Oxford University professor Marianne Talbot has a number of excellent philosophy podcasts online, some of which we’ve previously featured on the site. Today, we bring you Talbot’s A Romp Through Ethics for Complete Beginners (Web — iTunesU — YouTube), which addresses one of philosophy’s central questions: what is the right way to conduct yourself in life?
The problem may, at first, seem somewhat trivial. “Live whichever way you want, as long as you’re going to be a good person,” you might say, shrugging off the question. But it’s really a great deal more complicated than that. What does being a “good” person entail? Should we emulate the actions of someone widely considered virtuous?
Does being good mean living by absolute rules? Say, never murder another human being? Or should we tailor our actions according to each situation, with the aim of achieving the greatest quantity of good as our only hard-and-fast rule? If the possibilities are making your head spin, you’re not alone: philosophers have done their best to figure out precisely what constitutes moral rights and wrongs since the days of Socrates.
Luckily, Talbot is ready to guide us through the complexities. True to its title, A Romp Through Ethics for Complete Beginners walks students through seven comprehensive lectures (watch them all above) on moral thought, providing a neatly-packaged survey of the field. Talbot begins by discussing some preconditions to moral reasoning, and then sets out Aristotle’s conception of righteous living, which consists of acting in a virtuous manner (if you smell something fishy about that statement, you’re on the right track). Talbot then proceeds to guide the class through some of philosophy’s most significant ethical paradigms, explaining Immanuel Kant’s idea of the inviolable categorical imperative and the moral calculus behind John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian thought.
When I was younger, I often found myself disagreeing with something I’d read or heard, but couldn’t explain exactly why. Despite being unable to pinpoint the precise reasons, I had a strong sense that the rules of logic were being violated. After I was exposed to critical thinking in high school and university, I learned to recognize problematic arguments, whether they be a straw man, an appeal to authority, or an ad hominem attack. Faulty arguments are all-pervasive, and the mental biases that underlie them pop up in media coverage, college classes, and armchair theorizing. Want to learn how to avoid them? Look no further than Critical Reasoning For Beginners, the top rated iTunesU collection of lectures led by Oxford University’s Marianne Talbot.
Talbot builds the course from the ground up, and begins by explaining that arguments consist of a set of premises that, logically linked together, lead to a conclusion. She proceeds to outline the way to lay out an argument logically and clearly, and eventually, the basic steps involved in assessing its strengths and weaknesses. The six-part series, which was recorded in 2009, shows no sign of wear, and Talbot, unlike some philosophy professors, does a terrific job of making the content digestible. If you’ve got some time on your hands, the lectures, which average just over an hour in length, can be finished in less than a week. That’s peanuts, if you consider that all our knowledge is built on the foundations that this course establishes. If you haven’t had the chance to be exposed to a class on critical thought, I can’t recommend Critical Reasoning For Beginners with enough enthusiasm: there are few mental skills that are as underappreciated, and as central to our daily lives, as critical thinking.
The work of Hannah Arendt has been in the press recently for two reasons in particular: first, the 50th anniversary of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in 1963 from reports she filed for The New Yorker on the 1961 trial of the archetypal Nazi bureaucrat. Then there is Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 biopic Hannah Arendt, starring German actress Barbara Sukowa as the German Jewish philosopher. Recent coverage of the book and the film have focused on Arendt’s reputation as a philosophical journalist most closely identified with the famous descriptive phrase “the banality of evil,” a comment on Adolf Eichmann as an exemplar of genocidal murderers who, as the well-worn defense goes, were “just following orders.”
Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz argues that this reading of Arendt’s book is a profound misreading. Eichmann in Jerusalem was divisive, setting critics against each other in efforts to vindicate or castigate its author. The controversy, however, at the time of publication and again in the recent re-evaluation, has the unfortunate effect of obscuring the breadth of Arendt’s philosophical thinking apart from Eichmann and Nazism. Those interested in connecting with Arendt’s life, scholarship, and philosophical insight can find a wealth of archival materials online from the collections of Bard College and the Library of Congress. Today, we highlight several items in those collections that may be of interest, including the Library of Congress’s scanned copy of the final typescript of Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Part 1:
Part 2 (Q&A):
First, directly above, hear Arendt’s speech “Power & Violence.” The lecture re-iterates ideas Arendt expressed more fully in a lengthy 1969 essay published by the New York Review of Books as “Reflections on Violence” and as a book titled On Violence. In the lecture and the essay, Arendt references the work of thinkers like Friedrich Engels and, especially, Frantz Fanon in a critical discussion of the roles racism and ideology play in state violence.
That same year Arendt delivered a series of lectures for a Spring semester course at The New School for Social Research called “Philosophy and Politics: What is Political Philosophy.” This fascinating investigation grapples not only with political philosophy, but philosophy in general as a meaningful activity. You can view the full typescripts of her course lectures here.
The Library of Congress has also digitized much of Arendt’s correspondence and uploaded images of her letters, including some to and from such well-known figures as W.H. Auden, Lionel Trilling, and Alfred Kazin (most of Arendt’s letters are only available for viewing onsite at the Library of Congress, The New School University, or the University of Oldenburg).
Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Collection showcases many of Arendt’s personal books. We can see digitized images of her copies of—among many others—Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Leo Strauss, her friend poet Robert Lowell, Carl Schmitt, and, of course, her onetime mentor and lover, Martin Heidegger. Each of the uploads shows the pages in which Arendt underlined or marked key passages and left marginal notes.
In addition to the “Arendt Marginalia” section, Bard hosts a gallery that includes “inscribed books, journals & manuscripts,” “artwork & photographs,” and “postcards and other correspondence” (such as the above postcard from Walter Benjamin, addressed to “Hannah Stern,” her married name at the time).
Lastly, for an excellent overview of Arendt’s life and work that puts all of the above materials in context, see the Library of Congress’s “Biographical Note” and be sure to read “Three Essays: The Role of Experience in Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought” by Jerome Kohn, director of the New School’s Hannah Arendt Center. As many know, Arendt, and many other German Jewish intellectuals who fled the Nazis, found a home at New York’s New School for Social Research (now New School University). And we have the New School (and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant) to thank for the Library of Congress’s vast, digitized collection of Arendt’s papers, which preserves her legacy for generations to come.
The ever-flickering lights, the ever-present screen, the stupefied spectators immune to a larger reality and in need of sudden enlightenment—Plato’s allegory of the cave from Book VII of The Republic is a marketing department’s dream: it sums up an entire brand in a stock-simple parable that almost anyone can follow, one that lends itself to compellingly brief visual interpretations like those above and below. In the top video, Orson Welles narrates while the camera pans over some colorfully stylized illustrations of the fable by artist Dick Oden. This preserves the didactic tone of the text, but it is a little dry. In contrast, the award-winning three-dimensional renderings of the prisoners and their nonstop nickelodeon in the Claymation Cave Allegory below offers dramatic close-ups of the chained prisoner’s faces and the hypnotic movement of firelight over the cave’s rock walls.
Plato’s “brand” is a doctrine of idealism that posits a realm of ideal forms, of which everything we know by our senses is but an inferior copy. The ironically poetic Socrates relates the story to illustrate “the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature.”
And yet it does much more than this—Plato illustrates an epistemology that supports notions of the soul and immortality, and hence his ideas survived in theology long after they was supposedly vanquished by analytic philosophy.
Plato’s idea of reason as a perfect, unchanging realm of which we’re only dimly aware is intuitively compelling. Most of us are at some time conscious of how limited our perceptions truly are. But just because the allegory of the cave is fairly easy to communicate to philosophy 101 students doesn’t mean it’s easy to adapt to the screen like the two examples above. Mark Linsenmayer of The Partially Examined Life points us toward these 20 YouTube takes on Plato’s cave, “many of them,” he writes, “frightfully amateurish and some of them presenting a warped and/or incomprehensible version of the story.” I am particularly intrigued by the silent film version below. As always, your comments on the soundness of these various interpretations are most welcome.
Noam Chomsky is a pretty unlikely celebrity. As a preeminent anarchist theorist, his political writing is full of passionate intensity, but in his numerous public appearances, he conforms much more to images associated with his day job as a preeminent academic and linguist. He’s very soft-spoken—I’ve never heard him raise his voice above the register of polite coffee-shop conversation—and frumpy in that elder scholar kind of way: uncombed gray hair, an endless supply of sweaters and corduroy jackets…
So, yes, it’s amusing when, in the short clip above, a young Chomsky fan asks the 85-year-old “father of modern linguistics” for advice on how to talk to women. Chomsky’s nonplussed response is honest and heartfelt. He has nothing to offer in this regard, he says: “I got out of that business 70 years ago.” If it seems like Chomsky’s math is a little off—he was married in 1949—consider that he and his wife Carol met when they were both just five years old.
Theirs was a quietly charming romance. Chomsky, who has always possessed an extraordinary ability to keep his personal, political, and professional lives separate, did not speak much of their marriage until after Carol’s death in 2008. In the excerpt above from a Big Think interview shortly after, Chomsky tells a story of group of peasants in Southern Columbia who planted a forest in his wife’s memory. He’s also asked to define love. This time, he has a much more interesting response than his reply to the would-be pick up artist above: “I just know it’s—has an unbreakable grip, but I can’t tell you what it is. It’s just life’s empty without it.”
My Friend Friedrich opens on awkward, bespectacled Columbia student Nate having a heart to heart on the phone with his mother. Then, in a philosophy class, he almost succeeds in landing a date by lobbing an illustrated invitation at his love interest, Emma. All goes awry when a taller, more confident, bespectacled Columbia student cuts him off at the knees. So far, so very New York student film, but a conceit arrives to distinguish this story of Ivy League dating woes: the ghost of Friedrich Nietzsche appears before Nate to guide him towards self-actualization.
In what “seems to have been a senior project at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts,” according to Critical Theory (a Vimeo upload dates the film as “circa 2003), My Friend Friedrich gives us the typical undergraduate experience of the philosopher’s voice. Nietzsche instructs our young friend to regard the flashing lights, tall buildings, and “horseless carriages” of Times Square as meaningless. “Nihilism cares about nothing” he says and urges his pupil to will himself to power. It’s not too profound a portrayal of Nietzsche—though of course it’s only played for laughs—and seems to come mainly from a surface reading of his Will to Power, an unfinished manuscript published after the philosopher’s death. (His sister fraudulently pitched a mangled edition to the Nazis as Nietzsche’s underwriting of their ideology, cutting out all of her brother’s strong remarks against anti-Semitism.)
One could argue, if it’s worth explaining the humor, that this superficial take on Nietzsche is precisely the point, since it’s the diffident Nate’s slight reading of Will to Power at the outset that produces his hallucination-slash-visitation. Nietzsche helps Nate win an intellectual pissing contest by quoting Beyond Good and Evil chapter and verse, then goads him into some awkward outbursts and eventually overstays his welcome. The screwball conclusion is ripped right out of Wes Anderson.
Debates are modern gladiator contests—predicated on the blunt force of the opponents’ forensic stamina, charisma, and personal conviction. Speakers lacking in personality make for tedious debaters, and substance seems to matter little when partisans gather to cheer on their champion. Rarely do rhetorical spectacles sway the faithful. At least in our time, they tend to seem more like competing pep rallies. We’ve learned, for example, that such high profile events as U.S. presidential debates have little effect on the outcome of elections. But verbal contests over who will make the best Leader of the Free World can seem modest next to debates between theologians and philosophers over the existence of God. After all, we’ve heard more or less the same arguments for centuries now, and no one’s any closer to a “proof.” And though I’m not aware of anyone who argues thus, there is no way to disprove God’s existence either.
Nonetheless, with the rise of religious fervor worldwide, and rejection of the same by vociferous seculars, we’ve seen so-called “New Atheists” mount challenge after challenge to the authority and validity of religious institutions—primarily those representing the big three monotheisms. The philosophically inclined religious have their heavyweights as well. Biola University professor of philosophy and evangelical Christian William Lane Craig has taken on the mantle of defender not only of his particular brand of faith but of the existence of God generally. Craig is a skilled orator—his fans like to point out that he “wins” all of his debates, though what exactly that means is unclear. His critics call him everything from “dishonest” and “sleazy” to an apologist for genocide and religiously motivated pseudoscience. Whatever you think of Craig, he certainly does draw a crowd. But so do his most famous antagonists. Today, we bring you two such existence of God debates: at the top, see Craig debate the unflappable Christopher Hitchens on his home turf of Biola. And directly above, he takes on Sam Harris at Notre Dame.
You may be wondering, if you’ve followed these squabbles at all, whether the infamous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has stepped into the ring with Craig. He has. Dawkins appeared with skeptical authors Michael Shermer and Matt Ridley in an intellectual wrestlemania of sorts at a Mexican conference called “Ciudad de las Ideas” (City of Ideas). On the other side of the stage sat Craig, his colleague Doug Geivett, and rabbi David Wolpe. You can see the event above—each speaker gets up and steps into a literal ring, complete with bright red ropes, and the result is less a debate than bewildering series of metaphysical sales pitches. Dawkins himself did not consider it a debate. Though he’s made plenty of enemies among atheists and believers alike, accused of intolerance, sloppy reasoning, sexism, and worse, Dawkins has won adherents for declaring a principled stand against appearing with Craig in a true debate format, citing Craig’s “dark side” as a “deplorable apologist for genocide.” As with all these attacks and ripostes, not to mention the universe-sized questions, you’ll simply have to make up your own mind.
Isaiah Berlin casts a long shadow over modern political philosophy. Rising to prominence as a British public intellectual in the 1950s alongside thinkers like A.J. Ayer and Hugh Trevor-Roper, Berlin (writes Joshua Chemiss in The Oxonian Review of Books) was at one time a “cold warrior,” his opposition to Soviet Communism the “lynchpin” of his thought. But his longevity and intellectual vitality meant he was much more besides, and he has remained a popular reference, though, as Chemiss points out, Berlin’s reputation took a beating from critics on the left and right after his death in 1997. Born into a prominent Russian-Jewish family, Berlin grew up in middle class stability until the Russian Revolution dismantled the Czarist Russia of his youth and his family relocated to Britain in 1921.
Berlin’s childhood experience of the Bolsheviks was never far from his mind and precipitated his aversion to violence and coercion, he confesses above in a 1992 interview with his biographer Michael Ignatieff (who spent ten years in conversation with Berlin). Originally broadcast on BBC 2, Ignatieff’s interview serves as an introduction to both the man himself and to his past—in lengthy segments that detail Berlin’s history through photographs and narration. Referring to Berlin’s hugely influential categorization of intellectual history, The Hedgehog and the Fox, Ignatieff tells us: “He once wrote, ‘A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one, big thing.’ He was a hedgehog, all his work was a defense of liberty.… All of his writing can be read as a defense of the individual against the violence of the crowd and the dogma of the party line.”
Berlin was enormously prolific, in print as well as in recorded media, and we have access to several of his lectures online. One radio lecture series, Freedom and its Betrayal, examined six thinkers Berlin identified as “anti-liberal.” Perhaps foremost among these was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his lecture on Rousseau above (continued here in Parts 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6), Berlin elaborates on his important distinction between types of liberty, a theme he returned to again and again, most famously in a lecture, eventually published as a 57-page pamphlet, called “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Berlin adapted much of the ideas in these lectures from his Political Ideas in the Romantic Age—written between 1950 and 1952 and published posthumously—a text that Berlin called his “torso.”
Oxford University hosts an extensive “Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library” that details the composition of “Two Concepts of Liberty,” from its earliest draft stages (above) to its publication history. You can read the full text of the published lecture here and listen to Berlin’s recorded dictation of an early draft below.
In the published version of “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin succinctly sums up his major premise: “To coerce a man is to deprive him of freedom.” Then he goes on:
freedom from what? Almost every moralist in human history has praised freedom. Like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term is so porous that there little interpretation that it seems able to resist….[There are] more than two hundred senses.… of this protean word….
Berlin reduces the more than two hundred to two: negative liberty—dealing with the areas of life in which one is free from any interference; and positive liberty—his term for that which interferes in people’s lives for their supposed benefit and protection. Berlin’s conceptions of these two types is anchored in specific geopolitical arrangements and philosophical traditions, as Dwight MacDonald explained in a 1959 review of the published text. He saw Communism as an abuse of positive liberty and wished to enhance so-called negative liberty as much as possible. As such, Berlin is often cited approvingly by politicians and philosophers with more classical, limited understandings of state power, although these may include libertarians as well as liberals, finding common ground in values of ethical pluralism and robust civil liberties, both of which Berlin defended strenuously.
Berlin draws his account of negative liberty from the work of classical liberal political philosophers like John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. Most of his critique of positive liberty focused on Romanticism and German Idealism, in which he saw the beginnings of totalitarianism (above, hear Berlin’s final 1965 lecture on the “Roots of Romanticism,” continued in Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7). Despite his preoccupation with kinds of freedom, his thought was extraordinarily idiosyncratic, wide-ranging, and diverse. Oxford hopes to soon add the text of much of Berlin’s published work to its Virtual Library. Now, in addition to “Two Concepts of Liberty,” it also houses online text of the essay collection Concepts and Categories. While we await the posting of more Berlin texts, we might attend again to Berlin’s conception of types of freedom, and hear them defined by the philosopher himself in a 1962 interview:
As in the case of words which everyone is in favour of, ‘freedom’ has a very great many senses – some of the world’s worst tyrannies have been undertaken in the name of freedom. Nevertheless, I should say that the word probably has two central senses, at any rate in the West. One is the familiar liberal sense in which freedom means that every man has a life to live and should be given the fullest opportunity of doing so, and that there are only two adequate reasons for controlling men. The first is that there are other goodsbesides freedom, such as, for example, security or peace or culture, or other things which human beings need, which must be given them, apart from the question of whether they want them or not. Secondly, if one man obtains too much, he will deprive other people of their freedom – freedom for the pike means death to the carp – and this is a perfectly adequate reason for curtailing freedom. Still, curtailing freedom isn’t the same as freedom.
The second sense of the word is not so much a matter of allowing people to do what they want as the idea that I want to be governed by myself and not pushed around by other people; and this idea leads one to the supposition that to be free means to be self-governing. To be self-governing means that the source of authority must lie in me – or in us, if we’re talking about a community. And if the source of freedom lies in me, then it’s comparatively unimportant how much control there is, provided the control is exercised bymyself, or my representatives, or my nation, my people, my tribe, my Church, and so forth. Provided that I am governed by people who are sympathetic to me, or understand my interests, I don’t mind how much of my life is pried into, or whether there is a private province which is divided from the public province; and in some modern States – for example the Soviet Union and other States with totalitarian governments – this second view seems to be taken.
Between these two views, I see no possibility of reconciliation.
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