Allan Bloom, per­haps best remem­bered for his con­tro­ver­sial best­seller The Clos­ing of the Amer­i­can Mind, spent his career study­ing and lec­tur­ing on the great books, writ­ing exten­sive­ly on Pla­to, Shake­speare, Rousseau, Hegel and oth­ers. Per­haps not ter­ri­bly sur­pris­ing­ly, some of his lec­tures have popped up on YouTube. (What does­n’t even­tu­al­ly pop up there?) The lec­tures are actu­al­ly audio record­ings with some pho­tos mixed in, and above we’ve post­ed the first in a series of lec­tures on Pla­to’s Apol­o­gy. The rest of the Pla­to lec­tures can be found here. The gen­er­al col­lec­tion is here. And remem­ber, you can get hun­dreds of free uni­ver­si­ty course here.

Via The Dai­ly Dish

Niet­zsche’s final days weren’t ones that you’d wish on any­one. Some biog­ra­phers spec­u­late that he con­tract­ed syphilis, which even­tu­al­ly trig­gered his decline into mad­ness in 1899. Two strokes fol­lowed, then pneu­mo­nia and it was all over in August, 1900. The footage below is appar­ent­ly from 1899, and we’re now adding it to our YouTube Favorites, which cur­rent­ly has 399. Who wants to put it over 400?
 

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As I write, the most emailed arti­cle from today’s New York Times is this piece, which talks about the revival of phi­los­o­phy on Amer­i­can col­lege cam­pus­es. The rea­sons for this revival are var­ied — Some see phi­los­o­phy offer­ing “good train­ing for look­ing at larg­er soci­etal ques­tions, like glob­al­iza­tion and tech­nol­o­gy.” Oth­ers see it build­ing skills val­ued by law schools (argu­men­ta­tion and rea­son­ing). Still oth­ers believe that phi­los­o­phy and exis­ten­tial angst can be good for “good for get­ting girl­friends.” Mean­while, all seem to agree that philo­soph­i­cal think­ing is not sim­ply for “frou-frou” intel­lec­tu­als. The net result: the num­ber of phi­los­o­phy majors is up, with some schools see­ing increas­es of 50–100% over the past 5–6 years.

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Back when we start­ed out, we men­tioned a radio show — and now pod­cast — com­ing out of Stan­ford that offers a “down-to-earth and no-non­sense approach” to phi­los­o­phy that’s engag­ing, if not enter­tain­ing. It’s called Phi­los­o­phy Talk, and you can catch some of the old pro­grams on iTunes.

Now, about 6,000 miles and eight time zones away, anoth­er phi­los­o­phy pod­cast, Phi­los­o­phy Bites (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), has been launched in Eng­land by David Edmonds and Nigel War­bur­ton (see bios here). Inter­view­ing top philoso­phers, the two delve into some essen­tial philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions — what is the mean­ing of life? what is the nature of real­i­ty? what is evil?, etc. And then they get into some oth­er good ques­tions: Can philoso­phers con­tribute to pub­lic life, and is wine tast­ing sub­jec­tive?

The lat­est pod­cast (which can be accessed via the feed, but not yet via iTunes) fea­tures an inter­view with Alain de Bot­ton, who has man­aged to write snap­py best­sellers that tack­le philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions. It takes a rare writer to pull that off, and his books are def­i­nite­ly worth a look. After launch­ing his career with How Proust Can Change Your Life, he has more recent­ly pub­lished The Con­so­la­tions of Phi­los­o­phy and The Archi­tec­ture of Hap­pi­ness. And it is this last book that the lat­est pod­cast revolves around.

As a final note, Nigel War­bur­ton has also put out anoth­er pod­cast, Phi­los­o­phy: The Clas­sics (iTunes) in which he reads from a recent­ly pub­lished book with the same title. You may want to give it a lis­ten.

For more pod­casts along these lines, see our Arts & Cul­ture pod­cast col­lec­tion.