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Philosophy as an academic subject is regularly maligned in popular discourse. Philosophy majors get told that their studies are useless. Philosophy professors find their budgets cut, their courses scrutinized, and their character grossly impeached in propagandistic religious feature films. It’s enough to make one despair over the turgid air of anti-intellectualism that stifles conversation.
But before we start pining for bygone golden ages of rigorous critical thought, let us remember that philosophers have been a thorn in the side of the powerful since the inception of Western philosophy. After all, Socrates, the ancient Greek whose name we associate with philosophy’s most basic maxims and methods, was supposedly put to death for the crime of which today’s professorate so often stand accused: corrupting the youth.
We mostly know of Socrates’ life and death through the written dialogues of his star pupil, Plato, whom Alain de Botton calls in the first video above, “the world’s first true, and perhaps greatest, philosopher.” De Botton quickly explains in his animated School of Life introduction that the core of Plato’s philosophy constitutes a “special kind of therapy” geared toward Eudaimonia, or human fulfillment and well-being. From Plato, De Botton’s series of quick takes on famous philosophers continues, moving through the Enlightenment and the 19th and 20th centuries.
Key to Plato’s thought is the critical examination of Doxa, or the conventional values and “popular opinions” that reveal themselves as “riddled with errors, prejudice, and superstition.” Plato’s most famous illustration of the profound state of ignorance in which most of us live goes by the name “The Allegory of the Cave,” and receives a retelling with commentary by De Botton just above. The parable doesn’t only illustrate the utility of philosophy, as De Botton says; it also serves as a vivid introduction to Plato’s theory of the Forms—an ideal realm of which our phenomenal reality is only a debased copy.
The dualism between the real and the ideal long governed philosophical thought, though many competing schools like the Stoics expressed a healthy degree of skepticism. But we might say that it wasn’t until Immanuel Kant, whom you can learn about above, that Plato really met his match. Along with his famous ethical dictum of the “categorical imperative,” Kant also posited two distinct realms—the noumenal and the phenomenal. And yet, unlike Plato, Kant did not believe we can make any assertions about the properties or existence of the ideal. Whatever lies outside the cave, we cannot access it through our faulty senses.
These central questions about the nature of knowledge and mind not only make philosophy an immanently fascinating discipline—they also make it an increasingly necessary endeavor, as we move further into the realm of constructing artificial minds. Software engineers and video game developers are tasked with philosophical problems related to consciousness, identity, and the possibility of ethical free choice. And at the cutting edge of cognitive science—where evolutionary biology and quantum mechanics rub elbows—we may find that Plato and Kant both intuited some of the most basic problems of consciousness: what we take for reality may be nothing of the kind, and we may have no way of genuinely knowing what the world is like outside our senses.
As 17th century French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes feared, but found impossible to believe, our perception of the world may in fact be a deceptive, if useful, illusion. Learn more about Descartes above, and see De Botton’s full School of Life philosophy series at the top of the post. Or watch the series on Youtube.
There are 35 videos in total, which let you become acquainted with, and perhaps corrupted by, a range of thinkers who question orthodoxy and common sense, including Aristotle, Epicurus, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Arthur Schopenhauer, Albert Camus, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Baruch Spinoza. Watch all of the videos in the playlist right below.
If you like philosophy and road tripping, then you’ll want to put Wittgenstein in Norwayin your YouTube queue. Posted this month by Kirsten Dirksen, the short film takes through the beautiful countryside of Norway, in search of the hut where Ludwig Wittgenstein exiled himself from society from time to time, first starting in 1913. Dirksen gives this preface to the film:
Over 100 years ago, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein went to the fjords of Norway to escape the scholarly world of Cambridge. His former teacher Bertrand Russell wrote, “I said it would be lonely, and he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people.”
Not content with simply moving to the isolation of rural Norway- at the end of the Sognefjord (the deepest and second longest fjord)- Wittgenstein built his hut across the lake and halfway up a mountain from the nearest town (Skjolden). Measuring just 7 by 8 meters, the small cabin dubbed “Little Austria” (his native country) became his home on and off throughout his life (his longest stay here was 13 months).
Wittgenstein was fleeing the distractions and interruptions of a more social lifestyle and hoping to confront only his own thoughts. “Whoever is unwilling to descend into himself,” he wrote, “because it is too painful, will of course remain superficial in his writing.’” He wrote some of his most important work here (a precursor to his “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” and some of his “Philosophical Investigations”).
Today all that remains of his hut are its stone foundation and a very faint hikers trail up the mountain, though some Norwegians are trying to change this. Artists Marianne Bredesen, Sebastian Makonnen Kjølaas and Siri Hjorth (in collaborations with the Wittgenstein Society in Skjolden and funded by Public Art Norway) threw an all-expenses-paid vacation to bring fellow Oslo residents to the ruin. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s argument that “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday”, they are calling their art holiday “Wittgenstein on Vacation”. For part one, they entertained their guests with a weekend of lectures, meals and a Wittgenstein interpretation at the site of his cabin. We captured some of the show on our own journey to this disappearing piece of history.
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The refinements of medical imaging technologies like fMRI have given neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers better tools with which to study how the brain responds to all sorts of stimuli. We’ve seen studies of the brain on Jane Austen, the brain on LSD, the brain on jazz improv…. Music, it seems, offers an especially rich field for brain research, what with its connection to language, bodily coordination, mathematics, and virtually every other area of human intelligence. Scientists at MIT have even discovered which specific regions of the brain respond to music.
And yet, though we might think of music as a discrete phenomenon that stimulates isolated parts of the brain, Brownell professor of philosophy Dan Lloyd has a much more radical hypothesis, “that brain dynamics resemble the dynamics of music.”
He restates the idea in more poetic terms in an article for Trinity College: “All brains are musical—you and I are symphonies.” Plenty of people who can barely whistle on key or clap to a beat might disagree. But Lloyd doesn’t mean to suggest that we all have musical talent, but that—as he says in his talk below—“everything that goes on in the brain can be interpreted as having musical form.”
To demonstrate his theory, Lloyd chose not a musician or composer as a test subject, but another philosopher—and one whose brain he particularly admires—Daniel Dennett. And instead of giving us yet more colorful but baffling brain images to look at, he chose to convert fMRI scans of Dennett’s brain—“12 gigabytes of 3‑d snapshots of his cranium”—into music, turning data into sound through a process called “sonification.” You can hear the result at the top of the post—the music of Dennett’s brain, which is apparently, writes Daily Nous, “a huge Eno fan.”
In his paper “Mind as Music,” Lloyd argues that the so-called “language of thought” is, in fact, music. As he puts it, “the lingua franca of cognition is not a lingua at all,” an idea that has “aftershocks for semantics, method, and more.” Several questions arise: I, for one, am wondering if all our brains sound like Dennett’s abstract ambient score, or if some play waltzes, some operas, some psychedelic blues.…
You can learn much more about Lloyd’s fascinating research in his talk, which simplifies the technical language of his paper. Lloyd’s work goes much further, as he says, than studying “the brain on music”; instead he makes a sweepingly bold case for “the brain as music.”
It is sometimes said that science and philosophy have grown so far apart that they no longer recognize each other. Perhaps they no longer need each other. And yet some of the most thoughtful scientists of modernity—those who most dedicated their lives not only to discovering nature’s mysteries, but to communicating those discoveries with the rest of us—have been fully steeped in a philosophical tradition. This especially goes for Carl Sagan, perhaps the greatest science communicator of the past century or so.
Sagan wrote a number of popular books for layfolk in which he indulged not only his tendencies as a “hopeless romantic,” writes Maria Popova, but also as a “brilliant philosopher.” He did not fear to venture into the realms of spiritual desire, and did not mock those who did likewise; and yet Sagan also did not hesitate to defend reason against “society’s most shameless untruths and outrageous propaganda.” These undertakings best come together in Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, a book in which he very patiently explains how and why to think scientifically, against the very human compulsion to do anything but.
In one chapter of his book, “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” Sagan laid out his method, proposing what he called “A Baloney Detection Kit,” a set of intellectual tools that scientists use to separate wishful thinking from genuine probability. Sagan presents the contents of his kit as “tools for skeptical thinking,” which he defines as “the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and—especially important—to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument.” You can see his list of all eight tools, slightly abridged, below. These are all in Sagan’s words:
Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives.
Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations.
If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified…. You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.
See the unabridged list at Brain Pickings, or read Sagan’s full chapter, ideally by getting a copy of The Demon-Haunted World. As Popova notes, Sagan not only gives us succinct instructions for critical thinking, but he also makes a thorough list, with definitions, of the ways reason fails us through “the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric.” Sagan’s chapter on “Baloney Detection” is, like the rest of the book, a highly literary, personal, engagement with the most pressing scientific considerations in our everyday life. And it is also an informal yet rigorous restatement of Aristotle’s classical logic and rhetoric and Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy.
70 years ago this month, Albert Camus made his first and only trip to the United States, briefly visiting Philadelphia and Boston, but mostly staying in New York, the city that captivated him most. As Jennifer Schuessler writes in The New York Times, Camus didn’t quite know what to make of the city’s “swarming lights” and “frantic streets.” But he had to appreciate the warmth with which he was greeted. During his 1946 stay, Camus celebrated the English publication of The Strangeron the rooftop of the Hotel Astor. He sat down for an interview with The New Yorker and gave a memorable speech at Columbia University. He also became a fashion critic for a brief moment, offering this thought on American neckties: “You have to see it to believe it. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable.”
I arrived last night at the University of Arizona for my event with Edward Snowden and Noam Chomsky. Chomsky arrived shortly after I did and, after I greeted him, the following dialogue ensued:
Chomsky: You know, there’s this interesting essay by Albert Camus, written during his first visit to the United States, in which he described his surprise at what he regarded as the poor clothing taste of Americans, particularly men’s choices of ties.
Me (slightly confused): Are you sharing that anecdote because you dislike my tie?
Chomsky: Yes.
That’s how you receive a fashion critique from the world’s greatest public intellectual.
Ouch.
Note: The 70th anniversary of Camus’s trip to New York is being commemorated in “Camus: A Stranger in the City,” a monthlong festival of performances, readings, film screenings and events. If you’re in NYC, check it out. The full program is here.
In 2009, Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel broke some ground when he made his popular course, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?,” available online. A course taken by thousands of Harvard undergrads suddenly became a course taken by tens of thousands of lifelong learners worldwide.
Since then, Sandel has continued speaking to a broader audience, first creating a BBC podcast called “The Public Philosopher,” where he “examines the thinking behind a current controversy.” (Download the episodes here.) And now comes a new program, The Global Philosopher, which grapples with philosophical problems using an innovative digital format. According to the BBC, the show brings together “60 participants from over 30 countries using a pioneering studio developed by [the] Harvard Business School, called HBX Live. Each participant is able to see and speak to every other contributor, as well as to Professor Sandel, replicating the experience of a face-to-face debate.” In the first debate, shown above, “contributors from America, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East discussed the moral justification for national borders. Hundreds more watched a live video stream and took part by sending in text comments and voting in straw polls.” This is just the first of more planned installments. Down the road, you can find new episodes of The Global Philosopher here.
So, imagine that you’re John Malkovich. I know, you’ve seen this movie before, but hear me out: you’re one of the most venerated actors of your generation. You are entering your sixth decade and could probably coast into your golden years on accolades and prestige parts. But do you rest on your laurels? Or do you become a model and collaborator with photographer Sandro Miller, appear in an Eminem video… read Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” over an ambient piece of music called “Cryogenia X,” then have the results remixed by Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, Ric Ocasek, new wave icons Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, and other musical legends?
The answer is all of the above. You’re John Malkovich. You can do whatever you want. “When I have an idea for something,” says Malkovich, “I expect my collaborators to collaborate on that idea and if someone else has an idea, then I’ll certainly collaborate with them.” It’s that kind of disciplined, yet genial flexibility that made Malkovich perfect for the role of himself in Spike Jonze’s surreal comedy. Now the last of the projects in that extracurricular list above brings more surreality into Malkovich’s repertoire, in the form of a double LP’s‑worth of dreamlike recitations of Plato’s classical myth, called Like a Puppet Show, released on Black Friday of last year.
Ono and Lennon’s version “Cryolife 7:14,” the second track above, is, oddly, the most conventional of the three digital uploads we get to hear for free. Malkovich reads a portion of the text straight through, over wordless moans from Yoko and psychedelic lounge music from Lennon. In OMD and Ric Ocasek’s renditions, however, Malkovich’s voice gets cut-up into a series of disjointed samples. Rather than tell a story—that ancient 2,500-year-old story from Plato’s Republic about ignorance and awakening—these pieces suggest painful poses, emotional shocks, repetitive conditions, and weird ontological angles. What does it all mean for Malkovich?
It’s hard to say. He’s more steeped in process than interpretation. “Music,” says Malkovich, “creates its own kind of dream state.” If there’s any political subtext, you’ll have to supply it yourself. Malkovich—who gamely dressed as Che Guevara in one of his Sandro Miller recreations of famous photographs—has also been described as “so Right-wing you have to wonder if he’s kidding.” We know, of course, how Yoko feels about things. It’s part of what makes the collaboration so fresh and compelling—it doesn’t feel like one of those “of course these people got together” projects that, while satisfying, can suffer the fate of the supergroup: too many cooks.
Here, each collaborator—the 2,000-years-dead philosopher, the celebrated actor and photographer, and the legendary musicians—comes from such a different realm of experience and talent that their meeting seems more like a mountaintop conference of wizards than a celebrity jam session. If you like what you hear (and see), Malkovich, Alexandrakis, and Miller promise more. They’ve founded a record label, Cryogenia, and plant to release more musical/photographic projects in the near future.
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