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.

Sub­scribe to Our Feed

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.

The prince of prag­ma­tism and a lion of Stan­ford, Richard Rorty, died last week in Palo Alto at age 75. Rorty was most famous­ly a philo­soph­i­cal prag­ma­tist, believ­ing that the philoso­pher’s role in life is to answer our press­ing every­day ques­tions, not to get lost in abstract the­o­ries. Accord­ing to his obit­u­ary, in his lat­er years he “fierce­ly crit­i­cized the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, the reli­gious right, Con­gres­sion­al Democ­rats and anti-Amer­i­can intel­lec­tu­als.” And despite the pes­simism caused by any extend­ed con­tem­pla­tion of these groups, he had hope for his coun­try to the end.

You can lis­ten to one of Rorty’s last pub­lic speak­ing engage­ments, the annu­al Dewey lec­ture at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, here.

For those who dug our recent piece on UC Berke­ley’s 59 cours­es avail­able on iTunes, here’s anoth­er lit­tle item for you. Susan Stu­art, a lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Glas­gow, recent­ly taught a course on the epis­te­mol­o­gy (or the­o­ry of knowl­edge) of the great Ger­man philoso­pher, Immanuel Kant. And fig­ur­ing that it might help her stu­dents if she record­ed these lec­tures, she put on a lapel mic and did her thing. Then, as fate would have it, her lec­tures were loaded onto iTunes (iTunes — rss feed — web site) and, not unlike Lars Brown­worth’s lec­tures on the Byzan­tine World, they went viral and became iTunes’ #1 edu­ca­tion­al pod­cast for a while. The record­ings have a home­grown feel to them. But they get the job done if you’re up for grap­pling with Kan­t’s dif­fi­cult but foun­da­tion­al phi­los­o­phy.

If you want more infor­ma­tion on these pod­casts, here’s the writ­ten pref­ace that comes along with the taped course.

“Kant wrote exten­sive­ly on all major top­ics of intel­lec­tu­al inter­est. In terms of the pub­li­ca­tion of major texts his most pro­lif­ic peri­od was 1781 to 1790. In the domains of epis­te­mol­o­gy and meta­physics he pub­lished the Cri­tique of Pure Rea­son in 1781, with a sec­ond edi­tion in 1787. In the domain of ethics he pub­lished the Ground­work of the Meta­physics of Morals in 1785 and the Cri­tique of Prac­ti­cal Rea­son in 1788. In the domain of asthet­ics he pre­sent­ed his the­o­ry in 1790 in the form of the Cri­tique of Judg­ment. As a form of short­hand the three Cri­tiques are known as the First, Sec­ond, and Third, respec­tive­ly. In the first Cri­tique Kant deals with how we come to under­stand our world; in the sec­ond Cri­tique he deals with prac­ti­cal rea­son and how we act in our world; and in the third Cri­tique he attempts to show a sys­tem­at­ic con­nec­tion between the first two. So, the first deals with how we think about our sen­si­ble world, the sec­ond deals with how we act in it, and the third sup­plies a link between the two in terms of felt judge­ment. In the first he draws togeth­er our inner expe­ri­ence with our nec­es­sary per­cep­tion of an exter­nal world. He com­bines per­cep­tion and under­stand­ing through the appli­ca­tion of the pro­duc­tive imag­i­na­tion in such a way as to make judge­ments pos­si­ble. He links the First and the Third Cri­tiques by argu­ing that aes­thet­ic judg­ments, that is, judge­ments about what is beau­ti­ful or sub­lime, derive from our deter­mi­na­tion to impose order on our sen­so­ry expe­ri­ence. Thus, aes­thet­ics is just like math­e­mat­ics: it attempts to find uni­ty in expe­ri­ence. So, each of the Cri­tiques is con­cerned with judge­ment, judge­ments of rea­son, moral judge­ments, and aes­thet­ic judge­ments.”

See our com­plete list of uni­ver­si­ty pod­casts here, and our larg­er pod­cast col­lec­tion here.