In the Russian port city of Rostov-on-Don two men were having a beer this weekend and talking about the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (of course), when something went terribly wrong. An argument broke out, critical reason went out the window, and one man ended getting shot with rubber bullets. He’s in the hospital with non life-threatening injuries. The shooter now faces up to 10 years in jail, where he’ll have lots of time to ponder Kant’s theories.
If you would like to contemplate Kant in a more serene manner, we would invite you to check out his texts listed in our Free eBook collection:
If you’ve ever considered drawing up a list of the most debased words, allow me to nominate radical. If you call someone a “radical thinker,” for instance, a great many listeners might assume you mean something along the lines of “cool thinker.” While we do tend to find thinkers cool here at Open Culture, more interesting usages exist. Some interpret the meaning of “radical thinker” as closer to “thinker of very different thoughts than everyone else,” and hit closer to the mark though they may, you can bet that someone else nearby has readied themselves to denounce the thinker in question as not nearly radical enough to qualify for the label. Like any complex word, phrase, or other element of language, we may have to define radical by looking at examples. Luckily, the Guardian and Verso Books have put together Radical Thinkers, a series of three-minute videos profiling exactly those.
In each video, a modern academic delivers a three-minute lecture on a radical thinker of choice, drawing on a book in Verso’s Radical Thinkers editions. “Ordinarily, we are more or less resigned to the world as it is,” says Peter Hallward of Kingston University, standing in London’s Housmans (“Radical Booksellers Since 1945”), summarizing Alan Badiou’s Ethics. “We adapt as best we can to the existing logic of the system, of the established order of things. We get a job, we go through life as best we can, we get by. What Badiou calls ethics is essentially the discipline and resources you need in order to resist those temptations to abandon or betray or give up on something.” Stella Stanford, also of Kingston, takes on Wilhelm Reich’s Sex-Polin the Freud Museum. This radical thinker, she says, “argued against Freud’s view that sexual repression was the condition of possibility for all civilization. He used the same kind of anthropological work that Freud himself used to argue that sexual freedom and civilization were compatible.”
The Radical Thinkers series has three more videos: Esther Leslie in Camden Market on Max Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason (above), an indictment of the Enlightenment’s failure to deliver a rational society.
“Many of Mondrian’s pieces explore the relationships between adjacent spaces,” says Bolinger “and in particular the formative role of each on the boundaries and possibilities of the other. I based this painting [see above] off of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, in which he develops a theory of meaning grounded in the idea that propositions have meaning only insofar as they constrain the ways the world could be; a meaningful proposition is thus very like one of Mondrian’s color squares, forming a boundary and limiting the possible configurations of the adjacent spaces.”
A second-year PhD student in the philosophy program at the University of Southern California, Bolinger studied painting a Biola University before making philosophy her second major. “I actually came to philosophy quite late in my college career,” Bolinger says, “only adding the major in my junior year. I was fortunate to have two particularly excellent and philosophic art teachers, Jonathan Puls and Jonathan Anderson, who convinced me that my two passions were not mutually exclusive, and encouraged me to pursue both as I began my graduate education.”
Bolinger now works primarily on the philosophy of language, with side interests in logic, epistemology, mind and political philosophy. She continues to paint. We asked her how she reconciles her two passions, which seem to occupy opposite sides of the mind. “I do work in analytic philosophy,” she says, “but it’s only half true that philosophy and painting engage opposite sides of the mind. The sort of realist drawing and painting that I do is all about analyzing the relationships between the lines, shapes and color tones, and so still very left-brain. Nevertheless, it engages the mind in a different way than do the syllogisms of analytic philosophy. I find that the two types of mental exertion complement each other well, each serving as a productive break from the other.”
Bolinger has created a series of philosopher portraits, each one pairing a philosopher with an artist, or art style, in an intriguing way. In addition to Wittgenstein, she painted ten philosophers in her first series, many of them by request. They can all be seen on her Web site, where high quality prints can be ordered.
G.E.M. Anscombe/Jackson Pollock:
Bolinger says she paired the British analytic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe with the American abstract painter Jackson Pollock for two reasons: “First, the loose style of Pollock’s action painting fits the argumentative (and organizational) style of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which Anscombe helped to edit and was instrumental in publishing. Second, her primary field of work, in which she wrote a seminal text, is philosophy of action, which has obvious connections to the themes present in any of Pollock’s action paintings.”
Gottlob Frege/Vincent Van Gogh:
Bolinger paired the German logician, mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege with the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night and Frege’s puzzle concerning identity statements such as “Hesperus is Phosphorus,” or “the evening star is identical to the morning star.”
Bertrand Russell/Art Deco:
Bolinger painted the British logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell in the Art Deco style. “This pairing is a bit more about the gestalt, and a bit harder to articulate,” says Bolinger. “The simplification of form and reduction to angled planes that takes place in the background of this Art Deco piece are meant to cohere with Russell’s locial atomism (the reduction of complex logical propositions to their fundamental logical ‘atoms’).”
Kurt Gödel/Art Nouveau:
Bolinger paired the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel with Art Nouveau. “The Art Nouveau movement developed around the theme of mechanization and the repetition of forms,” says Bolinger, “and centrally involves a delicate balance between organic shapes — typically a figure that dominates the portrait — and schematized or abstracted patterns, often derived from organic shapes, but made uniform and repetitive (often seen in the flower motifs that ornament most Art Nouveau portraits). I paired this style with Kurt Gödel because his work was dedicated to defining computability in terms of recursive functions, and using the notion to prove the Completeness and Incompleteness theorems.”
Consciousness is the single most important aspect of our lives, says philosopher John Searle. Why? “It’s a necessary condition on anything being important in our lives,” he says. “If you care about science, philosophy, music, art — whatever — it’s no good if you are a zombie or in a coma.”
Searle is one of today’s preeminent philosophers of mind. Author of the famous “Chinese Room” argument against the possibility of true artificial intelligence, Searle has been a persistent thorn in the side of those who would reduce consciousness to computation, or conflate it with behavior. Despite its intrinsically subjective nature, consciousness is an irreducible biological phenomenon, he says, “as much subject to scientific analysis as any other phenomenon in biology, or for that matter the rest of science.”
Searle made his remarks at the May 3 TEDx conference at CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research — near Geneva, Switzerland. The video above gives a thought-provoking overview of his basic conclusions about consciousness, but to delve deeper into Searle’s philosophy of mind — and also his philosophy of language and society — see our earlier post about his online Berkeley lectures: “Philosophy with John Searle: Three Free Courses.”
What can philosophy do for you? The question is perhaps better asked this way. What can’t it do for you?
Head over to this web site created by Tomás Bogardus, a philosophy professor at Pepperdine, and you’ll learn why philosophy can answer big questions (we all know that), but also improve your test scores on the LSAT, GRE and GMAT, and then make you more employable and better compensated in the workplace. Yes, rigorous thinking can do that.
If you’re wondering which philosophy grads have actually made a dent in the world, here’s a list of players and yet another list. They include names like: George Soros, the Karl Popper disciple who singlehandedly broke the Bank of England (missed the course on ethics, I guess); Phil Jackson, the zen master who led 11 basketball teams to NBA championships; Carly Fiorina, the first woman to become the CEO of a Fortune 20 company; and Vaclav Havel, the playwright who later became president of Czechoslovakia.
If you want to start living the examined life too, we’d suggest getting started with our collection of 90 Free Philosophy Courses, and otherwise exploring related courses in our collection of 750 Free Courses Online.
Michel Foucault’s colorful life and hugely influential work were both struggles against limitation—the limits of language, of social structures and stultifying historical identities. As such, he managed to provoke scholars of every possible persuasion, since he called into question all positive programs—the ancient imperial, feudal, and liberal humanist—while steadfastly refusing to replace them with comprehensive alternative systems. And yet systems, social institutions of power and domination, were precisely the problem in Foucault’s estimation. Through his technique of raiding archives to produce an “archaeology of knowledge,” Foucault showed how every institution is shot through with what William E. Connolly calls “arbitrary… systemic cruelty.”
The 1993 documentary film above, Michel Foucault: Beyond Good and Evil, explores the philosopher and his complex and controversial life through interviews with colleagues and biographers and re-enactments of Foucault’s storied exploits in the American counterculture. Biographer James Miller points out that Foucault was “preoccupied with exploring states that were beyond normal everyday experience… drugs, certain forms of eroticism,” as a way to “reconfigure the world and his place in it.” In this, says anthropologist Paul Rabinow, Foucault sought to resurrect the questions that sober analytic philosophy had largely abandoned: questions about what it means to be human, beyond the social categories we take as natural and given.
Mike Rugnetta, the fast-talking host of PBS’s Idea Channel, theorizes that the 20-year-old film is a great, possibly inadvertent commentary on the dangers of global market capitalism. His merry spoiler-packed video touches on such phenomena as risky investments, the subprime mortgage crisis, and the havoc that can be wreaked by a disgruntled employee. He hales both Richard Attenborough’s park owner character and Director Spielberg as egotistical madmen chasing monstrous profits. His kitchen sink approach inevitably leads to appearances by both Barney and Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek.
Rugnetta is quick (of course) to point out that he could come up with similar hypotheses for such comparatively fresh releases as World War Z (wage slavery), Iron Man (glory be to the world-saving entrepreneur), and Pacific Rim (the global market will unite us all)… but why, when Jurassic Park’s got enduring, market-tested crowd-pleasers?
I’m usually pretty dialed into this stuff, but somehow this one slipped by me last fall. During the Gangnam Style craze, MIT shot a parody video where Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics, made a cameo appearance. Maybe it slipped by me because the appearance is brief. About 5 seconds, starting at the 3:20 mark. We were on the ball enough, however, to spot another parody by Ai Weiwei and then we had Slavoj Žižek demystifying the whole Gangnam Style phenomenon, complete with wild hand gesticulations and frantic rubs of the nose. Anyway, one day this will make for some good archival footage — public intellectual meets international pop culture craze — so we’re adding it to the trove.
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