What Did Old English Sound Like? Hear Reconstructions of Beowulf, The Bible, and Casual Conversations

in English Language | June 7th, 2019

What is the Eng­lish lan­guage? Is it Anglo-Sax­on? It is tempt­ing to think so, in part because the def­i­n­i­tion sim­pli­fies a lin­guis­tic his­to­ry that defies lin­ear sum­ma­ry. Over the course of 1000 years, the lan­guage came togeth­er from exten­sive con­tact with Anglo-Nor­man, a dialect of French; then became heav­i­ly Latinized and full of Greek roots and end­ings; then absorbed words from Ara­bic, Span­ish, and dozens of oth­er lan­guages, and with them, arguably, absorbed con­cepts and pic­tures of the world that can­not be sep­a­rat­ed from the lan­guage itself.

Shake­speare and oth­er writ­ers filled in the gaps (and still do), invent­ing words where they were lack­ing. Why do we then refer to the long-dead Anglo-Sax­on lan­guage as “Old Eng­lish,” if it is only a dis­tant ances­tor, and one, you’ll note, no Eng­lish speak­er today under­stands? There are many tech­ni­cal rea­sons for this, but to put it in plain terms: if Eng­lish were a body, Anglo-Sax­on might be the bones and lig­a­ments: not only for the hard­ness of its con­so­nants and its blunt, unadorned poet­ry, but because it con­tains the most com­mon words in the lan­guage, the struc­tur­al bits that hold togeth­er all those pan-lin­guis­tic bor­row­ings.

Observe the piece of verse known as Cædmon’s Hymn, below. Amidst the tan­gle of unfa­mil­iar phonemes and extinct let­ters like the “þ,” you can­not miss such bedrock words as “and,” “his,” “or,” “He,” and “to.” In oth­er texts, you’ll find rec­og­niz­able equiv­a­lents of “father,” “moth­er,” “hus­band,” “wife,” “good,” “god,” and many oth­er com­mon house­hold words.

Nu scu­lon her­ian     heo­fon­rices Weard,
Metodes mihte     and his mod­geþanc,
weorc Wul­dor­fæder,     swa he wun­dra
gehwæs
ece Dry­ht­en,     or onstealde.
He ærest scop     eorþan bear­num
heo­fon to hrofe     halig Sci­ep­pend.
þa mid­dan­geard     man­cynnes Weard
ece Dry­ht­en,     æfter teode
firum foldan     Frea ælmi­htig.

Despite shar­ing many words with mod­ern Eng­lish, how­ev­er, Anglo Sax­on is anoth­er lan­guage, from an entire­ly dif­fer­ent world long dis­ap­peared. No one liv­ing, of course, knows exact­ly what it sound­ed like, so schol­ars make their best edu­cat­ed guess­es using inter­nal evi­dence in the scant lit­er­a­ture, sec­ondary sources in oth­er lan­guages from the time, and sim­i­lar­i­ties to oth­er, liv­ing lan­guages. Now that you’ve seen what Old Eng­lish looks like, hear how it sounds to mod­ern ears.

In the video at the top, stu­dent of the lan­guage Stephen Rop­er reen­acts a casu­al con­ver­sa­tion with an Anglo-Sax­on speak­er, one who can under­stand but can­not speak con­tem­po­rary Eng­lish. The oth­er exam­ples here come from lit­er­ary con­texts. Fur­ther up, Justin A. Jack­son, Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at Hills­dale Col­lege, reads the open­ing lines of Beowulf, and just above, hear an unnamed nar­ra­tor read the epic poem’s full Pro­logue.

Just below—backed by a dra­mat­ic, dron­ing score and recit­ed over footage of misty Eng­lish moors—a read­ing of “The Lord’s Prayer” in 11th cen­tu­ry Old Eng­lish. In this text, you’ll pick out quite a few more famil­iar words, though the fact that most read­ers know the mod­ern Eng­lish equiv­a­lent prob­a­bly doesn’t hurt. But if you feel con­fi­dent after lis­ten­ing to these spec­u­la­tive recon­struc­tions of the lan­guage, enough to take a crack at read­ing it aloud your­self, head over this Uni­ver­si­ty of Glas­gow col­lec­tion of Old Eng­lish read­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Beowulf Read In the Orig­i­nal Old Eng­lish: How Many Words Do You Rec­og­nize?

These Four Man­u­scripts Con­tain All of the Lit­er­a­ture Writ­ten in Old English–and Beyond That, There’s Noth­ing More

Hear Beowulf and Gawain and the Green Knight Read in Their Orig­i­nal Old and Mid­dle Eng­lish by an MIT Medieval­ist

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

136 Maps Reveal Where Tourists & Locals Take Photos in Major Cities Across the Globe

in Maps | June 5th, 2019

How to tell the tourists in a city from the locals? Poten­tial­ly reli­able indi­ca­tors include the lan­guage they speak, the terms they use, the way they dress, the way they walk, and whether they’re stand­ing in the mid­dle of the side­walk squint­ing at a map. But few fac­tors draw the line between tourist and local more stark­ly than where they go and don’t go: no mat­ter the city, one will soon­er or lat­er hear talk of places locals know that tourists don’t, places locals don’t go because tourists do know about them, places tourists go when they want to act like locals, places locals go when they want to act like tourists, and so on.

In his project “Tourists and Locals,” Eric Fis­ch­er has found one way of quan­ti­fy­ing this great divide: where do the mem­bers of each group take the pho­tos they upload to the inter­net? You can view the results in 136 dif­fer­ent city maps or explore a whole world map, both of which use the same col­or cod­ing: “The red bits indi­cate pho­tos tak­en by tourists,” says Bril­liant Maps, “while the blue bits indi­cate pho­tos tak­en by locals and the yel­low bits might be either.”

Using “Map­Box and Twit­ter data from Gnip to cre­ate the maps,” Fis­ch­er defined locals as “those who tweet­ed from the same loca­tion for at least a month” and tourists as “those who were con­sid­ered local in anoth­er city but were tweet­ing in a dif­fer­ent loca­tion.”

Here, from the top of the post down, we have Fis­cher’s maps of Paris, Tokyo, Dublin, and San Fran­cis­co, all cities with vary­ing degrees of over­lap between the realm of the local and that of the tourist. Parisian attrac­tions like the Parc de Belleville and the Bassin de la Vil­lette show a rel­a­tive­ly healthy tourist-local bal­ance, where­as out­siders dom­i­nate in places like La Défense with its high­ly pho­tograph­able sky­scrap­ers, and of course the Lou­vre (to say noth­ing of the red-sat­u­rat­ed Ver­sailles, not pic­tured in this seg­ment of the map). Com­pare that with Tokyo, which of course has world-famous spots — the quaint­ly his­toric Asakusa, the sub­lime­ly urban Shibuya Cross­ing — but whose form does­n’t encour­age quite as strict a phys­i­cal sep­a­ra­tion of tourist and local.

The path a tourist takes through Dublin might over­lap a great deal with the one Leopold Bloom took on June 16, 1904, but less so with the paths an aver­age Dublin­er takes in the 2010s. The Irish cap­i­tal also offers a host of must-sees apart from the Ulysses tour — the Guin­ness Store­house, Trin­i­ty Col­lege’s Old Library, home of The Book of Kells— but vis­i­tors would do well to fol­low the exam­ple of Dublin’s locals and get a bit more dis­tance from the city cen­ter. They could do the same in San Fran­cis­co, a city of icon­ic tourist attrac­tions on which, before the tech boom, its very sur­vival seemed to depend. But do true trav­el­ers, as opposed to tourists, need this kind of data pro­cess­ing and infor­ma­tion design to know their time would be bet­ter spent some­where oth­er than Fish­er­man’s Wharf?

See 136 dif­fer­ent city maps here.

via Bril­liant Maps

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Visu­al Jour­ney Through 181 Years of Street Pho­tog­ra­phy (1838–2019)

The Shift­ing Pow­er of the World’s Largest Cities Visu­al­ized Over 4,000 Years (2050 BC-2050 AD)

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Drew an Accu­rate Satel­lite Map of an Ital­ian City (1502)

James Joyce’s Dublin Cap­tured in Vin­tage Pho­tos from 1897 to 1904

An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Breath­tak­ing Pho­tos of His­toric New York City

A Won­der­ful Archive of His­toric Tran­sit Maps: Expres­sive Art Meets Pre­cise Graph­ic Design

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Hear the Song That Two Teenage Musicians, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, Recorded Together in 1958

in Music | May 28th, 2019

Rock and roll needs its out­siders, its prodi­gious weirdos, trick­sters and pas­tiche artists to rein­vig­o­rate mori­bund gen­res and put things togeth­er no one thought would go. No two peo­ple fit the descrip­tion bet­ter than Frank Zap­pa and Cap­tain Beef­heart (Don Van Vli­et), some­time col­lab­o­ra­tors, fren­e­mies, and par­al­lel evil genius­es with crack teams of musi­cal hench­men at the ready—Zappa the genre-hop­ping vir­tu­oso and music busi­ness supervil­lain; Beef­heart the mad blues­man with a Beat poet’s heart and Mer­ry Prankster’s sense of humor….

Their intense on-again-off-again musi­cal rela­tion­ship threat­ened to come apart for good dur­ing the record­ing of Beefheart’s Zap­pa-pro­duced weirdo mas­ter­piece Trout Mask Repli­ca. These trou­bled stages of their asso­ci­a­tion are what we often talk about when we talk about Zappa/Beefheart, when they dis­cov­ered, writes Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock, “that their cre­ative process­es and work habits—Zappa was dis­ci­plined and exact­ing, while Beef­heart pre­ferred to be spon­ta­neous and freeform—couldn’t have been more at odds.”

A lit­tle over a decade ear­li­er, before either of them had musi­cal careers neces­si­tat­ing work habits, the two began record­ing togeth­er in “either late 1958 or ear­ly 1959,” notes Dan­ger­ous Minds. They had known each oth­er since high school in Lan­cast­er, Cal­i­for­nia, where their shared sen­si­bil­i­ties brought them togeth­er: “The two found they had a sim­i­lar taste in music, and quick­ly bond­ed over a shared love of blues, doo-wop, and R&B records.”

Pre­sag­ing all of the ways they would go on to warp, can­ni­bal­ize, and mash up these gen­res, “Lost in a Whirlpool,” with music by Zap­pa and lyrics by Van Vli­et, was one of sev­er­al songs they had begun writ­ing while still teenagers. Zap­pa tells the sto­ry of the record­ing in a 1989 inter­view:

“Lost in a Whirlpool” was taped on one of those tape recorders that you have in a school in the audio/visual depart­ment. We went into this room, this emp­ty room at the junior col­lege in Lan­cast­er, after school, and got this tape record­ed, and just turned it on. The gui­tars are me and my broth­er (Bob­by Zap­pa) and the vocal is Don Vli­et.

The sto­ry of “Lost in a Whirlpool” goes back even far­ther. When I was in high school in San Diego in ‘55, there was a guy who grew up to be a sports writer named Lar­ry Lit­tle­field. He, and anoth­er guy named Jeff Har­ris, and I used to hang out, and we used to make up sto­ries, lit­tle skits and stuff, you know, dumb lit­tle teenage things. One of the plots that we cooked up was about a per­son who was skindiving—San Diego’s a surfer kind of an area—skindiving in the San Diego sew­er sys­tem [laugh­ter], and talk­ing about encoun­ter­ing brown, blind fish. [laugh­ter] It was kind of like the Cousteau expe­di­tion of its era. [laugh­ter] So, when I moved to Lan­cast­er from San Diego, I had dis­cussed this sce­nario with Vli­et, and that’s where the lyrics come from. It’s like a musi­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of this oth­er skin­div­ing sce­nario.

Scat­o­log­i­cal skin­div­ing seems like such a per­fect con­cep­tu­al sum­ma­ry of the shared Zappa/Beefheart ethos it’s a won­der they didn’t use the title them­selves. Despite their grow­ing cre­ative dif­fer­ences and incom­pat­i­ble tem­pera­ments, they col­lab­o­rat­ed into the mid-70s.

In 1975, twen­ty years after cook­ing up the sto­ry of skin­div­ing in the San Diego sew­ers, they “regaled their fans with the amus­ing­ly titled (most­ly) live album, Bon­go Fury,” Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock writes, “a his­toric cease­fire in their oth­er­wise tur­bu­lent rela­tion­ship that would sad­ly prove all too fleet­ing.” The record is the result of an “inten­sive, 30-date tour” in which “Beef­heart con­tributed har­mon­i­ca, occa­sion­al sax, and numer­ous dis­plays of his eccen­tric poet­ry and one-of-a-kind vocals to the [Zap­pa] ensemble’s reper­toire.” Above, hear Bon­go Fury’s “Advance Romance,” as clas­sic a slice of Zappa/Beefheart odd­ball blues as their very first record­ings from the late 50s.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds/Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Case for Why Cap­tain Beefheart’s Awful Sound­ing Album, Trout Mask Repli­ca, Is a True Mas­ter­piece

The Night Frank Zap­pa Jammed With Pink Floyd … and Cap­tain Beef­heart Too (Bel­gium, 1969)

Hear a Rare Poet­ry Read­ing by Cap­tain Beef­heart (1993)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

Todd Rundgren’s Advice to Young Artists: Be Free and Fearless, Make Art That Expresses Your True Self, and Never Mind the Critics

in Education, Graduation Speech, Life, Music | May 25th, 2019

The Inter­net has redeemed grad­u­a­tion sea­son for those of us whose com­mence­ment speak­ers failed to inspire.

One of the chief dig­i­tal plea­sures of the sea­son is truf­fling up words of wis­dom that seem ever so much wis­er than the ones that were poured past the mor­tar­board into our own ten­der ears.

Our most-recent­ly found pearls come from the mouth of one of our favorite dark hors­es, musi­cian, pro­duc­er, and mul­ti­me­dia pio­neer Todd Rund­gren, one of Berklee Col­lege of Music’s 2017 com­mence­ment speak­ers.

Rund­gren claims he nev­er would have passed the pres­ti­gious institution’s audi­tion. He bare­ly man­aged to grad­u­ate from high school. But he struck a blow for life­long learn­ers whose pur­suit of knowl­edge takes place out­side the for­mal set­ting by earn­ing hon­orary degrees from both Berklee, and DePauw Uni­ver­si­ty, where the new­ly anoint­ed Doc­tor of Per­form­ing Arts can be seen below, study­ing his hon­oris causa as the school band ser­e­nades him with a stu­dent-arranged ver­sion of his song, All the Chil­dren Sing.

Rundgren’s out­sider sta­tus played well with Berklee’s Class of 2017, as he imme­di­ate­ly ditched his cer­e­mo­ni­al head­dress and con­ferred some cool on the sun­glass­es dic­tat­ed by his fail­ing vision.

But it wasn’t all open­ing snark, as he praised the stu­dents’ pre­vi­ous night’s musi­cal per­for­mance, telling them that they were a cred­it to their school, their fam­i­lies and them­selves.

His was a dif­fer­ent path.

Rund­gren, an expe­ri­enced pub­lic speak­er, claims he was stumped as to how one would go about craft­ing com­mence­ment speech­es. Reject­ing an avalanche of advice, whose urgency sug­gest­ed his speech could only result in “uni­ver­sal jubi­la­tion or mass sui­cide if (he) didn’t get it right,” he chose instead to spend his first 10 min­utes at the podi­um recount­ing his per­son­al his­to­ry.

It’s inter­est­ing stuff for any stu­dent of rock n roll, with added cool points owing to the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame’s fail­ure to acknowl­edge this musi­cal inno­va­tor.

Whether or not the Class of 17 were famil­iar with their speak­er pri­or to that day, it’s prob­a­ble most of them were able to do the math and real­ize that the self-edu­cat­ed Rund­gren would have been their age in 1970, when his debut album, Runt, was released, and only a cou­ple of years old­er when his third album, 1972’s two disc, Rital­in-fueled Something/Anything shot him to fame.

After which, this proud icon­o­clast prompt­ly thumbed his nose at com­mer­cial suc­cess, detour­ing into the son­ic exper­i­ments of A Wiz­ard, a True Star, whose dis­as­trous crit­i­cal recep­tion belies the mas­ter­piece rep­u­ta­tion it now enjoys.

Rolling Stone called it a case of an artist “run amok.”

Pat­ti Smith, whose absolute­ly manda­to­ry Creem review reads like beat poet­ry, was a rare admir­er.

Did a shiv­er of fear run through the par­ents in the audi­ence, as Rund­gren regaled their chil­dren with tales of how this delib­er­ate trip into the unknown cost him half his fan­base?

How much is Berklee’s tuition these days, any­way?

Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal urges from the com­mence­ment podi­um run the risk of com­ing off as inap­pro­pri­ate indul­gence, but Rundgren’s per­son­al sto­ry is sup­port­ing evi­dence of his very wor­thy mes­sage to his younger fel­low artists :

• Don’t self-edit in an attempt to fit some­one else’s image of who you should be as an artist. See your­self.
• Use your art as a tool for vig­or­ous self-explo­ration.
• Com­mit to remain­ing free and fear­less, in the ser­vice of your defin­ing moment, whose arrival time is rarely pub­lished in advance.
• Don’t view grad­u­a­tion as the end of your edu­ca­tion. Think of it as the begin­ning. Learn about the things you love.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Byrne’s Grad­u­a­tion Speech Offers Trou­bling and Encour­ag­ing Advice for Stu­dents in the Arts

John Waters’ RISD Grad­u­a­tion Speech: Real Wealth is Nev­er Hav­ing to Spend Time with A‑Holes

The First 10 Videos Played on MTV: Rewind the Video­tape to August 1, 1981

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City this June for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Graduation Highlight: Billionaire Robert F. Smith Announces That He’ll Pay Off the Student Loans of Morehouse’s Class of 2019

in Graduation Speech, Life | May 19th, 2019

Robert F. Smith, the bil­lion­aire CEO of Vista Equi­ty Part­ners, received an hon­orary degree from More­house Col­lege on Sun­day. And he gave some­thing back–a grant to retire the stu­dent loans of More­house­’s 2019 grad­u­at­ing class. Like that an esti­mat­ed $40 mil­lion in debt was gone.

Mean­while, in oth­er news, a titan of indus­try spent $90 mil­lion this week on a Jeff Koons rab­bit stat­ue. And now it will like­ly serve as an orna­ment piece in a walled-off man­sion some­where. Imag­ine how that mon­ey could have been put to more pro­duc­tive use…

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Is the Leonar­do da Vin­ci Paint­ing “Sal­va­tor Mun­di” (Which Sold for $450 Mil­lion in 2017) Actu­al­ly Authen­tic?: Michael Lewis Explores the Ques­tion in His New Pod­cast

John Waters’ RISD Grad­u­a­tion Speech: Real Wealth is Nev­er Hav­ing to Spend Time with A‑Holes

Meryl Streep Gives Grad­u­a­tion Speech at Barnard

David Byrne’s Grad­u­a­tion Speech Offers Trou­bling and Encour­ag­ing Advice for Stu­dents in the Arts

Jim Car­rey Com­mence­ment Speech: It’s Bet­ter to Fail at What You Love Than Fail at What You Don’t

‘This Is Water’: Com­plete Audio of David Fos­ter Wallace’s Keny­on Grad­u­a­tion Speech (2005)

Learn Philosophy with a Wealth of Free Courses, Podcasts and YouTube Videos

in Philosophy | May 14th, 2019

Used to be, a few thou­sand years ago, if you want­ed to learn phi­los­o­phy, you’d hang out in the ago­ra, the pub­lic space in ancient Greece whose name turned into verbs mean­ing both “to shop” and “to speak in pub­lic.” Pol­i­tics and meta­physics min­gled freely with com­merce. If a Socrates-like sage took a lik­ing to you, you might fol­low him around. If not, you might pay a sophist—a word mean­ing wise teacher before it became a term of abuse that Pla­to lobbed at rivals who charged for their ser­vices. Only cer­tain peo­ple had the means and leisure for these pur­suits. Nonethe­less, phi­los­o­phy was a pub­lic activ­i­ty, not one sequestered in libraries and sem­i­nar rooms.

Even though phi­los­o­phy moved indoors—to monas­ter­ies, col­leges, and the libraries of aristocrats—it did not stay cooped up for long. With the mod­ern age arrived new pub­lic squares, cen­tered around cof­fee­hous­es where all sorts of peo­ple gath­ered, rubbed elbows, formed dis­cus­sion groups. Phi­los­o­phy may not have been the pub­lic spec­ta­cle it seemed to have been in antiq­ui­ty, but neo­clas­si­cal thinkers tried to recre­ate its char­ac­ter of free and open inquiry in pub­lic spaces.

Wide­spread lit­er­a­cy and pub­lish­ing brought phi­los­o­phy to the mass­es in new ways. Philo­soph­i­cal works trick­led down in afford­able edi­tions to the intel­lec­tu­al­ly curi­ous, who might read and dis­cuss them with like-mind­ed laypeo­ple. But phi­los­o­phy also became a pro­fes­sion­al dis­ci­pline, gov­erned by asso­ci­a­tions, con­fer­ences, jour­nals, and arcane vocab­u­lar­ies. Out­side of France, philoso­phers rarely act­ed as pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als address­ing pub­lic issues. They were aca­d­e­mics whose pri­ma­ry audi­ences were oth­er aca­d­e­mics.

The cul­ture suf­fered immense­ly, one might argue, in the with­draw­al of phi­los­o­phy from pub­lic life.

The broad out­line above does not pre­tend to be a his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy, but rather a sketch of some of the ways West­ern cul­ture has engaged with phi­los­o­phy, treat­ing it as a pub­lic good and resource, or a domain of spe­cial­ists and an activ­i­ty divorced from ordi­nary life. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for us in the 21st cen­tu­ry, dreams of a dig­i­tal ago­ra have col­lapsed in the dystopi­an sur­veil­lance schemes of social media and the tox­ic sludge of com­ments sec­tions. But the inter­net has also, in a way, returned phi­los­o­phy to the pub­lic square.

Philoso­phers can once again share knowl­edge freely and open­ly, and any­one with access can stream and down­load hun­dreds of lessons, cours­es, enter­tain­ing explain­ers, inter­views, pod­casts, and more. We have fea­tured many of these resources over the years in hopes that more peo­ple will dis­cov­er the art of think­ing deeply and crit­i­cal­ly. Today, we gath­er them in a mas­ter list, below.

Learn the in-depth his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy from Peter Adamson’s acclaimed series The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy… With­out Any Gaps; lis­ten in on round­table dis­cus­sions on famous thinkers and the­o­ries with the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast, or “repave the Ago­ra with the rub­ble of the Ivory Tow­er!” with the acces­si­ble, com­pre­hen­sive phi­los­o­phy videos of Carneades. These are but a few of the many qual­i­ty resources you’ll find below. Tech­nol­o­gy may nev­er recre­ate the ear­ly atmos­phere of pub­lic philosophy—for that you’ll need to get out and min­gle. But it can deliv­er more phi­los­o­phy than any­one has ever had before, lit­er­al­ly right into the palms of our hands.

Cours­es

187 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es: In a neat, handy list, we’ve amassed a col­lec­tion of free phi­los­o­phy cours­es record­ed at great uni­ver­si­ties. Pret­ty much every facet of phi­los­o­phy gets cov­ered here.

YouTube

Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy: Learn about phi­los­o­phy with pro­fes­sors from Yale, Stan­ford, Oxford, MIT, and more. 130+ ani­mat­ed videos intro­duce peo­ple to the prac­tice of phi­los­o­phy. The videos are free, enter­tain­ing, inter­est­ing and acces­si­ble to peo­ple with no back­ground in the sub­ject.

School of Life: This col­lec­tion of 35 ani­mat­ed videos offers an intro­duc­tion to major West­ern philosophers—Wittgenstein, Fou­cault, Camus and more. The videos were made by Alain de Botton’s School of Life.

Gre­go­ry Sadler’s Phi­los­o­phy Videos: After a decade in tra­di­tion­al aca­d­e­m­ic posi­tions, Gre­go­ry Sadler start­ed bring­ing phi­los­o­phy into prac­tice, mak­ing com­plex clas­sic philo­soph­i­cal ideas acces­si­ble for a wide audi­ence of pro­fes­sion­als, stu­dents, and life-long learn­ers. His YouTube chan­nel includes exten­sive lec­ture series on Kierkegaard, Sartre, Hegel and more.

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: Watch 81 video lec­tures trac­ing the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy mov­ing from Ancient Greece to mod­ern times. Arthur Holmes pre­sent­ed this influ­en­tial course at Wheaton Col­lege for decades and now it’s online for you.

Carneades: Repave the Ago­ra with the rub­ble of the Ivory Tow­er!  Put your beliefs to the test!  Learn some­thing about phi­los­o­phy!  Doubt some­thing you thought you knew before.  Find on this chan­nel 400 videos on the sub­jects of phi­los­o­phy and skep­ti­cism.

What the The­o­ry?: This col­lec­tion pro­vides short intro­duc­tions to the­o­ries and the­o­ret­i­cal approach­es in cul­tur­al stud­ies and the wider human­i­ties. Cov­ers semi­otics, phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, post­mod­ernism, marx­ist lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, and much more.

Crash Course Phi­los­o­phy:  In 46 episodes, Hank Green will teach you phi­los­o­phy. This course is based on an intro­duc­to­ry West­ern phi­los­o­phy col­lege lev­el cur­ricu­lum. By the end of the course, you will be able to exam­ine top­ics like the self, ethics, reli­gion, lan­guage, art, death, pol­i­tics, and knowl­edge. And also craft argu­ments, apply deduc­tive and induc­tive rea­son­ing, and iden­ti­fy fal­lac­i­es.

Pod­casts:

Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life: Phi­los­o­phy, philoso­phers and philo­soph­i­cal texts. This pod­cast fea­tures an infor­mal round­table dis­cus­sion, with each episode loose­ly focused on a short read­ing that intro­duces at least one “big” philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion, con­cern, or idea. Recent episodes have focused on Niet­zsche, Sartre and Aldous Hux­ley, and fea­tured Fran­cis Fukuya­ma as a guest.

Hi-Phi-Nation: Cre­at­ed by Bar­ry Lam (Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy at Vas­sar Col­lege), Hi-Phi Nation is a phi­los­o­phy pod­cast “that turns sto­ries into ideas.” Con­sid­er it “the first sound and sto­ry-dri­ven show about phi­los­o­phy, bring­ing togeth­er nar­ra­tive sto­ry­telling, inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism, and sound­track­ing.”

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy … With­out Any Gaps: Cre­at­ed by Peter Adam­son, Pro­fes­sor of Ancient and Medieval Phi­los­o­phy at King’s Col­lege Lon­don, this pod­cast fea­tures more than 300 episodes, each about 20 min­utes long, cov­er­ing the Pre­So­crat­ics (Pythago­ras, Zeno, Par­menides, etc) and then Socrates, Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, and much more.

Phi­los­o­phy Bites: David Edmonds (Uehi­ro Cen­tre, Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty) and Nigel War­bur­ton (free­lance philosopher/writer) inter­view top philoso­phers on a wide range of top­ics. Two books based on the series have been pub­lished by Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press. There are over 400 pod­casts in this col­lec­tion.

In Our Time: Phi­los­o­phy: In Our Time is a live BBC radio dis­cus­sion series explor­ing the his­to­ry of ideas, pre­sent­ed by Melvyn Bragg since Octo­ber 1998. It is one of BBC Radio 4’s most suc­cess­ful dis­cus­sion pro­grammes, acknowl­edged to have “trans­formed the land­scape for seri­ous ideas at peak lis­ten­ing time.’”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Cours­es in Ancient His­to­ry, Lit­er­a­ture & Phi­los­o­phy 

Intro­duc­tion to Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course 

Philoso­phers Name the Best Phi­los­o­phy Books: From Sto­icism and Exis­ten­tial­ism, to Meta­physics & Ethics for Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Introduction to Philosophy: A Free Course

in | May 13th, 2019

In the playlist above, Gre­go­ry Sadler presents a 67-lec­ture course, “Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy.” Pre­sent­ed at Marist Col­lege, the course goes in his­tor­i­cal order–from Pla­to to Kierkegaard. Watch the playlist above, or find the video on YouTube here.

“Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy” has been added to our list of Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oxford’s Free Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy: Stream 41 Lec­tures

Oxford’s Free Course Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing For Begin­ners Teach­es You to Think Like a Philoso­pher

32 Ani­mat­ed Videos by Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy Teach You the Essen­tials of Crit­i­cal Think­ing

Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course

Ethics: A Free Online Course

in | May 13th, 2019

Taught at Marist Col­lege by Gre­go­ry Sadler, this course on Ethics starts “with dis­cussing Emo­tivism and con­trast­ing it with a Nat­ur­al Law and Virtue Ethics Per­spec­tive, then move[s] into Virtue Ethics, Ego­ism, Might Makes Right, and Con­trac­tar­i­an moral the­o­ry as depict­ed in Pla­to’s dia­logues. After that we dis­cuss ancient Hedo­nist and Sto­ic the­o­ries, then move into Util­i­tar­i­an­ism with Ben­tham and Mill, fol­lowed by Deon­tol­ogy with Kant and Ross. Ethics of Care fol­lows, as well as a return to Virtue Ethics with in-depth study of Aris­to­tle, fin­ish­ing with study of Thomas Aquinas’ Nat­ur­al Law moral the­o­ry.”

Ethics has been added to our list of Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties. Watch the 32 lec­tures above, or on YouTube here.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oxford’s Free Course “A Romp Through Ethics” for Com­plete Begin­ners Will Teach You Right from Wrong

Jour­nal­is­tic Ethics: A Free Online Course from UCLA

Do Ethi­cists Behave Any Bet­ter Than the Rest of Us?: Here’s What the Research Shows

Pro­fes­sion­al Ethics: A Free Online Course

Steve Jobs Shares a Secret for Success: Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

in Apple, Business, Entrepreneurship, Life | April 26th, 2019

In 1994—the year Apple co-founder Steve Jobs filmed an inter­view with The Sil­i­con Val­ley His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion in which he encour­aged peo­ple to go for what they want by enlist­ing oth­ers’ assistance—there was no social media, no Kick­starter, no GoFundMe, no Patre­on…  email was just becom­ing a thing.

Back then, ask­ing for help meant engag­ing in a face-to-face or voice-to-voice real time inter­ac­tion, some­thing many peo­ple find intim­i­dat­ing.

Not so young Jobs, an elec­tron­ics nut who relat­ed more eas­i­ly to the adult engi­neers in his Sil­i­con Val­ley neigh­bor­hood than to kids his own age.

As he recounts above, his desire to build a fre­quen­cy counter spurred him to cold call Bill Hewlett (of Hewlett-Packard), to see if he’d give him some of the nec­es­sary parts.

(In light of the recent col­lege admis­sions scan­dal, let us rec­og­nize the 12-year-old Jobs not only had the gump­tion to make that call, he also appears to have had no parental assis­tance look­ing up Hewlett’s num­ber in the Palo Alto White Pages.)

Hewlett agreed to the young go-getter’s request for parts. Jobs’ chutz­pah also earned him a sum­mer job on a Hewlett Packard assem­bly line, putting screws into fre­quen­cy coun­ters. (“I was in heav­en,” Jobs said of this entry lev­el posi­tion.)

Per­haps the biggest les­son for those in need of help is to ask bold­ly.

Ask like it’s 1994.

No, ask like it’s 1968, and you’re a self-starter like Steve Jobs hell­bent on procur­ing those spe­cial­ty parts to build your fre­quen­cy counter.

(Let’s fur­ther pre­tend that lying around wait­ing for Mom to order you a DIY fre­quen­cy counter kit on Ama­zon is not an option…)

Need an extra push?

Psy­chol­o­gist Adam Grant’s best­selling Give and Take makes an effec­tive case for human inter­ac­tion as the path­way to suc­cess, whether you’re the kid plac­ing the call, or the big wig with the pow­er to grant the wish.

Social psy­chol­o­gist Hei­di Grant’s book, Rein­force­ments: How to Get Peo­ple to Help You, explains how to ask with­out snivel­ing, self-aggran­diz­ing, or putting the per­son on the receiv­ing end in an awk­ward posi­tion.

And that shy vio­let Aman­da Fuck­ing Palmer, author of The Art of Ask­ing and no stranger to the punk rock barter econ­o­my, details how her “nin­ja mas­ter-lev­el fan con­nec­tion” has result­ed in her every request being met—from hous­ing and meals to prac­tice pianos and a neti pot hand deliv­ered by an Aus­tralian nurse.

Just don’t for­get to say “please” and, even­tu­al­ly, “thank you.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Steve Jobs on Life: “Stay Hun­gry, Stay Fool­ish”

A Young Steve Jobs Teach­es a Class at MIT (1992)

Steve Jobs Nar­rates the First “Think Dif­fer­ent” Ad (Nev­er Aired)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City this May for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

A Short Animated Film Explores the Fluidity of Gender in the Thought of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler

in Gender, Philosophy | April 24th, 2019

In hind­sight, it seems like a very dif­fer­ent world when I first read Judith Butler’s Gen­der Trou­ble in col­lege in the 90s. (Mash togeth­er all your stereo­types about col­lege cam­pus­es in the 90s and you’ve pret­ty much got the pic­ture.) For one thing, colum­nists in major nation­al news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines weren’t writ­ing con­tro­ver­sial, or sim­ply explana­to­ry, arti­cles about gen­der flu­id­i­ty. The con­cept did not exist in the main­stream press. It seemed both hip and rar­i­fied, con­fined to the­o­ry dis­cus­sion groups, aca­d­e­m­ic sem­i­nars, and punk zines.

As rad­i­cal as Butler’s ideas about gen­der seemed, she acknowl­edged that she did not orig­i­nate the cri­tique. She found it first artic­u­lat­ed in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Sec­ond Sex, in which the French exis­ten­tial­ist fem­i­nist wrote, “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.”

In the short film above, Devenir (To Become), by French film­mak­er Géral­dine Char­p­en­tier-Basille, But­ler describes her reac­tion to read­ing the pas­sage. “I wrote some­thing about this prob­lem of becom­ing. And I want­ed to know: does one ever become one? Or is that to be a woman is a mode of becom­ing… that has no goal…. You could say the same of gen­der more gen­er­al­ly.”

As the images illus­trat­ing this extract from a 2006 inter­view with But­ler show, the goal­posts of fem­i­nine and mas­cu­line iden­ti­ties move all the time, from year to year, from cul­ture to cul­ture. Gen­der is a pas­tiche of rep­re­sen­ta­tions we inhab­it. It is pro­duced, per­for­ma­tive, But­ler thought, but we can nev­er get it “right” because there is no true ref­er­ent. The idea descends from the exis­ten­tial­ist insights of de Beau­voir, who wrote about and dra­ma­tized sim­i­lar prob­lems of the per­son­al and social self.

De Beau­voir extend­ed Sartre’s claim that “exis­tence pre­cedes essence” in her pio­neer­ing fem­i­nist work—we come into the world, then acquire iden­ti­ties through accul­tur­a­tion, social con­di­tion­ing, and coer­cion. But­ler extend­ed the argu­ment fur­ther. “For her, writes Aeon’s Will Frak­er, “gen­der wasn’t pre­de­ter­mined by nature or biol­o­gy, nor was it sim­ply ‘made up’ by cul­ture. Rather, But­ler insist­ed that gen­der resides in repeat­ed words and actions, words and actions that both shape and are shaped by the bod­ies of real, flesh-and-blood human beings. And cru­cial­ly, such rep­e­ti­tions are rarely per­formed freely.”

From our ear­li­est years, we are trained how to behave as a gen­der, just as we are taught to per­form oth­er identities—trained by the expec­ta­tions of par­ents, teach­ers, reli­gious lead­ers, adver­tis­ers, and the bul­ly­ing and social pres­sure of our peers. Hear But­ler explain fur­ther how gen­der, in her the­o­ry, func­tions as “a phe­nom­e­non that is pro­duced and is being repro­duced all the time…. Nobody real­ly is a gen­der from the start. I know it’s con­tro­ver­sial,” she says. “But that’s my claim.” It is one that pos­es com­pli­cat­ed ques­tions more broad­ly, notes Aeon, about “the pur­suit of the ‘authen­tic’ self” as a mean­ing­ful idea—questions West­ern philoso­phers have been ask­ing for well over half a cen­tu­ry.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The­o­rist Judith But­ler Explains How Behav­ior Cre­ates Gen­der: A Short Intro­duc­tion to “Gen­der Per­for­ma­tiv­i­ty”

Judy!: 1993 Judith But­ler Fanzine Gives Us An Irrev­er­ent Punk-Rock Take on the Post-Struc­tural­ist Gen­der The­o­rist

Simone de Beau­voir Explains “Why I’m a Fem­i­nist” in a Rare TV Inter­view (1975)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness