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

Watch “Critical Living,” a Stop-Motion Film Inspired by the 1960s Movement That Rejected Modern Ideas About Mental Illness

in Animation, Philosophy, Psychology | May 14th, 2019

Along with Michel Fou­cault’s cri­tique of the med­ical mod­el of men­tal ill­ness, the work of Scot­tish psy­chi­a­trist R.D. Laing and oth­er influ­en­tial the­o­rists and crit­ics posed a seri­ous intel­lec­tu­al chal­lenge to the psy­chi­atric estab­lish­ment. Laing’s 1960 The Divid­ed Self: An Exis­ten­tial Study in San­i­ty and Mad­ness the­o­rized schiz­o­phre­nia as a philo­soph­i­cal prob­lem, not a bio­log­i­cal one. Oth­er ear­ly works like Self and Oth­ers and Knots made Laing some­thing of a star in the 1960s and ear­ly 70s, though his star would fade once French the­o­ry began to take over the acad­e­my.

Glas­gow-born Laing is described as part of the so-called “anti-psy­chi­a­try movement”—a loose col­lec­tion of psy­chi­a­trists and char­ac­ters like L. Ron Hub­bard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guat­tari, Fou­cault, and Erv­ing Goff­man, pio­neer­ing soci­ol­o­gist and author of The Pre­sen­ta­tion of Self in Every­day Life. For his part, Laing did not deny the exis­tence of men­tal ill­ness, nor oppose treat­ment. But he ques­tioned the bio­log­i­cal basis of psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­ders and opposed the pre­vail­ing chem­i­cal and elec­troshock cures. He was seen not as an antag­o­nist of psy­chi­a­try but as a “crit­i­cal psy­chi­a­trist,” con­tin­u­ing a tra­di­tion begun by Freud and Jung: “the alienist or ‘head shrinker’ as pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al,” as Duquesne University’s Daniel Burston writes.

Like many oth­er philo­soph­i­cal­ly-mind­ed intel­lec­tu­als in his field, Laing not only offered com­pelling alter­na­tive the­o­ries of men­tal ill­ness but also pio­neered alter­na­tive ther­a­pies. He was inspired by Exis­ten­tial­ism; the many hours he had spent “in padded cells with the men placed in his cus­tody” while appren­ticed in psy­chi­a­try in the British Army; and to a large extent by Fou­cault. (Laing edit­ed the first Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Foucault’s Mad­ness and Civ­i­liza­tion.) Armed with the­o­ry and clin­i­cal expe­ri­ence, he co-found­ed the Philadel­phia Asso­ci­a­tion in 1965, an orga­ni­za­tion “cen­tred on a com­mu­nal approach to well­be­ing,” writes Aeon, “where peo­ple who are expe­ri­enc­ing acute men­tal dis­tress live togeth­er in a Philadel­phia Asso­ci­a­tion house, with rou­tine vis­its from ther­a­pists.”

Based not in the Penn­syl­va­nia city, but in Lon­don, the Philadel­phia Asso­ci­a­tion still operates—along with sev­er­al sim­i­lar orgs influ­enced by Laing’s vision of ther­a­peu­tic com­mu­ni­ties. In “Crit­i­cal Liv­ing,” the ani­mat­ed stop-motion film above, film­mak­er Alex Wid­dow­son excerpts inter­views with “a cur­rent house ther­a­pist, a for­mer house res­i­dent, and the UK author and cul­tur­al his­to­ri­an Mike Jay, to explore the think­ing behind the organization’s method­ol­o­gy and con­tex­tu­al­ize its lega­cy.” For Laing, men­tal ill­ness­es, even extreme psy­choses like schiz­o­phre­nia, are per­son­al strug­gles that can best be worked through in inter­per­son­al set­tings which elim­i­nate dis­tinc­tions between doc­tor and patient and abol­ish meth­ods Laing called “con­fronta­tion­al.”

Laing’s work began to be dis­cred­it­ed in the mid-sev­en­ties, as break­throughs in brain imag­ing pro­vid­ed neu­ro­log­i­cal evi­dence for main­stream psy­chi­atric the­o­ries, and as the cul­ture changed and left his the­o­ries behind. A friend of Tim­o­thy Leary, Ram Dass, and Allen Gins­berg, and an intel­lec­tu­al hero to many in the coun­ter­cul­ture, Laing began to move into stranger ter­ri­to­ry, hold­ing work­shops for “rebirthing” ther­a­pies and giv­ing peo­ple around him rea­son to doubt his own grasp on real­i­ty. Burston lists a num­ber of oth­er rea­sons his exper­i­ments with “ther­a­peu­tic com­mu­ni­ty” large­ly fell into obscu­ri­ty, includ­ing the sig­nif­i­cant invest­ment of time and effort required. “We want a quick fix: some­thing clean and cost-effec­tive, not messy and time con­sum­ing.”

But for many, Laing’s ideas of men­tal ill­ness as an exis­ten­tial problem—one which could be just as much a break­through as a breakdown—continue to res­onate, as do the many polit­i­cal and social cri­tiques he and his con­tem­po­raries raised. “In the sys­tem of psy­chi­a­try,” says one inter­vie­wee in the video above, “there’s a huge empha­sis on goals, and on an end­ing. In the more in-depth ther­a­pies, they’re more sen­si­tive to the fact that the psy­che can’t be rushed, it takes time.”

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

When Michel Fou­cault Tripped on Acid in Death Val­ley and Called It “The Great­est Expe­ri­ence of My Life” (1975)

How to Use Psy­che­del­ic Drugs to Improve Men­tal Health: Michael Pollan’s New Book, How to Change Your Mind, Makes the Case

Sun Ra Plays a Music Ther­a­py Gig at a Men­tal Hos­pi­tal; Inspires Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

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

Would You Go Back to 1889 and Take Out Baby Hitler?: Time-Travel Expert James Gleick Answers the Philosophical Question

in History, Sci Fi | May 14th, 2019

The vast major­i­ty of us have no incli­na­tion to kill any­one, much less a small child. But what if we had the chance to kill baby Adolf Hitler, pre­vent­ing the Holo­caust and indeed the Sec­ond World War? That hypo­thet­i­cal ques­tion has endured for a vari­ety of rea­sons, touch­ing as it does on the con­cepts of geno­cide and infant mur­der in forms even more high­ly charged than usu­al. It also presents, in the words of Time Trav­el: A His­to­ry author James Gle­ick, “two prob­lems at once. There’s a sci­en­tif­ic prob­lem — you can set your mind to work imag­in­ing, ‘Could such a thing be pos­si­ble and how would that work?’ And then there’s an eth­i­cal prob­lem. ‘If I could, would I, should I?’ ”

By the sim­plest analy­sis, writes Vox’s Dylan Matthews, the ques­tion comes down to, “Is it eth­i­cal to kill one per­son to save 40-plus mil­lion peo­ple?” But time-trav­el fic­tion has been around long enough that we’ve all inter­nal­ized the mes­sage that it’s not quite so sim­ple. We can even ques­tion the assump­tion that killing baby Hitler would pre­vent the Holo­caust and World War II in the first place.

Maybe those ter­ri­ble events hap­pen on any time­line, regard­less of whether Hitler lives or dies: that would align with the Novikov self-con­sis­ten­cy prin­ci­ple, which holds that “time trav­el could be pos­si­ble, but must be con­sis­tent with the past as it has already tak­en place,” and which has been dra­ma­tized in time-trav­el sto­ries from La Jetée to The Ter­mi­na­tor.

Gle­ick does­n’t have a straight answer in the Vox video on the killing-baby-hitler ques­tion above as to whether he him­self would go back to 1889 and put baby Hitler out of action. “When you change his­to­ry,” he says of the moral of the count­less many time trav­el sto­ries he’s read, “you don’t get the result you’re look­ing for. Every day, every­thing we do is a turn­ing point in his­to­ry, whether it’s obvi­ous to us or not.” This in con­trast to for­mer Flori­da gov­er­nor and Unit­ed States pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Jeb Bush, who, when he had the big baby-Hitler ques­tion put to him by the Huff­in­g­ton Post, returned a hearty “Hell yea I would.” But giv­en time to reflect, even he con­clud­ed that such an act “could have a dan­ger­ous effect on every­thing else.” It appears that some of the lessons of time-trav­el sto­ries have been learned, but as for what human­i­ty will do if it actu­al­ly devel­ops time-trav­el tech­nol­o­gy — maybe we’d rather not peer into the future to find out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What’s the Ori­gin of Time Trav­el Fic­tion?: New Video Essay Explains How Time Trav­el Writ­ing Got Its Start with Charles Dar­win & His Lit­er­ary Peers

What Hap­pened When Stephen Hawk­ing Threw a Cock­tail Par­ty for Time Trav­el­ers (2009)

Pro­fes­sor Ronald Mal­lett Wants to Build a Time Machine in this Cen­tu­ry … and He’s Not Kid­ding

Carl Jung Psy­cho­an­a­lyzes Hitler: “He’s the Uncon­scious of 78 Mil­lion Ger­mans.” “With­out the Ger­man Peo­ple He’d Be Noth­ing” (1938)

How Did Hitler Rise to Pow­er? : New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Pro­vides a Case Study in How Fas­cists Get Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly Elect­ed

The New York Times’ First Pro­file of Hitler: His Anti-Semi­tism Is Not as “Gen­uine or Vio­lent” as It Sounds (1922)

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.

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

Critical Thinking: A Free Course

in | May 13th, 2019

In the playlist above, Gre­go­ry Sadler presents a 24-lec­ture course on “Crit­i­cal Think­ing.” Pre­sent­ed at Fayet­teville State Uni­ver­si­ty in 2011, the course fea­tures lec­tures on top­ics like Deduc­tive and Induc­tive Argu­ments, Fal­lac­i­es, Rhetor­i­cal Devices, Appeals to Author­i­ty and much more. Also find the playlist of lec­tures on YouTube here.

“Crit­i­cal Think­ing” 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 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

Oliver Sacks’ Recommended Reading List of 46 Books: From Plants and Neuroscience, to Poetry and the Prose of Nabokov

in Books, Neuroscience | May 13th, 2019

Image by Lui­gi Novi. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We remem­ber Oliv­er Sacks as a neu­rol­o­gist, but we remem­ber him not least because he wrote quite a few books as well. If you read those books, you’ll get a sense of Sacks’ wide range of inter­ests — inven­tion, per­cep­tion and mis­per­cep­tion, hal­lu­ci­na­tion, and more — few of which lack a con­nec­tion to the human mind. His pas­sion for ferns, the core sub­ject of a trav­el­ogue he wrote in Oax­a­ca as well as an unex­pect­ed­ly fre­quent object of ref­er­ence in his oth­er writ­ings and talks, may seem an out­lier. But for Sacks, ferns offered one more win­dow into the king­dom of nature that pro­duced human­i­ty, and which through­out his life he tried to under­stand by observ­ing from as many dif­fer­ent angles as pos­si­ble.

No small amount of evi­dence of that pur­suit appears in Sacks’ list of 46 book rec­om­men­da­tions com­mis­sioned for The Strand’s “Author’s Book­shelf” series. (See the full list below.) A fair few of its selec­tions, includ­ing William James’ The Prin­ci­ples of Psy­chol­o­gy, A.R. Luri­a’s The Mind of a Mnemonist, and Anto­nio Dama­sio’s The Feel­ing of What Hap­pens, seem like nat­ur­al favorites for a writer so end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by human cog­ni­tion and con­scious­ness.

Trac­ing the devel­op­ment of the human brain and mind would, of course, lead to an inter­est in biol­o­gy and evo­lu­tion, here result­ing in such picks as Edward O. Wilson’s Nat­u­ral­ist, Carl Zim­mer’s Evo­lu­tion: The Tri­umph of an Idea, and the jour­nals Charles Dar­win kept aboard the Bea­gle.

But Sacks was­n’t just an observ­er of the brain: some of his most inter­est­ing writ­ings come out of the times he used him­self as a kind of research sub­ject — as when he found out what he could learn on amphet­a­mines and LSD. A sim­i­lar line of inquiry no doubt showed him the val­ue of Aldous Hux­ley’s The Doors of Per­cep­tion and Heav­en and Hell, and in less altered states the likes of Sig­mund Freud’s The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams. But whichev­er paths took Sacks toward his knowl­edge, he ulti­mate­ly had to get that knowl­edge down on paper him­self, and the prose of Vladimir Nabokov, the poet­ry of W.H. Auden and the phi­los­o­phy of David Hume sure­ly did their part to inspire his inci­sive and evoca­tive style. We would all, what­ev­er our inter­ests, like to write like Oliv­er Sacks: if these books shaped him as a writer and thinker, who are we to demur from, say, A Nat­ur­al His­to­ry of Ferns?

• A Nat­ur­al His­to­ry of Ferns by Rob­bin C. Moran
• A Rum Affair: A True Sto­ry of Botan­i­cal Fraud by Karl Sab­bagh
• A Trea­tise of Human Nature by David Hume
• A Vision­ary Mad­ness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influ­enc­ing Machine by Mike Jay
• Actu­al Minds, Pos­si­ble Worlds by Jerome Bruner
• Being Mor­tal: Med­i­cine and What Mat­ters in the End by Atul Gawande
• Can­nery Row (Stein­beck Cen­ten­ni­al Edi­tion (1902–2002)) by John Stein­beck
• Chal­lenger & Com­pa­ny: the Com­plete Adven­tures of Pro­fes­sor Chal­lenger and His Intre­pid Team-The Lost World, The Poi­son Belt, The Land of Mists, The Dis­in­te­gra­tion Machine and When the World Screamed by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Col­lect­ed Poems by W.H. Auden
• Curi­ous Behav­ior: Yawn­ing, Laugh­ing, Hic­cup­ping, and Beyond by Robert R. Provine
• Dar­win and the Bar­na­cle: The Sto­ry of One Tiny Crea­ture and His­to­ry’s Most Spec­tac­u­lar Sci­en­tif­ic Break­through by Rebec­ca Stott
• Dis­turb­ing the Uni­verse by Free­man Dyson
• Earth Abides by George R. Stew­art
• Evo­lu­tion: The Tri­umph of an Idea by Carl Zim­mer
• Eye of the Behold­er: Johannes Ver­meer, Antoni van Leeuwen­hoek, and the Rein­ven­tion of See­ing by Lau­ra J. Sny­der
• God’s Hotel: A Doc­tor, a Hos­pi­tal, and a Pil­grim­age to the Heart of Med­i­cine by Vic­to­ria Sweet
• Igno­rance: How It Dri­ves Sci­ence by Stu­art Firestein
• Imag­in­ing Robert: My Broth­er, Mad­ness, and Sur­vival by Jay Neuge­boren
• In Search of Mem­o­ry: The Emer­gence of a New Sci­ence of Mind by Eric R. Kan­del
• Inward Bound: Of Mat­ter and Forces in the Phys­i­cal World by Abra­ham Pais
• Lise Meit­ner: A Life in Physics by Ruth Lewin Sime
• Lost in Amer­i­ca: A Jour­ney with My Father by Sher­win B. Nuland
• Music, Lan­guage, and the Brain by Anirud­dh D. Patel
• Nat­u­ral­ist by Edward O. Wil­son
• Phan­toms in the Brain: Prob­ing the Mys­ter­ies of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachan­dran
• Plu­to­ni­um: A His­to­ry of the World’s Most Dan­ger­ous Ele­ment by Jere­my Bern­stein
• Same and Not the Same by Roald Hoff­mann
• Select­ed Poems by Thom Gunn
• Silent Thun­der: In the Pres­ence of Ele­phants by Katy Payne
• Speak, Mem­o­ry: An Auto­bi­og­ra­phy Revis­it­ed by Vladimir Nabokov
• Swim­ming to Antarc­ti­ca: Tales of a Long-Dis­tance Swim­mer by Lynne Cox
• The Age of Won­der: How the Roman­tic Gen­er­a­tion Dis­cov­ered the Beau­ty and Ter­ror of Sci­ence by Richard Holmes
• The Anatomist: A True Sto­ry of Gray’s Anato­my by Bill Hayes
• The Doors of Per­cep­tion and Heav­en and Hell by Aldous Hux­ley
• The Ele­phan­ta Suite by Paul Ther­oux
• The Feel­ing of What Hap­pens: Body and Emo­tion in the Mak­ing of Con­scious­ness by Anto­nio Dama­sio
• The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams by Sig­mund Freud
• The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curios­i­ty Changed the World by Jen­ny Uglow
• The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Lit­tle Book about a Vast Mem­o­ry by A. R. Luria
• The Prin­ci­ples of Psy­chol­o­gy (Vol­ume Two) by William James
• The World With­out Us by Alan Weis­man
• Think­ing in Pic­tures: And Oth­er Reports from My Life with Autism by Tem­ple Grandin
• Time, Love, Mem­o­ry: A Great Biol­o­gist and His Quest for the Ori­gins of Behavior by Jonathan Wein­er
• Voy­age of the Bea­gle: Charles Dar­win’s Jour­nals of Research­es by Charles Dar­win
• What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Sens­es by Daniel Chamovitz
• What Mad Pur­suit: A Per­son­al View of Sci­en­tif­ic Dis­cov­ery by Fran­cis Crick
• Won­der­ful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of His­to­ry by Stephen Jay Gould

To pur­chase books on this list, vis­it The Strand’s web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

This is What Oliv­er Sacks Learned on LSD and Amphet­a­mines

Oliv­er Sacks Con­tem­plates Mor­tal­i­ty (and His Ter­mi­nal Can­cer Diag­no­sis) in a Thought­ful, Poignant Let­ter

A First Look at The Ani­mat­ed Mind of Oliv­er Sacks, a Fea­ture-Length Jour­ney Into the Mind of the Famed Neu­rol­o­gist

Oliv­er Sacks Explains the Biol­o­gy of Hal­lu­ci­na­tions: “We See with the Eyes, But with the Brain as Well”

Oliv­er Sacks’ Final Inter­view: A First Look

29 Lists of Rec­om­mend­ed Books Cre­at­ed by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers: Jorge Luis Borges, Pat­ti Smith, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, David Bowie & More

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.

An Animated Introduction to the World’s Five Major Religions: Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity & Islam

in Religion | May 13th, 2019

No mat­ter the strength of par­tic­u­lar beliefs, or dis­be­liefs, reli­gions of every kind are all equal­ly fun­da­men­tal to the human expe­ri­ence. This was so for thou­sands of years before the advent of the world’s big five reli­gions, and for thou­sands of years after. “Reli­gion has been an aspect of cul­ture for as long as it has exist­ed, and there are count­less vari­a­tions of its prac­tice,” says Epis­co­pal priest and anthro­pol­o­gist John Bel­laimey in the TED-Ed video above. “Com­mon to all reli­gions is an appeal for mean­ing beyond the emp­ty van­i­ties and low­ly real­i­ties of exis­tence.”

Reli­gions par­tic­u­lar­ize a set of arche­typ­al human respons­es to uni­ver­sal meta­phys­i­cal ques­tions like “Where do we come from?” and “How do I live a life of mean­ing?” and “What hap­pens to us after we die?” Such ques­tions find answers out­side the bound­aries of reli­gious faith. For an increas­ing num­ber of peo­ple, sci­ence and sec­u­lar phi­los­o­phy offer com­fort­ing, even beau­ti­ful nat­u­ral­is­tic expla­na­tions. And mil­lions more feel the pull of intu­itions about a high­er pow­er or “a source from which we all come and to which we must return.”

Reli­gion gives the big ques­tions faces and names, of divini­ties, demons, and holy men (in the five big, it has been almost entire­ly men). Whether these fig­ures exist­ed or not, their leg­ends shape cul­ture and his­to­ry and are shaped and changed in turn. Bel­lamy sur­veys the big five world reli­gions with an overview of their cen­tral nar­ra­tives, illus­trat­ed with mon­tages of reli­gious art. The infor­ma­tion is at the lev­el of a 101 course intro­duc­tion, but the num­ber of peo­ple in the world who know lit­tle to noth­ing about oth­er reli­gions is like­ly quite high, giv­en the num­bers of peo­ple who know so lit­tle about their own. We can prob­a­bly all learn some­thing here we didn’t know before.

Bellamy’s approach broad­ly sug­gests that what mat­ters most in reli­gion is sto­ry. But to dis­miss reli­gions as “just sto­ries” miss­es the point. Pure­ly at the lev­el of nar­ra­tive, we can think of reli­gions as cre­ative ways to tell the sto­ries we find untellable. This says noth­ing about religion’s effects on the world. Is it a force for good or ill? Giv­en its role in every stage of human cul­tur­al devel­op­ment, both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive, maybe the ques­tion is unan­swer­able. There are too many vari­eties of reli­gious expe­ri­ence over too great a span of time to reck­on with.

Bellamy’s char­i­ta­ble expla­na­tions of the major five reli­gions high­light their con­tin­gent nature—he locates each faith in its par­tic­u­lar time and place of ori­gin. But he also shows the uni­ver­sal­iz­ing ten­den­cies of each tra­di­tion, qual­i­ties that made them so portable. He does not, how­ev­er, men­tion that more inclu­sive inter­pre­ta­tions usu­al­ly came from revolts against more lim­it­ed orig­i­nal designs. Reli­gions and cul­tures evolved togeth­er, mate­ri­al­ly and cul­tur­al­ly. As they spread and occu­pied more ter­ri­to­ry with wider pop­u­la­tions, they grew and adapt­ed.

In his book The Tree of World Reli­gions, Bel­lamy devel­ops such his­tor­i­cal mate­r­i­al into an explo­ration of twen­ty world reli­gions from Hin­duism to Rasta­far­i­an­ism, show­ing each one as a col­lec­tive act of sto­ry­telling. Com­piled from a 25-year high school world reli­gions class Bel­lamy taught, the book cov­ers the Mayans, the Norse, and Socrates, Laozi, the Hebrew Prophets, and the Bud­dha. In what Karl Jaspers called “the Axi­al Age,” writes Ama­zon, these lat­er sages “moved reli­gion from most­ly-super­nat­ur­al to most­ly-human­is­tic, shift­ing the focus on God’s inscrutable oth­er­ness to God’s increas­ing insis­tence on eth­i­cal behav­ior as the high­est form of wor­ship.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Visu­al Map of the World’s Major Reli­gions (and Non-Reli­gions)

Chris­tian­i­ty Through Its Scrip­tures: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty 

Take Harvard’s Intro­duc­to­ry Course on Bud­dhism, One of Five World Reli­gions Class­es Offered Free Online

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

Economic Geography of the Industrial World: A Free Course from UC Berkeley

in | May 13th, 2019

Taught by Pro­fes­sor Richard A. Walk­er at UC Berke­ley, this course, Eco­nom­ic Geog­ra­phy of the Indus­tri­al World, cov­ers the fol­low­ing top­ics: Indus­tri­al­iza­tion, urban­iza­tion, and eco­nom­ic growth in the glob­al North. Loca­tion­al pat­terns in man­u­fac­tur­ing, retail­ing trade, and finance. Geo­graph­ic dynam­ics of tech­ni­cal change, employ­ment, busi­ness orga­ni­za­tion, resource use, and divi­sions of labor. Prop­er­ty, labor, and social con­flict as geo­graph­ic forces. Local, nation­al, and con­ti­nen­tal rival­ries in a glob­al econ­o­my, and chal­lenges to U.S.

Lec­ture 01 — Geog­ra­phy & Econ­o­my, The Econ­o­my Today, Polit­i­cal Econ­o­my (above)
Lec­ture 02 — Mar­kets: A World for Sale
Lec­ture 03 — Indus­try: Rev­o­lu­tions in Pro­duc­tion
Lec­ture 04 — Tech­nol­o­gy: Progress & Knowl­edge
Lec­ture 05 — Cap­i­tal: The Accu­mu­la­tion of Mon­ey & Trou­ble
Lec­ture 06 — Local­iza­tion of Indus­try: Places of Pro­duc­tion
Lec­ture 07 — Glob­al­iza­tion of Indus­try: Pro­duc­tion Chains
Lec­ture 08 — The Space of Flows: Logis­tics & Sys­tems
Lec­ture 09 — Retail Loca­tion: Spaces for Sell­ing
Lec­ture 10 — Nation­al Economies: States, Dif­fer­ence & Trade
Lec­ture 11 — State Eco­nom­ic Pol­i­cy: Devel­op­ment & Sta­bi­liza­tion
Lec­ture 12 — Sta­bi­liza­tion (cont.), Empire & Econ­o­my
Lec­ture 13 — Cities & Regions
Lec­ture 14 — Class Strug­gle in the USA: Cap­i­tal Tri­umphant
Lec­ture 15 — Will Work for (Fast) Food: The New Econ­o­my of Labor
Lec­ture 16 — Work­ers of the World: Hope in the East?
Lec­ture 17 — New Divi­sions of Labor: The Chang­ing Nature of Work
Lec­ture 18 — Ele­ments of Finance: Mon­ey, Banks & Secu­ri­ties
Lec­ture 19 — Glob­al Finance: Mon­ey Makes the World Go Round
Lec­ture 20 — Finance & Growth: The Con­trol of Cap­i­tal
Lec­ture 21 — Finan­cial Fren­zy: Bub­ble Eco­nom­ics & Dys­func­tion­al Finance
Lec­ture 22 — Nat­ur­al Resources & Indus­try
Lec­ture 23 — Ener­gy Life­lines
Lec­ture 24 — Ener­gy Life­lines (cont.), Waste of the World: Neglect­ed Geo­gra­phies

Eco­nom­ic Geog­ra­phy of the Indus­tri­al World has been added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Mastering Econometrics: A Free Online Course

in | May 12th, 2019

From Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion Uni­ver­si­ty comes a new course, Mas­ter­ing Econo­met­rics, taught by MIT pro­fes­sor Josh Angrist. They write:

If you’re look­ing to untan­gle cause and effect in a com­plex world, then econo­met­rics is what you seek. Join MIT pro­fes­sor Josh Angrist, aka Mas­ter Josh­way, and learn to mas­ter the econo­met­rics “Furi­ous Five”: ran­dom assign­ment, regres­sion, instru­men­tal vari­ables, regres­sion dis­con­ti­nu­ity designs, and dif­fer­ences-in-dif­fer­ences meth­ods. Think econo­met­rics is bor­ing? So it was once, but will be no more! Skip­ping the­o­ret­i­cal tedi­um, we use real empir­i­cal ques­tions to bring the num­bers to life. Does an expen­sive pri­vate uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion pay off with high­er earn­ings? Does health insur­ance real­ly make you health­i­er? Does legal drink­ing cost lives? Econo­met­rics is a jour­ney, grasshop­per.

Get start­ed on the course here. Also see the pro­fes­sor’s book, Most­ly Harm­less Econo­met­rics: An Empiri­cist’s Com­pan­ion.

Mas­ter­ing Econo­met­rics will be added to our list of Free Eco­nom­ics 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!