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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What the Theory?: Watch Short Introductions to Postmodernism, Semiotics, Phenomenology, Marxist Literary Criticism and More

in Philosophy | May 8th, 2019

The­o­ry. The word alone can intim­i­date, and it can espe­cial­ly intim­i­date those of us out­side the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties. The rig­or and com­plex­i­ty of sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry is for­bid­ding enough, but cul­tur­al the­o­ry, with its thick­ets of mul­ti­va­lent mean­ing and thinkers with their cultish­ly devot­ed and ter­ri­to­r­i­al fol­low­ings, has sure­ly made many a hope­ful learn­er turn back before they’ve even stepped in. But help has arrived in this age of explain­ers, most recent­ly in the form of a Uni­ver­si­ty of Exeter PhD stu­dent and Youtu­ber named Tom Nicholas who has tak­en it upon him­self to explain such tricky sub­jects as post­mod­ernism, semi­otics, phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, and many oth­ers besides in his series “What the The­o­ry?”

Nico­las has put his aca­d­e­m­ic back­ground into videos on every­thing from how to read jour­nal arti­cles and write essays to sub­jects like his own research and how Bojack Horse­man cri­tiques the 1990s. But it’s “What the The­o­ry?” that most direct­ly con­fronts the intel­lec­tu­al frame­works that his oth­er videos put to more implic­it use.

In it he breaks down the nature of the most abstruse-sound­ing dis­ci­plines in all the mod­ern human­i­ties as well as the ideas of the the­o­rists who devel­oped them — semi­otics and Fer­di­nand de Saus­sure, phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy and Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, cul­tur­al mate­ri­al­ism and Ray­mond Williams, as well as broad­er con­cepts like post­mod­ernism and even the mod­ernism that pre­ced­ed it — illu­mi­nat­ing them by draw­ing upon a set of less-rar­efied works, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to Dunkirk and The Lego Movie.

In more recent “What the The­o­ry?” videos, Nicholas takes on indi­vid­ual ideas as pop­u­lar­ized (at least with­in the acad­e­my) by cer­tain writ­ers, the­o­rists, and philoso­phers. He explains, for exam­ple, what Roland Barthes meant when he pro­claimed “the death of the author” in 1967, as well as what Barthes’ coun­try­man Guy Debord meant when he described human­i­ty as liv­ing in a “soci­ety of the spec­ta­cle” that same year. Watch through the entire “What the The­o­ry?” playlist so far, and there’s a chance you might come away with an inter­est in launch­ing an aca­d­e­m­ic career of your own in order to dig deep­er into these and oth­er ideas. But there’s a much greater chance that you’ll come away believ­ing that these crit­i­cal texts actu­al­ly do have insights to offer our world, the soci­eties that make up our world, and the cul­ture that dri­ves those soci­eties — bare­ly intel­li­gi­ble though many of them may still look.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Quick Intro­duc­tion to Lit­er­ary The­o­ry: Watch Ani­mat­ed Videos from the Open Uni­ver­si­ty

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Roland Barthes’s Mytholo­gies and How He Used Semi­otics to Decode Pop­u­lar Cul­ture

Yale Presents a Free Online Course on Lit­er­ary The­o­ry, Cov­er­ing Struc­tural­ism, Decon­struc­tion & More

David Fos­ter Wal­lace on What’s Wrong with Post­mod­ernism: A Video Essay

Noam Chom­sky Explains What’s Wrong with Post­mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy & French Intel­lec­tu­als, and How They End Up Sup­port­ing Oppres­sive Pow­er Struc­tures

The CIA Assess­es the Pow­er of French Post-Mod­ern Philoso­phers: Read a New­ly Declas­si­fied CIA Report from 1985

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 or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Dictionary of Words Invented to Name Emotions We All Feel, But Don’t Yet Have a Name For: Vemödalen, Sonder, Chrysalism & Much More

in English Language, Film, Life, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychology | April 30th, 2019

Philoso­phers have always dis­trust­ed lan­guage for its slip­per­i­ness, its overuse, its propen­si­ty to deceive. Yet many of those same crit­ics have devised the most inven­tive terms to describe things no one had ever seen. The Philosopher’s Stone, the aether, mias­mas—images that made the inef­fa­ble con­crete, if still invis­i­bly gaseous.

It’s impor­tant for us to see the myr­i­ad ways our com­mon lan­guage fails to cap­ture the com­plex­i­ty of real­i­ty, ordi­nary and oth­er­wise. Ask any poet, writer, or lan­guage teacher to tell you about it—most of the words we use are too abstract, too worn out, decayed, or rusty. Maybe it takes either a poet or a philoso­pher to not only notice the many prob­lems with lan­guage, but to set about rem­e­dy­ing them.

Such are the qual­i­ties of the mind behind The Dic­tio­nary of Obscure Sor­rows, a project by graph­ic design­er and film­mak­er John Koenig. The blog, YouTube chan­nel, and soon-to-be book from Simon & Schus­ter has a sim­ple premise: it iden­ti­fies emo­tion­al states with­out names, and offers both a poet­ic term and a philosopher’s skill at pre­cise def­i­n­i­tion. Whether these words actu­al­ly enter the lan­guage almost seems beside the point, but so many of them seem bad­ly need­ed, and per­fect­ly craft­ed for their pur­pose.

Take one of the most pop­u­lar of these, the invent­ed word “Son­der,” which describes the sud­den real­iza­tion that every­one has a sto­ry, that “each ran­dom passer­by is liv­ing a life as vivid and com­plex as your own.” This shock can seem to enlarge or dimin­ish us, or both at the same time. Psy­chol­o­gists may have a term for it, but ordi­nary speech seemed lack­ing.

Son­der like­ly became as pop­u­lar as it did on social media because the theme “we’re all liv­ing con­nect­ed sto­ries” already res­onates with so much pop­u­lar cul­ture. Many of the Dictionary’s oth­er terms trend far more unam­bigu­ous­ly melan­choly, if not neurotic—hence “obscure sor­rows.” But they also range con­sid­er­ably in tone, from the rel­a­tive light­ness of Greek-ish neol­o­gism “Anecdoche”—“a con­ver­sa­tion in which every­one is talk­ing, but nobody is listening”—to the major­ly depres­sive “pâro”:

the feel­ing that no mat­ter what you do is always some­how wrong—as if there’s some obvi­ous way for­ward that every­body else can see but you, each of them lean­ing back in their chair and call­ing out help­ful­ly, “cold­er, cold­er, cold­er…”

Both the coinages and the def­i­n­i­tions illu­mi­nate each oth­er. Take “Énoue­ment,” defined as “the bit­ter­sweet­ness of hav­ing arrived in the future, see­ing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.” A psy­chol­o­gy of aging in the form of an elo­quent dic­tio­nary entry. Some­times the rela­tion­ship is less sub­tle, but still mag­i­cal, as in the far from sor­row­ful “Chrysal­ism: The amni­ot­ic tran­quil­i­ty of being indoors dur­ing a thun­der­storm.”

Some­times, it is not a word but a phrase that speaks most poignant­ly of emo­tions that we know exist but can­not cap­ture with­out dead­en­ing clichés. “Moment of Tan­gency” speaks poignant­ly of a meta­phys­i­cal phi­los­o­phy in verse. Like Son­der, this phrase draws on an image of inter­con­nect­ed­ness. But rather than tak­ing a per­spec­tive from within—from solip­sism to empathy—it takes the point of view of all pos­si­ble real­i­ties.

Watch the video for “Vemö­dalen: The Fear That Every­thing Has Already Been Done” up top. See sev­er­al more short films from the project here, includ­ing “Silience: The Bril­liant Artistry Hid­den All Around You”—if, that is, we could only pay atten­tion to it. Below, find 23 oth­er entries describ­ing emo­tions peo­ple feel, but can’t explain.

1. Son­der: The real­iza­tion that each passer­by has a life as vivid and com­plex as your own.
2. Opia: The ambigu­ous inten­si­ty of Look­ing some­one in the eye, which can feel simul­ta­ne­ous­ly inva­sive and vul­ner­a­ble.
3. Mona­chop­sis: The sub­tle but per­sis­tent feel­ing of being out of place.
4 Énoue­ment: The bit­ter­sweet­ness of hav­ing arrived in the future, see­ing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.
5. Vel­li­chor: The strange wist­ful­ness of used book­shops.
6. Rubato­sis: The unset­tling aware­ness of your own heart­beat.
7. Kenop­sia: The eerie, for­lorn atmos­phere of a place that is usu­al­ly bustling with peo­ple but is now aban­doned and qui­et.
8. Mauer­bauer­trau­rigkeit: The inex­plic­a­ble urge to push peo­ple away, even close friends who you real­ly like.
9. Jous­ka: A hypo­thet­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion that you com­pul­sive­ly play out in your head.
10. Chrysal­ism: The amni­ot­ic tran­quil­i­ty of being indoors dur­ing a thun­der­storm.
11. Vemö­dalen: The frus­tra­tion of pho­to­graph­ic some­thing amaz­ing when thou­sands of iden­ti­cal pho­tos already exist.
12. Anec­doche: A con­ver­sa­tion in which every­one is talk­ing, but nobody is lis­ten­ing
13. Ellip­sism: A sad­ness that you’ll nev­er be able to know how his­to­ry will turn out.
14. Kue­biko: A state of exhaus­tion inspired by acts of sense­less vio­lence.
15. Lach­esism: The desire to be struck by dis­as­ter – to sur­vive a plane crash, or to lose every­thing in a fire.
16. Exu­lan­sis: The ten­den­cy to give up try­ing to talk about an expe­ri­ence because peo­ple are unable to relate to it.
17. Adroni­tis: Frus­tra­tion with how long it takes to get to know some­one.
18. Rück­kehrun­ruhe: The feel­ing of return­ing home after an immer­sive trip only to find it fad­ing rapid­ly from your aware­ness.
19. Nodus Tol­lens: The real­iza­tion that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you any­more.
20. Onism: The frus­tra­tion of being stuck in just one body, that inhab­its only one place at a time.
21. Libero­sis: The desire to care less about things.
22. Altschmerz: Weari­ness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same bor­ing flaws and anx­i­eties that you’ve been gnaw­ing on for years.
23. Occhi­olism: The aware­ness of the small­ness of your per­spec­tive.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Tsun­doku,” the Japan­ese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the Eng­lish Lan­guage

The Largest His­tor­i­cal Dic­tio­nary of Eng­lish Slang Now Free Online: Cov­ers 500 Years of the “Vul­gar Tongue”

How a Word Enters the Dic­tio­nary: A Quick Primer

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

Is Modern Society Stealing What Makes Us Human?: A Glimpse Into Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra by The Partially Examined Life

in Philosophy, Podcasts | April 29th, 2019

Image by Genevieve Arnold

The pro­logue of Friedrich Niet­zsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathus­tra (1883) intro­duced his notion of the “last man,” who is no longer cre­ative, no longer explor­ing, no longer risk tak­ing. He took this to be the implic­it aim of efforts to “dis­cov­er hap­pi­ness” by fig­ur­ing out human nature and engi­neer­ing soci­ety to ful­fill human needs. If needs are met, no suf­fer­ing occurs, no effort is need­ed to counter the suf­fer­ing, and we all stag­nate. Is our tech­nol­o­gy-enhanced con­sumer cul­ture well on its way to deliv­er­ing us up to such a fate?

In the clip below, Mark Lin­sen­may­er from the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life phi­los­o­phy pod­cast con­sid­ers this pos­si­bil­i­ty, explores Niet­zsche’s pic­ture of ethics, and con­cludes that the poten­tial mis­take by poten­tial social engi­neers lies in under­es­ti­mat­ing the com­plex­i­ty of human needs. As Niet­zsche argued, we’re all idio­syn­crat­ic, and our needs are not just for peace, warmth, food, exer­cise and enter­tain­ment, but (once these are sat­is­fied, per Maslow’s hier­ar­chy of needs) self-actu­al­iza­tion, which is an indi­vid­ual pur­suit, and so is impos­si­ble to mass engi­neer. Hav­ing our more basic needs ful­filled with­out life-fill­ing effort (i.e. full time jobs) would not leave us com­pla­cent but actu­al­ly free to enter­tain these “high­er needs,” and so to pur­sue the cre­ative pur­suits that Niet­zsche thought were the pin­na­cle of human achieve­ment.

Niet­zsche’s tar­get is util­i­tar­i­an­ism, which urges indi­vid­u­als and pol­i­cy-mak­ers to max­i­mize hap­pi­ness, and the more this is pur­sued sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, the more that “hap­pi­ness” needs to be reduced to some­thing poten­tial­ly mea­sur­able, like plea­sure, but clear­ly plea­sure does not add up to a mean­ing­ful life. While we may not be able to quan­ti­fy mean­ing­ful­ness and aim pub­lic pol­i­cy in that direc­tion, it should be eas­i­er to iden­ti­fy clear obsta­cles to pur­su­ing mean­ing­ful activ­i­ty, such as ill­ness, pover­ty, drudgery and servi­tude. We should be glad that choos­ing the most eth­i­cal path is not a mat­ter of mere cal­cu­la­tion, because on Niet­zsche’s view, we thrive as “cre­ators of val­ues,” and fig­ur­ing out for our­selves what makes each us tru­ly hap­py (what we find valu­able) is itself a mean­ing­ful activ­i­ty.

The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life episodes 213 and 214 (forth­com­ing) pro­vide a 4‑man walk­through of Thus Spoke Zarathus­tra, explor­ing the Last Man, the Over­man, Will to Pow­er, the dec­la­ra­tion that “God Is Dead,” and oth­er noto­ri­ous ideas.

Episode 213 Part One:

Episode 213 Part Two: 

Mark Lin­sen­may­er is the host of The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life and Naked­ly Exam­ined Music pod­casts. 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Steven Pinker & Rebecca Goldstein Debate the Value of Reason in an Animated Socratic Dialogue

in Animation, Philosophy | April 26th, 2019

Aca­d­e­m­ic pow­er cou­ple Steven Pinker and Rebec­ca New­berg­er Gold­stein prob­a­bly need no intro­duc­tion to Open Cul­ture read­ers, but if so, their lengthy and impres­sive CVs are only a search and click away. The Har­vard cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gist and nov­el­ist and philoso­pher, respec­tive­ly, are sec­u­lar human­ist heroes of a sort—public intel­lec­tu­als who have ded­i­cat­ed their lives to defend­ing sci­ence and clas­si­cal log­ic and rea­son­ing. So, what do two such peo­ple talk about when they go out to din­ner?

The TED-Ed video above depicts a date night sce­nario, with dia­logue record­ed live at TED in 2012 and edit­ed into an “ani­mat­ed Socrat­ic dia­logue.” The first scene begins with a defen­sive Gold­stein hold­ing forth on the decline of rea­son in polit­i­cal dis­course and pop­u­lar cul­ture. “Peo­ple who think too well are often accused of elit­ism,” says Gold­stein, while she and Pinker’s ani­mat­ed avatars stroll under a Star Trek bill­board fea­tur­ing Spock giv­ing the Vul­can salute, just one of many clever details insert­ed by ani­ma­tion stu­dio Cog­ni­tive.

Pinker nar­rows the debate to a dilemma—a Spock­ean dilem­ma, if you will—between the head and heart. “Per­haps rea­son is over­rat­ed,” he ven­tures (artic­u­lat­ing a posi­tion he may not actu­al­ly hold): “Many pun­dits have argued that a good heart and stead­fast moral clar­i­ty are supe­ri­or to the tri­an­gu­la­tions of over-edu­cat­ed pol­i­cy wonks.” The cow­boy with a six-shoot­er and a heart of gold depict­ed in the ani­ma­tion bests the stereo­typ­i­cal eggheads in every Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tion.

The “best and bright­est” of the eggheads, after all, says Pinker, “dragged us into the quag­mire in Viet­nam.” Oth­er quag­mires advo­cat­ed by oth­er pol­i­cy wonks might come to mind (as might the unrea­son­ing cow­boys who made the big deci­sions.) Rea­son, says Pinker, gave us envi­ron­men­tal despo­li­a­tion and weapons of mass destruc­tion. He sets up a dichoto­my between “char­ac­ter & con­science” on the one side and “cold-heart­ed cal­cu­la­tion” on the oth­er. “My fel­low psy­chol­o­gists have shown that we are led by our bod­ies and our emo­tions and use our puny pow­ers of rea­son mere­ly to ratio­nal­ize our gut feel­ings after the fact.”

Gold­stein coun­ters, “how could a rea­soned argu­ment entail the inef­fec­tive­ness of rea­soned argu­ments?” (Visu­al learn­ers may remem­ber the image of a per­son blithe­ly saw­ing off the branch on which they sit.) “By the very act of try­ing to rea­son us into your posi­tion, you’re con­ced­ing reason’s poten­cy.” One might object that stat­ing a sci­en­tif­ic theory—such as the the­o­ry that sen­sa­tion and emo­tion come before reasoning—is not the same as mak­ing an Aris­totelian argu­ment.

But this is a 15-minute debate, not a philo­soph­i­cal trea­tise. There will, by nature of the forum and the edit­ing process, be eli­sions and some slip­pery uses of ter­mi­nol­o­gy. Still, when Gold­stein dis­miss­es the cri­tique of “logo­cen­trism” as an alle­ga­tion of “the crime of let­ting log­ic dom­i­nate our think­ing,” some philoso­phers may grind their teeth. The prob­lem of logo­cen­trism is not “too much log­ic” but the under­ly­ing influ­ence of Pla­ton­ic ide­al­ism and the so-called “meta­physics of pres­ence” on West­ern think­ing.

With­out the cri­tique of logo­cen­trism, argues philoso­pher Peter Grat­ton, “there is no 20th-cen­tu­ry con­ti­nen­tal phi­los­o­phy.” Hand­wav­ing away an entire body of thought seems rather hasty. Out­side of spe­cif­ic con­texts, ide­al­ized abstrac­tions like “rea­son” and “progress” may mean lit­tle to noth­ing at all in the messy real­i­ty of human affairs. This is the prob­lem Pinker alludes to in ask­ing whether rea­son can have moral ends if it is main­ly a tool we use to sat­is­fy short-term bio­log­i­cal and emo­tion­al needs and desires.

By the time the check arrives, Pinker has been per­suad­ed by Goldstein’s argu­ment that in the course of time, maybe a long time, rea­son is the key dri­ver of moral progress, pro­vid­ed that cer­tain con­di­tions are met: that rea­son­ers care about their well-being and that they belong to a com­mu­ni­ty of oth­er rea­son­ers who hold each oth­er account­able and pro­duce bet­ter out­comes than indi­vid­u­als can alone. Drop your assump­tions, watch their stim­u­lat­ing ani­mat­ed din­ner and see if, by the final course, you are per­suad­ed too.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Steven Pinker: “Dear Human­ists, Sci­ence is Not Your Ene­my”

What is the Good Life? Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, Niet­zsche, & Kant’s Ideas in 4 Ani­mat­ed Videos

How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions on Ethics Nar­rat­ed by Har­ry Shear­er

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

What Is a Zen Koan? An Animated Introduction to Eastern Philosophical Thought Experiments

in Philosophy, Religion | April 22nd, 2019

If you know any­thing at all about Zen, you know the famous ques­tion about the sound of one hand clap­ping. While the brain teas­er did indeed orig­i­nate with a Zen mas­ter, it does not ful­ly rep­re­sent the nature of the koan. Between the 9th and 13th cen­turies, when Chan Bud­dhism, as Zen was known in Chi­na, flour­ished, koans became wide­ly-used, explains the TED-Ed ani­mat­ed video above, as objects of med­i­ta­tion. “A col­lec­tion of rough­ly one thou­sand, sev­en hun­dred bewil­der­ing philo­soph­i­cal thought exper­i­ments,” koans were osten­si­bly tools to prac­tice liv­ing with the unex­plain­able mys­ter­ies of exis­tence.

The name, notes the les­son, “orig­i­nal­ly gong-an in Chi­nese, trans­lates to ‘pub­lic record or case.’ But unlike real-world court cas­es, koans were inten­tion­al­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble.” Koans are “Sur­pris­ing, sur­re­al, and fre­quent­ly con­tra­dict­ed them­selves.” The lessons in ambi­gu­i­ty and para­dox have their ana­logue, per­haps, in cer­tain trains of thought in Medieval Catholic phi­los­o­phy or the ide­al­ism of thinkers like George Berke­ley, who might have first come up with the one about the tree falling in the for­est.

But is the pur­pose of the koan sim­ply to break the brain’s reliance on rea­son? It was cer­tain­ly used this way. Zen Mas­ter Eihei Dogen, founder of Japan­ese Soto Zen trav­eled to Chi­na to study under the Chan Mas­ters, and lat­er crit­i­cized this kind of koan prac­tice and oth­er aspects of Chan, though he also col­lect­ed 300 koans him­self and they became inte­gral to Soto tra­di­tion. Koans are not just absur­dist zingers, they are, as the name says, cases—little sto­ries, often about two monks in some kind of teacher and stu­dent rela­tion­ship. Many of the stu­dents and teach­ers in these sto­ries were patri­archs of Chan.

Like the say­ings and doings of oth­er reli­gious patri­archs in oth­er world reli­gions, these “cas­es” have been col­lect­ed with copi­ous com­men­tary in books like The Blue Cliff Record and The Book of Seren­i­ty. They show in snap­shots the trans­mis­sion of the teach­ing direct­ly from teacher to stu­dent, rather than through sacred texts or rit­u­als (hun­dreds of koans, rules, and rit­u­als notwith­stand­ing). That they are puz­zling and ambigu­ous does not mean they are incom­pre­hen­si­ble. Many seem more or less like fables, such as the oft-told sto­ry of the monk who car­ries a beau­ti­ful woman across a mud patch, then chas­tis­es his younger com­pan­ion for bring­ing it up miles down the road.

Oth­er koans are like Greek philo­soph­i­cal dia­logues in minia­ture, such as the sto­ry in which two monks argue about the nature of a flag wav­ing in the wind. A third steps in, Socrates-like, with a seem­ing­ly “right” answer that tran­scends both of their posi­tions. The longevi­ty of these vignettes lies in their subtlety—surface mean­ings only hint at what the sto­ries are up to. Koans force those who take up their study to strug­gle with uncer­tain­ty and irres­o­lu­tion. They also fre­quent­ly under­mine the most com­mon expec­ta­tion that the teacher knows best.

Often posed as a kind of oblique ver­bal com­bat between teacher and stu­dent, koans include extreme­ly harsh, even vio­lent teach­ers, or teach­ers who seem to admit defeat, tac­it­ly or oth­er­wise, when a stu­dent gets the upper hand, or when both con­front the speech­less awe of not know­ing. Atti­tudes of respect, rev­er­ence, humil­i­ty, can­dor, and good humor pre­vail. Per­haps under all koan prac­tice lies the idea of skill­ful means—the appro­pri­ate action to take in the moment, which can only be known in the moment.

In his short, humor­ous dis­cus­sion of Zen koans above, Alan Watts tells the sto­ry of a Zen stu­dent who tricks his mas­ter and hits him with his own stick. The mas­ter responds with approval of the student’s tac­tics, but the koan does not sug­gest that every­one should do the same. That, as Dogen would argue, would be to have an idea about real­i­ty, rather than a whol­ly-engaged response to it. What­ev­er else koans show their stu­dents, they point again and again to this cen­tral human dilem­ma of think­ing about living—in the past, present, or future—versus actu­al­ly expe­ri­enc­ing our lives.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Watts Presents a 15-Minute Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tion: A Time-Test­ed Way to Stop Think­ing About Think­ing

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

The World’s Largest Col­lec­tion of Tibetan Bud­dhist Lit­er­a­ture Now Online

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast