Bertrand Russell was one of the most important logicians and mathematical philosophers of the early 20th century. He was also a tireless campaigner for peace and social progress. Born into an aristocratic British family, Russell believed that the social and political ills of the world could be lessened if people of all social classes had a better grasp of knowledge and critical reasoning. To this end, he devoted a great deal of his time to writing popular books on moral and intellectual matters. He was also a regular presence on BBC radio during the 1930s, 40s and 50s.
Most of Russell’s surviving radio programs have been locked away in the archives for all these years. But in January of 2012, producers at BBC Radio 4 assembled some interesting excerpts from the philosopher’s many radio appearances for a retrospective. Bertrand Russell: The First Media Academic? (above, in its entirety) is a fascinating overview of Russell’s life as a public intellectual. Hosted by comedian and writer Robin Ince, the program includes commentary from two of Britain’s current crop of media academics: physicist and former pop musician Brian Cox and mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, who currently holds Richard Dawkins’s old seat as the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. There are excerpts from vintage interviews with people who knew Russell, including his son Conrad and his second wife, Dora Black Russell. But the best contributions are from the philosopher himself. Even the most devoted fan of Russell will find something new and interesting to listen to in this excellent assemblage of rare audio clips.
Critical theorist and musicologist Theodor Adorno was a contrarian, almost contradictory figure—a committed Marxist thinker who was also a cultural elitist. Anyone who’s sat through a theory class will know his name (most likely through his seminal text Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Max Horkheimer). For those who don’t, Adorno was an integral member of what was called the “Frankfurt School,” a group of early twentieth-century German scholars and social theorists who were highly critical of both Western capitalism and Soviet communism. Adorno’s work is wide-ranging, penetrating, and, at times, abstruse to the point of nigh-unintelligibility.
Despite Adorno’s hope for social transformation, his influence is (by design) primarily in the academic and cultural spheres, and his critiques of popular culture and music were scathing and sometimes just plain weird. He had a notoriously irrational dislike of jazz, for example. (Historian Eric Hobsbawm said that his writing contained “some of the stupidest pages ever written about jazz.”) Adorno also disliked “protest music,” as you can see from the interview above, in which he slams the folky, hippy stuff for its “cross-eyed transfixion with amusement” that renders it safe. Protest music, Adorno says, takes “the horrendous,” the Vietnam War in this case, and makes it “somehow consumable.” Maybe Dylan felt the same way when he gave up his Woody Guthrie act and started writing those brilliantly arcane, poetic lyrics.
But Adorno didn’t just preach the virtues of difficult art. He practiced them. In addition to championing the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg, Adorno composed his own music, for piano and strings. The three piano pieces above are his, somewhat reminiscent of the most dissonant passages in Modest Mussorgsky. Performed by pianist Steffen Schleiermacher, the pieces are titled “Langsame halbe—Immer ganz zart,” “Heftige Achtel,” and “Presto.”
A much longer, more substantial work is Adorno’s Studies for Strings in six movements. Movement one is above and movement two below (hear part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6). It’s challenging and often quite sublime listening. The YouTuber who uploaded the music has seen fit to set it to a montage of black-and-white images. I don’t know whether this hinders or helps your appreciation, but you may wish to leave the videos running and listen to each movement while you work on other things. Or better yet, close your eyes and forget everything you know, don’t know, or think you know about Theodor Adorno.
Yesterday we featured Alain de Botton’s television broadcast on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Today, we feature another, earlier television broadcast on a much more recently active philosopher: Mike Wallace’s 1959 interview of Ayn Rand, writer and founder of the school of thought known as Objectivism. But should we really call Rand, who achieved most of her fame with novels like The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, a philosopher? Most of us come to know her through her fiction, and many of us form our opinions of her based on the divisive, capitalism-loving, religion-hating public persona she carefully crafted. Just as Nietzsche had his ideas about how individual human beings could realize their potential by enduring hardship, Rand has hers, all to do with using applied reason to pursue one’s own interests.
Mainstream, CBS-watching America got quite an introduction to this and other tenets of Objectivism from this installment in what Mike Wallace calls a “gallery of colorful people.” The interviewer, in the allotted half-hour, probes as many Randian principles as possible, especially those against altruism and self-sacrifice. “What’s wrong with loving your fellow man?” Wallace asks, and Rand responds with arguments the likes of which viewers may never have heard before: “When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.” Does Ayn Rand still offer the bracing cure for a rudderless, mealy-mouthed America which has forgotten what’s what? Or does her philosophy ultimately turn out to be too simple — too simple to engage with, and too simple to improve our society? The debate continues today, with no sign of resolution.
In a famous scene from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, the biographer and his subject come to discuss the bizarre theories of Bishop Berkeley, who posited that everything is immaterial—nothing has any real existence; it’s all just ideal concepts held together by the mind of God. If God should lose his mind or fall asleep or die, everything would fall to pieces or cease to exist. Boswell insists there’s no way to refute the idea. Johnson, kicking a large stone with such force that his foot rebounds, cries, “I refute it thus.”
Johnson’s little demonstration doesn’t actually refute Berkeley’s radical idealism. It’s a conundrum still with us, like Plato’s Euthyphro stumper, which asks whether the rules governing human behavior exist independently of the gods, who simply enforce them, or whether the gods make the rules according to their whims. In other words, is morality objective or subjective?
A similar problem occurs when we consider the existence of the rules that govern physical laws—the rules of mathematics. Where does math come from? Does it exist independently of human (or other) minds, or is it a human creation? Do we discover mathematical problems or do we invent them?
The question has engendered two positions: mathematical realism, which states that math exists whether we do or not, and that there is math out there we don’t know yet, and maybe never can. This position may require a degree of faith, since, “unlike all of the other sciences, math lacks an empirical component.” You can’t physically observe it happening. Anti-realists, on the other hand, argue that math is a language, a fiction, a “rigorous aesthetic” that allows us to model regularities in the universe that don’t objectively exist. This seems like the kind of relativism that tends to piss off scientists. But no one can refute either idea… yet. The video above, from PBS’s Idea Channel, asks us to consider the various dimensions of this fascinating and irresolvable question.
“To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities, profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, and the wretchedness of the vanquished.” Thus wrote forbiddingly mustachioed German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, articulating his counterintuitive view of suffering as something desirable. But surely the Nietzschean way could never lead to an enjoyable life? On the contrary, explains the television series Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness. “Friedrich Nietzsche believed that all varieties of suffering and failure were to be welcomed by anyone seeking happiness. We should regard them as tough challenges to be overcome in the same way as a climber might tackle a mountain.” Thus speaks the show’s host, popularizer of philosophers from Socrates to Seneca, Epicurus to Schopenhauer, Alain de Botton.
Nietzsche perhaps put more compellingly than any writer before or since the notion of “no pain, no gain.” De Botton, a philosophy enthusiast eager to look for theory in practice, visits a dedicated, sacrifice-making dancer from the English National Ballet, the combination of whose acquired physical grace and painful history of toenail bruises make the argument in a visceral way.
He then chats with a drinks distributor fresh off the failure of his first business venture and already working hard on his second. According to our host, Nietzsche “didn’t think that having failed was, in itself, enough. All lives have failures in them. What makes some lives fulfilled as well is the manner in which failure has been met.” Or, in the simpler words of the distributor himself, “How would you be able to judge your success if you haven’t failed?”
Although this broadcast works as an introduction, we don’t recommend you limit your learning about a philosopher with a voluminous body of written work to videos alone. In our collection of free eBooks, you can download eight of Nietzsche’s volumes in a variety of formats: Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, Homer and Classical Philology, Human, All Too Human, The Anti Christ, The Case Against Wagner, The Gay Science, and Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Wait, though, it’s not what you think! The atheist in question is public radio star Ira Glass, amiably sitting for an interview with amateur spiritual anthropologist and former This American Life guestJim Henderson. The mutual respect is refreshing. Henderson makes it his mission to seek out influential people who are “unusually interested in others,” and willing to “stay in the room with difference.” Glass’ relaxed and chatty demeanor translates to mission accomplished.
The non-believing child of secular Jews does his tribe proud by volunteering the opinion that Christians get a bum rap in the national media. The portrayal of Christians as “doctrinaire crazy hothead people” doesn’t square with fond recollections of former public radio colleagues who kept Bibles on their desks and invited him to screenings of Rapture movies (At WBEZ? Really?).
The civility of the discourse could renew your faith in mankind, whatever your beliefs.
Love him or hate him, many of our readers may know enough about Daniel C. Dennett to have formed some opinion of his work. While Dennett can be a soft-spoken, jovial presence, he doesn’t suffer fuzzy thinking or banal platitudes— what he calls “deepities”—lightly. Whether he’s explaining (or explaining away) consciousness, religion, or free will, Dennett’s materialist philosophy leaves little-to-no room for mystical speculation or sentimentalism. So it should come as no surprise that his latest book, Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, is a hard-headed how-to for cutting through common cognitive biases and logical fallacies.
In a recent Guardian article, Dennett excerpts seven tools for thinking from the new book. Having taught critical thinking and argumentation to undergraduates for years, I can say that his advice is pretty much standard fare of critical reasoning. But Dennett’s formulations are uniquely—and bluntly—his own. Below is a brief summary of his seven tools.
1. Use Your Mistakes
Dennett’s first tool recommends rigorous intellectual honesty, self-scrutiny, and trial and error. In typical fashion, he puts it this way: “when you make a mistake, you should learn to take a deep breath, grit your teeth and then examine your own recollections of the mistake as ruthlessly and as dispassionately as you can manage.” This tool is a close relative of the scientific method, in which every error offers an opportunity to learn, rather than a chance to mope and grumble.
2. Respect Your Opponent
Often known as reading in “good faith” or “being charitable,” this second point is as much a rhetorical as a logical tool, since the essence of persuasion involves getting people to actually listen to you. And they won’t if you’re overly nitpicky, pedantic, mean-spirited, hasty, or unfair. As Dennett puts it, “your targets will be a receptive audience for your criticism: you have already shown that you understand their positions as well as they do, and have demonstrated good judgment.”
3. The “Surely” Klaxon
A “Klaxon” is a loud, electric horn—such as a car horn—an urgent warning. In this point, Dennett asks us to treat the word “surely” as a rhetorical warning sign that an author of an argumentative essay has stated an “ill-examined ‘truism’” without offering sufficient reason or evidence, hoping the reader will quickly agree and move on. While this is not always the case, writes Dennett, such verbiage often signals a weak point in an argument, since these words would not be necessary if the author, and reader, really could be “sure.”
4. Answer Rhetorical Questions
Like the use of “surely,” a rhetorical question can be a substitute for thinking. While rhetorical questions depend on the sense that “the answer is so obvious that you’d be embarrassed to answer it,” Dennett recommends doing so anyway. He illustrates the point with a Peanuts cartoon: “Charlie Brown had just asked, rhetorically: ‘Who’s to say what is right and wrong here?’ and Lucy responded, in the next panel: ‘I will.’” Lucy’s answer “surely” caught Charlie Brown off-guard. And if he were engaged in genuine philosophical debate, it would force him to re-examine his assumptions.
5. Employ Occam’s Razor
The 14th-century English philosopher William of Occam lent his name to this principle, which previously went by the name of lex parsimonious, or the law of parsimony. Dennett summarizes it this way: “The idea is straightforward: don’t concoct a complicated, extravagant theory if you’ve got a simpler one (containing fewer ingredients, fewer entities) that handles the phenomenon just as well.”
6. Don’t Waste Your Time on Rubbish
Displaying characteristic gruffness in his summary, Dennett’s sixth point expounds “Sturgeon’s law,” which states that roughly “90% of everything is crap.” While he concedes this may be an exaggeration, the point is that there’s no point in wasting your time on arguments that simply aren’t any good, even, or especially, for the sake of ideological axe-grinding.
7. Beware of Deepities
Dennett saves for last one of his favorite boogeymen, the “deepity,” a term he takes from computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. A deepity is “a proposition that seems both important and true—and profound—but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous.” Here is where Dennett’s devotion to clarity at all costs tends to split his readers into two camps. Some think his drive for precision is an admirable analytic ethic; some think he manifests an unfair bias against the language of metaphysicians, mystics, theologians, continental and post-modern philosophers, and maybe even poets. Who am I to decide? (Don’t answer that).
You’ll have to make up your own mind about whether Dennett’s last rule applies in all cases, but his first six can’t be beat when it comes to critically vetting the myriad claims routinely vying for our attention and agreement.
The Philosophy section of our big Free Online Courses collection just went through another update, and it now features 100 courses. Enough to give you a soup-to-nuts introduction to a timeless discipline. You can start with one of several introductory courses.
Philosophy for Beginners – iTunes – Web Video – Marianne Talbot, Oxford
The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps - Multiple Formats– Peter Adamson, King’s College London
Then, once you’ve found your footing, you can head off in some amazing directions. As we mentioned many moons ago, you can access courses and lectures by modern day legends – Michel Foucault, Bertrand Russell, John Searle, Walter Kaufmann, Leo Strauss, Hubert Dreyfus and Michael Sandel. Then you can sit back and let them introduce you to the thinking of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Hobbes, Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre and the rest of the gang. The courses listed here are generally available via YouTube, iTunes, or the web.
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