.” We’ve also received a lot of great reviews on iTunes, and a thrilling compliment from philosopher Arthur C. Danto, who was gracious enough to listen to our discussion of two of his essays in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. We’ve been gratified to see our listenership rise, but most importantly we’re happy that the podcast has kept us connected to philosophy and allowed us to pursue it—partially—in a way that seems more compatible with the spirit of the discipline.
This post comes to us via Wes Alwan, an occasional contributor to Open Culture.
Slavoj Zizek, one of today’s most influential philosophers/theorists, spoke earlier this year at the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA). And now RSA has posted the video online with their patented animated treatment. Like other recent RSA speakers, Zizek makes modern capitalism his focus. This time, we see how contemporary capitalism has essentially reworked Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic, or that strange relationship between money making and personal redemption. Zizek’s critique isn’t utterly damning. (No one will run to the barricades.) Nor do I think he intends it to be. But the observations hold a certain amount of interest, especially when placed alongside Barbara Ehrenreich and David Harvey’s related RSA talks.
We have mentioned him here many times before. Michael Sandel teaches philosophy at Harvard, including the ever-popular course, “Justice,” taken by some 14,000 students during the past two decades. (The legendary course is now freely available online.) Speaking at the Aspen Institute not too long ago, Sandel gave a very abbreviated version of the course. Call it “Justice in Under an Hour.” (My title, not his.) And, by the time he wrapped things up, he got down to a timely question in America. Is it just for the state to withhold the institution of marriage from same sex couples? What would Aristotle (who laid the foundation for western thinking about justice) have to say about this question? And how do Sandel’s Harvard students grapple with it? The full presentation is available above; the particular section on gay marriage is here.
Looking for free philosophy courses? Have a look through the Philosophy section of our big collection of Free Online Courses.
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