What Is Freedom? Watch Four Philosophy Animations on Freedom & Free Will Narrated by Harry Shearer

in Neuroscience, Philosophy | September 6th, 2017

Grow­ing up in Amer­i­ca, I heard near­ly every behav­ior, no mat­ter how unpleas­ant, jus­ti­fied with the same phrase: “It’s a free coun­try.” In her recent book Notes on a For­eign Coun­try, the Istan­bul-based Amer­i­can reporter Suzy Hansen remem­bers singing “God Bless the USA” on the school bus dur­ing the first Iraq war: “And I’m proud to be an Amer­i­can / Where at least I know I’m free.” That “at least,” she adds, is fun­ny: “We were free – at the very least we were that. Every­one else was a chump, because they didn’t even have that obvi­ous thing. What­ev­er it meant, it was the thing that we had, and no one else did. It was our God-giv­en gift, our super­pow­er.”

But how many of us can explain what free­dom is? These videos from BBC Radio 4 and the Open Uni­ver­si­ty’s ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Ideas series approach that ques­tion from four dif­fer­ent angles. “Free­dom is good, but secu­ri­ty is bet­ter,” says nar­ra­tor Har­ry Shear­er, sum­ming up the view of sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher Thomas Hobbes, who imag­ined life with­out gov­ern­ment, laws, or soci­ety as “soli­tary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The solu­tion, he pro­posed, came in the form of a social con­tract “to put a strong leader, a sov­er­eign or per­haps a gov­ern­ment, over them to keep the peace” — an escape from “the war of all against all.”

But that escape comes hand in hand with the unpalat­able prospect of liv­ing under “a fright­en­ing­ly pow­er­ful state.” The nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher John Stu­art Mill, who wrote a great deal about the state’s prop­er lim­i­ta­tions, based his con­cept of free­dom in some­thing called the “harm prin­ci­ple,” which holds that “the state, my neigh­bors, and every­one else should let me get on with my life, as long as I don’t harm any­one in the process.” As “the seedbed of genius” and “the basis of endur­ing hap­pi­ness for ordi­nary peo­ple,” this indi­vid­ual free­dom needs pro­tec­tion, espe­cial­ly when it comes to speech: “Mere­ly caus­ing offense, he thinks, is no grounds for inter­ven­tion, because, in his view, that is not a harm.”

That propo­si­tion remains debat­ed more heat­ed­ly now, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, than Mill prob­a­bly could have imag­ined. But then as now, and as in any time of human his­to­ry, we live in more or less the same world, “a world fes­ter­ing with moral evil, a world of wars, tor­ture, rape, mur­der, and oth­er acts of mean­ing­less vio­lence,” not to men­tion “nat­ur­al evil” like dis­ease, famine, floods, and earth­quakes. This gives rise to per­haps the old­est prob­lem in the philo­soph­i­cal book, the prob­lem of evil: “How could a good god allow any­one to do such hor­rif­ic things?” Some have tak­en the fact that the wars, mur­ders, floods, and earth­quakes con­tin­ue as evi­dence that no such god exists.

But had that god cre­at­ed “human beings that always did the right thing, nev­er harmed any­one else, nev­er went astray,” we’d all have end­ed up “automa­ta, pre­pro­grammed robots.” Bet­ter, in this view, “to have free will with the gen­uine risk that some peo­ple will end up evil than to live in a world with­out choice.” Even so, the mere men­tion of free will, a con­cept no more eas­i­ly defined than that of free­dom itself, opens up a whole oth­er can of worms, espe­cial­ly in light of research like neu­ro­sci­en­tist Ben­jamin Libet’s.

Libet, who “wired up sub­jects to an EEG machine, mea­sur­ing brain activ­i­ty via elec­trodes on our scalps,” found that brain activ­i­ty ini­ti­at­ing a move­ment actu­al­ly hap­pened before the sub­jects thought they’d decid­ed to make that move­ment. Does that dis­prove free will? Does evil dis­prove the exis­tence of a good god? Does offense cause the same kind of harm as phys­i­cal vio­lence? Should we give up more secu­ri­ty for free­dom, or more free­dom for secu­ri­ty? These ques­tions remain unan­swered, and quite pos­si­bly unan­swer­able, but that does­n’t make con­sid­er­ing the very nature of free­dom any less nec­es­sary as human soci­eties — those in “free coun­tries” and oth­er­wise — find their way for­ward.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

47 Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain the His­to­ry of Ideas: From Aris­to­tle to Sartre

An Ani­mat­ed Aldous Hux­ley Iden­ti­fies the Dystopi­an Threats to Our Free­dom (1958)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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An Animated Introduction to Ludwig Wittgenstein & His Philosophical Insights on the Problems of Human Communication

in Philosophy | August 30th, 2017

In the record­ed his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy, there may be no sharp­er a mind than Lud­wig Wittgen­stein. A bête noire, enfant ter­ri­ble, and all oth­er such phras­es used to describe affronts to order and deco­rum, Wittgen­stein also rep­re­sent­ed an anar­chic force that dis­turbed the staid dis­ci­pline. His teacher Bertrand Rus­sell rec­og­nized the exis­ten­tial threat Wittgen­stein posed to his pro­fes­sion (though not right away). When Wittgen­stein hand­ed Rus­sell the com­pact, cryp­tic Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus, he admit­ted his stu­dent had gone beyond his own ana­lyt­ic insights in the pur­suit of absolute clar­i­ty. Wittgenstein’s long­time men­tor and friend, famed logi­cian and math­e­mati­cian Got­t­lob Frege, expressed crit­i­cism. Some have sug­gest­ed he did so in part because he saw that Wittgen­stein had ren­dered much of his work irrel­e­vant.

Alain de Bot­ton gives a brief but fas­ci­nat­ing sketch of Wittgen­stein’s ideas and incred­i­bly odd biog­ra­phy in the School of Life video above. The eccen­tric Aus­tri­an savant, he asserts, “can help us with our com­mu­ni­ca­tion prob­lems” through his pen­e­trat­ing, though often impen­e­tra­ble, claims about lan­guage. That may be so. But we may need to rede­fine what we mean by “com­mu­ni­ca­tion.” Accord­ing to Wittgen­stein in the Trac­ta­tus, an over­whelm­ing per­cent­age of what we obsess about on a dai­ly basis—political and reli­gious abstrac­tions, for example—is so total­ly inco­her­ent and mud­dled that it means noth­ing at all. He revised this opin­ion dra­mat­i­cal­ly in his lat­er thought.

Though he pub­lished noth­ing after the Trac­ta­tus and soon became a near-recluse after his star­tling entry into ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy, notes from his stu­dents were col­lect­ed and pub­lished as well as a posthu­mous book called Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions. This ver­sion of Wittgenstein’s approach to the prob­lems of com­mu­ni­ca­tion involves a devel­op­ment of the “ostensive”—or demonstrative—role of lan­guage. Wittgen­stein made an argu­ment that lan­guage can only serve a social, rather than a per­son­al, sub­jec­tive, func­tion. To make the point, he intro­duced his “Bee­tle in a Box” anal­o­gy, which you can see explained above in an ani­mat­ed BBC video writ­ten by Nigel War­bur­ton and nar­rat­ed by Aidan Turn­er.

The anal­o­gy uses the idea of each of us claim­ing to have a bee­tle in a box as a stand in for our indi­vid­ual, pri­vate expe­ri­ences. We all claim to have them (we can even observe brain states), but no one can ever see inside the the­ater of our minds to ver­i­fy. We sim­ply have to take each oth­er’s word for it. We play “lan­guage games,” which only have mean­ing in respect to their con­text. That such games can be mutu­al­ly intel­li­gi­ble among indi­vid­u­als who are oth­er­wise  opaque to each oth­er has to do with our shared envi­ron­ment, abil­i­ties, and lim­i­ta­tions. Should we, how­ev­er, meet a lion who could speak—in per­fect­ly intel­li­gi­ble English—we would not, Wittgen­stein assert­ed, be able to under­stand a sin­gle word. The vast­ly dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences of human ver­sus lion would not trans­late through any medi­um.

Just above, we have an expla­na­tion of this thought exper­i­ment from an unlike­ly source, Ricky Ger­vais, in an attempt­ed expla­na­tion to his com­ic foil Karl Pilk­ing­ton, who takes things in his own pecu­liar direc­tion. Though Wittgen­stein used the idea for a dif­fer­ent pur­pose, his obser­va­tion about the unbridge­able chasm between humans and lions antic­i­pates Thomas Nagel’s provoca­tive claims in the 1974 essay “What is it like to be a bat?” We can­not inhab­it the sub­jec­tive states of beings so dif­fer­ent from us, and there­fore can­not say much of any­thing about their con­scious­ness. Maybe it isn’t like any­thing to be a bat. Luck­i­ly for humans, we do have the abil­i­ty to imag­ine each other’s expe­ri­ences, in indi­rect, imper­fect, round­about, ways, and we all have enough shared con­text that we can, at least the­o­ret­i­cal­ly, use lan­guage to pro­duce more clar­i­ty of thought and greater social har­mo­ny.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Wittgenstein’s Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus Sung as a One-Woman Opera

In Search of Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Seclud­ed Hut in Nor­way: A Short Trav­el Film

Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Short, Strange & Bru­tal Stint as an Ele­men­tary School Teacher

Wittgen­stein and Hitler Attend­ed the Same School in Aus­tria, at the Same Time (1904)

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

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On the Power of Teaching Philosophy in Prisons

in Life, Philosophy | August 22nd, 2017

Phi­los­o­phy is often seen as an arcane aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­pline, in com­pe­ti­tion with the hard sci­ences or laden with abstruse con­cepts and lan­guage inac­ces­si­ble to ordi­nary peo­ple. Such a per­cep­tion may be war­rant­ed. This is not to damn aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy but to high­light what has been lost through pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion: clas­si­cal notions of ethics as “the art of liv­ing” or what Michel Fou­cault called “the care of the self”; the ancient Greek idea of par­rhe­sia—bold, hon­est speech uncloud­ed by pro­pri­etary jar­gon; phi­los­o­phy as a prac­tice like med­i­ta­tion or yoga, a tech­nique for self-knowl­edge, self-con­trol, and wise, just, and con­sid­er­ate rela­tion­ships with oth­ers.

From Socrates to Aris­to­tle to Epi­cu­rus and the Sto­ics, ancient West­ern thinkers believed phi­los­o­phy to be inti­mate­ly rel­e­vant to every­day life. This was very much the case in ancient East­ern thought as well, in the Jain­ist sages, the Bud­dha, or Lao-Tzu, to name a few. We will find some form of pop­u­lar phi­los­o­phy on every con­ti­nent and every his­tor­i­cal age. And while plen­ty of mod­ern teach­ers still believe in phi­los­o­phy for every­one, they oper­ate in a con­sumer cul­ture that often deems them irrel­e­vant, at best. Still, many edu­ca­tors per­sist out­side the acad­e­my, endeav­or­ing to reach not only ordi­nary cit­i­zens but a class of dis­em­pow­ered peo­ple also deemed irrel­e­vant, at best: the impris­oned, many of whom have had few edu­ca­tion­al resources and lit­tle to no expo­sure to philo­soph­i­cal think­ing.

We have many exam­ples of influ­en­tial thinkers writ­ing from prison, whether Boethius’ ear­ly Chris­t­ian Con­so­la­tions of Phi­los­o­phy, Anto­nio Gramsci’s pas­sion­ate Marx­ist prison let­ters, Oscar Wilde’s De Pro­fundis, or Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.’s essen­tial “Let­ter from a Birm­ing­ham Jail.” These have maybe pro­vid­ed read­ers who have nev­er been jailed with trag­ic, yet roman­tic notions of doing phi­los­o­phy while doing time. But the philoso­phers who enter pris­ons to work with peo­ple convicted—justly or otherwise—of all man­ner of crimes can­not afford to have roman­tic ideas. Philoso­pher Alan Smith found this to be espe­cial­ly so after teach­ing in UK pris­ons for 14 years, and writ­ing bold­ly and can­did­ly about the expe­ri­ence in his Guardian col­umn “Phi­los­o­phy for Pris­on­ers.”

Final­ly retir­ing in 2013, Smith con­fessed, “If I car­ried on in prison, I would have to do it dif­fer­ent­ly; I would have to admit that it was prison.” He may have felt burned out at the end of his sojourn, but he had­n’t lost his sense of eth­i­cal pur­pose:

When we don’t know about his­to­ry and art and soci­ety we are adrift. Most of you read­ing this will nev­er have had that expe­ri­ence, but many of the men I taught were igno­rant of just about every­thing, and as grown men felt this keen­ly. Edu­ca­tion was a relief, a route to self-respect.

Those who do this work report on how so many inmates hunger for routes to self-knowl­edge, reflec­tion, and rig­or­ous intel­lec­tu­al exer­cise. Sev­er­al edu­ca­tors at The Phi­los­o­phy Foun­da­tion, for exam­ple, have writ­ten about their expe­ri­ences teach­ing phi­los­o­phy in var­i­ous UK pris­ons. Con­di­tions are dif­fer­ent, and often much bleak­er, in the US—a coun­try with 5% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion and 25% of its prisoners—but here, too, philoso­phers have helped inmates dis­cov­er new truths about them­selves and their soci­ety. In the very short TED talk up top, Damon Horowitz, who teach­es at San Quentin through the Prison Uni­ver­si­ty Project, gives a pas­sion­ate, rapid-fire account­ing of his mis­sion behind bars: “Every­one’s got an opin­ion. We are here for knowl­edge. Our ene­my is thought­less­ness.” A cho­rus of ven­er­a­ble ancients would assured­ly agree.

Fur­ther down, you can see par­tic­i­pants in Prince­ton’s Prison Teach­ing Ini­tia­tive talk about the virtues and rewards of their accred­it­ed pro­gram. That includes teach­ers and stu­dents alike.

Note: You can find 140+ Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es in our ever-grow­ing list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tim Rob­bins’ Improv Class­es Trans­form Pris­on­ers’ Lives & Low­er Recidi­vism Rates

Pat­ti Smith Reads from Oscar Wilde’s De Pro­fundis, the Love Let­ter He Wrote From Prison (1897)

What Pris­on­ers Ate at Alca­traz in 1946: A Vin­tage Prison Menu

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

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How Doors Open onto Philosophical Mysteries in Robert Bresson’s Films: A Short Video Essay by Kogonada

in Film, Philosophy | August 14th, 2017

FYI: Last Fri­day, Col­in Mar­shall high­light­ed for you the new fea­ture film by kog­o­na­da, whose many video essays–on Ozu, Lin­klater, Mal­ick, Ander­son, etc.–we’ve shown you here before. Rather by coin­ci­dence, The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion just post­ed kog­o­nada’s lat­est video essay, this one exam­in­ing how “doors open onto philo­soph­i­cal mys­ter­ies in the films of French mas­ter Robert Bres­son.” Watch “Once There Was Every­thing” above, and pair it with his oth­er Bres­son essay (“Hands of Bres­son”) from three years ago. It appears right below.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

Video Essay­ist Kog­o­na­da Makes His Own Acclaimed Fea­ture Film: Watch His Trib­utes to Its Inspi­ra­tions Like Ozu, Lin­klater & Mal­ick

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

“Auteur in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Tran­scends Sci­ence Fic­tion

The Eyes of Hitch­cock: A Mes­mer­iz­ing Video Essay on the Expres­sive Pow­er of Eyes in Hitchcock’s Films

Cin­e­mat­ic Exper­i­ment: What Hap­pens When The Bicy­cle Thief’s Direc­tor and Gone With the Wind’s Pro­duc­er Edit the Same Film

How Richard Lin­klater (Slack­er, Dazed and Con­fused, Boy­hood) Tells Sto­ries with Time: Six Video Essays

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

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Bertrand Russell Reveals the 4 Human Desires That Make Our World: Acquisitiveness, Rivalry, Vanity & Love of Power

in Philosophy, Politics | August 8th, 2017

Con­trary to Aris­to­tle, the emi­nent logi­cian, philoso­pher, and activist Bertrand Rus­sell believed that virtue and moral­i­ty play lit­tle part in polit­i­cal life. Rather, what most dri­ves us to action, he argued, is self­ish desire. Rus­sel­l’s polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy could seem almost Machi­avel­lian, most notably in his Nobel Prize speech 1950, in which he pro­claims that “all human activ­i­ty is prompt­ed by desire.” (Hear Rus­sell read an excerpt above.)

There is a whol­ly fal­la­cious the­o­ry advanced by some earnest moral­ists to the effect that it is pos­si­ble to resist desire in the inter­ests of duty and moral prin­ci­ple. I say this is fal­la­cious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be duti­ful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or prin­ci­pal­ly, their mate­r­i­al cir­cum­stances, but rather the whole sys­tem of their desires with their rel­a­tive strengths.

Russell’s argu­ment about desire admits “there is no lim­it to the efforts that men will make, or to the vio­lence that they will dis­play” in the face of per­ceived scarci­ty, and his obser­va­tions recall not only the realpoli­tik of Machi­avel­li, but the insights of that most promi­nent the­o­rist of desire, Sig­mund Freud.

Man dif­fers from oth­er ani­mals in one very impor­tant respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infi­nite, which can nev­er be ful­ly grat­i­fied, and which would keep him rest­less even in Par­adise. The boa con­stric­tor, when he has had an ade­quate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs anoth­er meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this. 

Rather than libidi­nous instincts, how­ev­er, Rus­sell names four main polit­i­cal desires that can­not be sat­is­fied: Acquis­i­tive­ness (“the wish to pos­sess as much as pos­si­ble), Rival­ry (“a much stronger motive”), Van­i­ty (“a motive of immense poten­cy”), and Love of Pow­er (“which out­weighs them all”). We may note the tremen­dous degree to which all four desires seem active­ly at work in shap­ing our cur­rent world. All four of these qual­i­ties greet us every morn­ing on our smart­phones and nev­er let up, day after day. But it has always been so to one degree or anoth­er, Rus­sell argues. The impor­tant thing is to be clear­sight­ed on the mat­ter. Although self­ish polit­i­cal desires can and large­ly are destruc­tive, they need not always be so.

Polit­i­cal desires like the love of pow­er may “have oth­er sides which are more desir­able.” Schol­ar­ly and sci­en­tif­ic endeav­ors may be “main­ly actu­at­ed by a love of pow­er.…. In pol­i­tics, also, a reformer may have just as strong a love of pow­er as a despot. It would be a com­plete mis­take to decry love of pow­er alto­geth­er as a motive.” “Rus­sell,” writes Maria Popo­va, is “a thinker of excep­tion­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty to nuance and to the dual­i­ties of which life is woven.” He cau­tions that we can­not sim­ply dis­miss our most pow­er­ful motive as “a whole­sale neg­a­tive dri­ver.”

The real prob­lem, as Rus­sell sees it, lies in “cir­cum­stances in which pop­u­la­tions will fall below self­ish­ness, if self­ish­ness is inter­pret­ed as enlight­ened self-inter­est.” The phe­nom­e­non we observe of peo­ple “vot­ing against their inter­ests” is for Rus­sell an occa­sion “on which they are con­vinced that they are act­ing from ide­al­is­tic motives.”

Much that pass­es as ide­al­ism is dis­guised hatred or dis­guised love of pow­er. When you see large mass­es of men swayed by what appear to be noble motives, it is as well to look below the sur­face and ask your­self what it is that makes these motives effec­tive. It is part­ly because it is so easy to be tak­en in by a facade of nobil­i­ty that a psy­cho­log­i­cal inquiry, such as I have been attempt­ing, is worth mak­ing.

Rather than virtue or moral­i­ty, pol­i­tics most requires “intel­li­gence,” Rus­sell con­cludes, “a thing that can be fos­tered by known meth­ods of edu­ca­tion.” These are not the forms of edu­ca­tion we gen­er­al­ly receive: “Schools are out to teach patri­o­tism,” he says, “news­pa­pers are out to stir up excite­ment; and politi­cians are out to get re-elect­ed. None of the three, there­fore, can do any­thing towards sav­ing the human race from rec­i­p­ro­cal sui­cide.”

The Cold War threat of nuclear anni­hi­la­tion hangs heavy over Russell’s speech. As long as humans are gripped by hatred and fear of oth­ers and held in thrall to polit­i­cal delu­sions, he sug­gests, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of mutu­al­ly assured destruc­tion remains. On the oth­er hand, if we were hon­est about our desires, and “if men were actu­at­ed by self-inter­est,” Rus­sell writes, “which they are not.… if men desired their own hap­pi­ness as ardent­ly as they desired the mis­ery of their neigh­bors.… the whole human race would coop­er­ate.” Read the full text of Rus­sel­l’s Nobel speech here.

via Brain­Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Cours­es

7 Nobel Speech­es by 7 Great Writ­ers: Hem­ing­way, Faulkn­er, and More

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Bertrand Rus­sell: The Every­day Ben­e­fit of Phi­los­o­phy Is That It Helps You Live with Uncer­tain­ty

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

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James Franco Hosts Philosophy Time, a New Videos Series Created to Help Philosophy Reach a Wider Audience

in Philosophy | July 26th, 2017

How do you get ordi­nary peo­ple inter­est­ed in phi­los­o­phy? If we are to believe the accounts of Pla­to, this wasn’t so dif­fi­cult in ancient Athens. One sim­ply lounged around the Acrop­o­lis harass­ing passers­by, a tac­tic sure to fail in most city cen­ters, town squares, and strip malls today. Pod­casts and YouTube videos grab their share of eyes and ears, though many in their audi­ences also sing in the choir. For­mer Python John Cleese has done his part to pop­u­lar­ize philo­soph­i­cal think­ing. As some­one who has moved between the worlds of acad­e­mia and pop­u­lar cul­ture, Cleese has both cred­i­bil­i­ty and vis­i­bil­i­ty on his side. Some younger audi­ences (I write with apolo­gies to Cleese) may be inclined to tune him out.

How about anoth­er actor with both fame and high­er ed cred? Some­one “very appeal­ing to a younger demo­graph­ic”? Some­one like… James Franco—currently a doc­tor­al stu­dent at Yale, and for­mer­ly a lec­tur­er and/or student/graduate of UCLA, Colum­bia, NYU, Brook­lyn Col­lege, War­ren Wil­son Col­lege, and the Rhode Island School of Design? This might seem like the resume either of an aca­d­e­m­ic dilet­tante, or of a life­long stu­dent and lover of knowl­edge.

Giv­en Franco’s com­mit­ment to teach­ing, writ­ing, and devel­op­ing and star­ring in lit­er­ary films like As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, The Bro­ken Tow­er, and Howl, we might give him the ben­e­fit of the doubt. Not everyone’s a fan, but he does bring a good deal of aca­d­e­m­ic enthu­si­asm to the role of phi­los­o­phy pop­u­lar­iz­er.

Fran­co also brings along an actu­al philoso­pher, Eliot Michael­son, of King’s Col­lege, a for­mer teacher of his. He pro­posed the idea of their project, “Phi­los­o­phy Time,” while the two were at UCLA togeth­er, Michael­son as a grad stu­dent and Fran­co as an under­grad fin­ish­ing his Eng­lish degree after tak­ing a hia­tus from col­lege to become a star. “We had some­how end­ed up becom­ing friends,” writes Michael­son, “In part, prob­a­bly because I had no idea who he was.” Their long-ges­tat­ing idea—an attempt to widen philosophy’s audience—has final­ly come to fruition. In the short episodes here, you can see the two in con­ver­sa­tion with Rut­gers University’s Andy Egan, at the top (on beau­ty), Princeton’s Liz Har­mon, fur­ther up (on the fraught top­ic of abor­tion), and Rut­gers’ Liz Camp, above and below (on imag­i­na­tion and metaphor).

Michael­son is a mod­er­at­ing influ­ence. Franco’s laid back pre­sen­ta­tion will remind you of his per­for­mances in ston­er com­e­dy Pineap­ple Express, the 83rd Acad­e­my Awards cer­e­mo­ny, and the 2008 High Times Ston­er of the Year event (though he swears he doesn’t touch the stuff any­more). Squig­gly, ani­mat­ed word and thought bub­bles add anoth­er com­ic touch. But whether or not view­ers are charmed by his per­sona, they’ll find that he lets his guests do most of the talk­ing, and they each make it plain that phi­los­o­phy can be fas­ci­nat­ing and immi­nent­ly rel­e­vant to our ordi­nary mod­ern lives. The kinds of ques­tions Socrates nee­dled hap­less Athe­ni­ans with—about beau­ty, ethics, and language—are just as press­ing now as they were 2400 years ago.

You can find the emerg­ing trove of “Phi­los­o­phy Time” videos on YouTube here.

via Leit­er Reports

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Cleese Touts the Val­ue of Phi­los­o­phy in 22 Pub­lic Ser­vice Announce­ments for the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion

James Fran­co Reads a Dream­i­ly Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’

James Fran­co Reads 6 Short Poems from His New Col­lec­tion

140+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life: A Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast, Now at 239 Episodes, Expands into East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

Dis­cov­er the Cre­ative, New Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast Hi-Phi Nation: The First Sto­ry-Dri­ven Show About Phi­los­o­phy

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

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How Aristotle Invented Computer Science

in Computer Science, Philosophy | July 20th, 2017

In pop­u­lar con­cep­tions, we take the com­put­er to be the nat­ur­al out­come of empir­i­cal sci­ence, an inher­i­tance of the Enlight­en­ment and sub­se­quent sci­en­tif­ic rev­o­lu­tions in the 19th and 20th cen­turies. Of course, mod­ern com­put­ers have their ancient pre­cur­sors, like the Antikythera Mech­a­nism, a 2,200-year-old bronze and wood machine capa­ble of pre­dict­ing the posi­tions of the plan­ets, eclipses, and phas­es of the moon. But even this fas­ci­nat­ing arti­fact fits into the nar­ra­tive of com­put­er sci­ence as “a his­to­ry of objects, from the aba­cus to the Bab­bage engine up through the code-break­ing machines of World War II.” Much less do we invoke the names of “philoso­pher-math­e­mati­cians,” writes Chris Dixon at The Atlantic, like George Boole and Got­t­lob Frege, “who were them­selves inspired by Leibniz’s dream of a uni­ver­sal ‘con­cept lan­guage,’ and the ancient log­i­cal sys­tem of Aris­to­tle.” But these thinkers are as essen­tial, if not more so, to com­put­er sci­ence, espe­cial­ly, Dixon argues, Aris­to­tle.

The ancient Greek thinker did not invent a cal­cu­lat­ing machine, though they may have exist­ed in his life­time. Instead, as Dixon writes in his recent piece, “How Aris­to­tle Cre­at­ed the Com­put­er,” Aris­to­tle laid the foun­da­tions of math­e­mat­i­cal log­ic, “a field that would have more impact on the mod­ern world than any oth­er.”

The claim may strike his­to­ri­ans of phi­los­o­phy as some­what iron­ic, giv­en that Enlight­en­ment philoso­phers like Fran­cis Bacon and John Locke announced their mod­ern projects by thor­ough­ly repu­di­at­ing the medieval scholas­tics, whom they alleged were guilty of a slav­ish devo­tion to Aris­to­tle. Their crit­i­cisms of medieval thought were var­ied and great­ly war­rant­ed in many ways, and yet, like many an empiri­cist since, they often over­looked the crit­i­cal impor­tance of Aris­totelian log­ic to sci­en­tif­ic thought.

At the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry, almost three hun­dred years after Bacon sought to tran­scend Aristotle’s Organon with his form of nat­ur­al phi­los­o­phy, the for­mal log­ic of Aris­to­tle could still be “con­sid­ered a hope­less­ly abstract sub­ject with no con­ceiv­able appli­ca­tions.” But Dixon traces the “evo­lu­tion of com­put­er sci­ence from math­e­mat­i­cal log­ic” and Aris­totelian thought, begin­ning in the 1930s with Claude Shan­non, author of the ground­break­ing essay “A Sym­bol­ic Analy­sis of Switch­ing and Relay Cir­cuits.” Shan­non drew on the work of George Boole, whose name is now known to every com­put­er sci­en­tist and engi­neer but who, in 1938, “was rarely read out­side of phi­los­o­phy depart­ments.” And Boole owed his prin­ci­ple intel­lec­tu­al debt, as he acknowl­edged in his 1854 The Laws of Thought, to Aristotle’s syl­lo­gis­tic rea­son­ing.

Boole derived his oper­a­tions by replac­ing the terms in a syl­lo­gism with vari­ables, “and the log­i­cal words ‘all’ and ‘are’ with arith­meti­cal oper­a­tors.” Shan­non dis­cov­ered that “Boole’s sys­tem could be mapped direct­ly onto elec­tri­cal cir­cuits,” which hith­er­to “had no sys­tem­at­ic the­o­ry gov­ern­ing their design.” The insight “allowed com­put­er sci­en­tists to import decades of work in log­ic and math­e­mat­ics by Boole and sub­se­quent logi­cians.” Shan­non, Dixon writes, “was the first to dis­tin­guish between the log­i­cal and the phys­i­cal lay­er of com­put­ers,” a dis­tinc­tion now “so fun­da­men­tal to com­put­er sci­ence that it might seem sur­pris­ing to mod­ern read­ers how insight­ful it was at the time.” And yet, the field could not move for­ward with­out it—without, that is, a return to ancient cat­e­gories of thought.

Since the 1940s, com­put­er pro­gram­ming has become sig­nif­i­cant­ly more sophis­ti­cat­ed. One thing that hasn’t changed is that it still pri­mar­i­ly con­sists of pro­gram­mers spec­i­fy­ing rules for com­put­ers to fol­low. In philo­soph­i­cal terms, we’d say that com­put­er pro­gram­ming has fol­lowed in the tra­di­tion of deduc­tive log­ic, the branch of log­ic dis­cussed above, which deals with the manip­u­la­tion of sym­bols accord­ing to for­mal rules.

Dixon’s argu­ment for the cen­tral­i­ty of Aris­to­tle to mod­ern com­put­er sci­ence takes many turns—through the qua­si-mys­ti­cal thought of 13th-cen­tu­ry Ramon Llull and, lat­er, his admir­er Got­tfried Leib­niz. Through Descartes, and lat­er Frege and Bertrand Rus­sell. Through Alan Tur­ing’s work at Bletch­ley Park. Nowhere do we see Aris­to­tle, wrapped in a toga, build­ing a cir­cuit board in his garage, but his modes of rea­son­ing are every­where in evi­dence as the scaf­fold­ing upon which all mod­ern com­put­er sci­ence has been built. Aristotle’s attempts to under­stand the laws of the human mind “helped cre­ate machines that could rea­son accord­ing to the rules of deduc­tive log­ic.” The appli­ca­tion of ancient philo­soph­i­cal prin­ci­ples may, Dixon con­cludes, “result in the cre­ation of new minds—artificial minds—that might some­day match or even exceed our own.” Read Dixon’s essay at The Atlantic, or hear it read in its entire­ty in the audio above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

How the World’s Old­est Com­put­er Worked: Recon­struct­ing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism

The Books on Young Alan Turing’s Read­ing List: From Lewis Car­roll to Mod­ern Chro­mat­ics

How Ara­bic Trans­la­tors Helped Pre­serve Greek Phi­los­o­phy … and the Clas­si­cal Tra­di­tion

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

 

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New Archive Is Digitizing the Entirety of Phenomenology: Browse Works by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and More

in Philosophy | July 6th, 2017

Chances are, if you can define the word phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, you’re already a stu­dent of the 20th cen­tu­ry philo­soph­i­cal school, field, move­ment, or—as its ear­li­est expos­i­tor, Edmund Husserl wrote in a pref­ace to the Eng­lish edi­tion of his 1913 Ideas: Gen­er­al Intro­duc­tion to Pure Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, “new science—though, indeed, the whole course of philo­soph­i­cal devel­op­ment since Descartes has been prepar­ing the way for it.”

Husserl’s mes­sian­ic claim for phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal thinking–that which, broad­ly, deals with the con­tents of con­scious­ness and the objects of experience–presages the discipline’s enor­mi­ty, well rep­re­sent­ed by the total­iz­ing thought of Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, the Nazi philoso­pher who intend­ed with his 1927 Being and Time to accom­plish the “destruc­tion” of phi­los­o­phy. In a way, writes Simon Critch­ley, he suc­ceed­ed. “There is no way of under­stand­ing what took place in con­ti­nen­tal phi­los­o­phy after Hei­deg­ger with­out com­ing to terms with Being and Time.”

Anoth­er promi­nent phe­nom­e­nol­o­gist, French thinker Mau­rice Mer­leau-Pon­ty, asserts a no less mind-bog­gling­ly huge man­date for the method: “phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy is the study of essences,” he writes in his 1947 Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy of Per­cep­tion. “It is the search for a phi­los­o­phy which shall be a ‘rig­or­ous sci­ence,’ but it also offers an account of space, time and the world as we ‘live’ them.” Again, if this makes sense to you, you may already be a stu­dent of phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, and you’ve prob­a­bly read a lot of it.

Phi­los­o­phy stu­dents and pro­fes­sors must have ready access to a huge num­ber of texts by a wide range of authors, most of whom are hav­ing mul­ti­ple con­ver­sa­tions with each oth­er at once. It is, of course, ide­al to have at hand the kinds of resources one might find at the Stadt­bib­lio­thek in Berlin, one of the largest libraries in the world, or even at most large uni­ver­si­ty libraries. But if you don’t have such access, you can still gath­er a fair num­ber of full texts by Husserl, Hei­deg­ger, Mer­leau-Pon­ty and their many famous stu­dents and col­leagues on the web.

Soon, you will be able to do so all in one place, in mul­ti­ple lan­guages and for­mats, at the Open Com­mons of Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, a “non-prof­it, inter­na­tion­al schol­ar­ly asso­ci­a­tion” aim­ing to “pro­vide free access to the full cor­pus of phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy” by 2020. A suit­ably ambi­tious task for a very ambi­tious school of thought. Cur­rent­ly, project founders Patrick Flack (whom you’ll see in the pro­mo video at the top), Rod­ney Park­er, Nico­las de War­ren, and the Husserl Archives have com­piled “about 12000 bib­li­o­graph­ic entries,” close to a quar­ter of which link to open access pdfs.

The project still needs to iron out a num­ber kinks, and bro­ken links, but it plans in the com­ing years to col­lect not only pre­vi­ous­ly online essays and books, but also new­ly dig­i­tized texts and trans­la­tions, “enhanced with a num­ber of pow­er­ful tools, such as inter­ac­tive time­lines and genealo­gies of phe­nom­e­nol­o­gists and psy­chol­o­gists, .xml ver­sions of texts,” and much more. Read more about the project at Dai­ly Nous, at the now-closed Indiegogo page from its fund­ing cam­paign last year, and at the Open Com­mons site itself, where you’ll also find reviews, calls for papers, lists of events, and more. The dense out­line on the site’s About page promis­es great things for this new “dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture” of phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy research. Enter the Open Com­mons of Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy here.

via Dai­ly Nous

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es 

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks 

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

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