Bryan Magee’s In-Depth, Uncut TV Conversations With Famous Philosophers (1978–87)

in Philosophy, Television | May 18th, 2012

Bryan Magee comes from a tra­di­tion that pro­duced some of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry’s most impres­sive media per­son­al­i­ties: that of the schol­ar­ship-edu­cat­ed, Oxbridge-refined, intel­lec­tu­al­ly omniv­o­rous, occa­sion­al­ly office-hold­ing, radio- and tele­vi­sion-savvy man of let­ters. Stu­dents and pro­fes­sors of phi­los­o­phy prob­a­bly know him from his large print oeu­vre, which includes vol­umes on Pop­per and Schopen­hauer as well as sev­er­al guides to west­ern phi­los­o­phy and the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Con­fes­sions of a Philoso­pher. He also wrote anoth­er mem­oir called The Tele­vi­sion Inter­view­er, and philo­soph­i­cal­ly inclined lay­men may fond­ly remem­ber him as just that. When Magee played to both these strengths at once, he came up with two philo­soph­i­cal tele­vi­sion shows in the span of a decade: Men of Ideas, which began in 1978, and The Great Philoso­phers, which ran in 1987. Both series brought BBC view­ers in-depth, uncut con­ver­sa­tions with many of the day’s most famous philoso­phers.

You can watch select inter­views of Men of Ideas and The Great Philoso­phers on YouTube, includ­ing:

At the top of the post, you’ll find Magee talk­ing with A.J. Ayer, a well-known spe­cial­ist in “log­i­cal pos­i­tivism,” about the devel­op­ment of, and chal­lenges to, that philo­soph­i­cal sub-field. Two philoso­phers, relaxed on a couch, some­times smok­ing, enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly engaged in a com­mer­cial-free back-and-forth about the most impor­tant thinkers and thoughts in the field — watch some­thing like that, and you can’t pos­si­bly think of now as a gold­en age of tele­vi­sion.

Note: Oodles of phi­los­o­phy cours­es, many thought by famous philoso­phers, can be found in the Phi­los­o­phy sec­tion of our list of Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

105 Ani­mat­ed Phi­los­o­phy Videos from Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy: A Project Spon­sored by Yale, MIT, Duke & More

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

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Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Technology Can’t Grasp Reality

in Philosophy, Religion, Technology, Television | April 13th, 2012

“The world is a mar­velous sys­tem of wig­gles,” says Alan Watts in a series of lec­tures I keep on my iPod at all times. He means that the world, as it real­ly exists, does not com­prise all the lines, angles, and hard edges that our var­i­ous sys­tems of words, sym­bols, and num­bers do. Were I to dis­till a sin­gle over­ar­ch­ing argu­ment from all I’ve read and heard of the body of work Watts pro­duced on Zen Bud­dhist thought, I would do so as fol­lows: human­i­ty has made astound­ing progress by cre­at­ing and read­ing “maps” of real­i­ty out of lan­guage, num­bers, and images, but we run an ever more dan­ger­ous risk of mis­tak­ing these maps for the land. In this 1971 Nation­al Edu­ca­tion­al Tele­vi­sion pro­gram, A Con­ver­sa­tion With Myself, Watts claims that our com­par­a­tive­ly sim­ple minds and the sim­ple tech­nolo­gies they’ve pro­duced have proven des­per­ate­ly inad­e­quate to han­dle real­i­ty’s actu­al com­plex­i­ty. But what to do about it?

Using an aes­thet­ic now rarely seen on tele­vi­sion, A Con­ver­sa­tion With Myself cap­tures, in only two unbro­ken shots, an infor­mal “lec­ture” deliv­ered by Watts straight to the view­er. Speak­ing first amid the abun­dant green­ery sur­round­ing his Mount Tamal­pais cab­in and then over a cup of cer­e­mo­ni­al Japan­ese green tea (“good on a cold day”), he explains why he thinks we have thus far failed to com­pre­hend the world and our inter­fer­ence with it. In part, we’ve failed because our “one-track” minds oper­at­ing in this “mul­ti-track” world insist on call­ing it inter­fer­ence at all, not real­iz­ing that the bound­aries between us, one anoth­er, our tech­nol­o­gy, and nature don’t actu­al­ly exist. They’re only arti­facts of the meth­ods we’ve used to look at the world, just like the dis­tor­tions you get when dig­i­tiz­ing a piece of ana­log sight or sound. Like ear­ly dig­i­ti­za­tion sys­tems, the crude tools we’ve been think­ing with have, in Watts’ view, forced all of real­i­ty’s “wig­gles” into unhelp­ful “lines and rows.” He sums up the prob­lem with a mem­o­rable dash of Bud­dha-by-way-of-Britain wit: “You’re try­ing to straight­en out a wig­gly world, and now you’re real­ly in trou­ble.”

(If you’d like a side of irony, pon­der for a moment the impli­ca­tions of absorb­ing all this not only through human lan­guage, but through tech­nol­o­gy like iPods and Google Video!)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Watts Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Med­i­ta­tion & East­ern Phi­los­o­phy (1960)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Philosophy Bites: Podcasting Ideas From Plato to Singularity Since 2007

in Philosophy, Podcasts | April 12th, 2012

I’ve spent four years writ­ing Podthoughts, a pod­cast review col­umn, for Maximumfun.org. At one pod­cast a week, this means I’ve lis­tened to and writ­ten up well over 200 dif­fer­ent pod­casts. At this point, each and every one that does­n’t con­sist of two guys vol­ley­ing shape­less com­plaints about their least favorite bands, movies, tele­vi­sion shows, and sports teams comes as a drop of water in the desert. Yes, I exag­ger­ate, but the vast cre­ative ter­ri­to­ry offered by a form of media as fresh and open as pod­cast­ing nev­er­the­less remains most­ly unex­plored. None of the blame, how­ev­er, falls upon Open Uni­ver­si­ty lec­tur­er Nigel War­bur­ton and BBC pro­duc­er David Edmonds, whose pod­cast Phi­los­o­phy Bites (iTunes — Lib­syn — Web) pushed the medi­um for­ward very ear­ly in its life­time. Alas, my pre­de­ces­sor in Pod­think­ing beat me to review­ing Phi­los­o­phy Bites, but I lat­er inter­viewed Edmonds on my own show about what it takes to craft a pod­cast with so many top philoso­phers talk­ing about so many philo­soph­i­cal top­ics in such short spans of time, so we’ll call it even.

The Phi­los­o­phy Bites canon now forms a wider-rang­ing, more acces­si­ble phi­los­o­phy cur­ricu­lum than you’ll find in any uni­ver­si­ty — and notably, in these try­ing eco­nom­ic times, an infi­nite­ly cheap­er one. You can pick from a vari­ety of pos­si­ble points of entry, includ­ing clear expla­na­tions of well-known con­cepts like Pla­to’s Cave and free will; philo­soph­i­cal per­spec­tives on such issues of the day as the sin­gu­lar­i­ty and genet­ic enhance­ment in sports; dis­cus­sions of Adam Smith, David Hume, and phi­los­o­phy’s oth­er lumi­nar­ies of old; and con­ver­sa­tions with mod­ern-day philo­soph­i­cal lumi­nar­ies like Alain de Bot­ton and A.C. Grayling. When you’d like to move on to longer-form round­table dis­cus­sions of famous works of phi­los­o­phy, start down­load­ing The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, a pod­cast I did get the chance to Pod­think about. For the ear­bud-equipped and philo­soph­i­cal­ly inclined, these are fruit­ful times indeed.

Note: Phi­los­o­phy Bites recent­ly pub­lished a book based on its pod­cast. And it starts by try­ing to answer the ques­tion. What is Phi­los­o­phy? Brain­Pick­ings has more on their answers.

Relat­ed con­tent:

55 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy… With­out Any Gaps

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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How Bertrand Russell Turned The Beatles Against the Vietnam War

in History, Music, Philosophy | March 10th, 2012

The Bea­t­les were so much a part of the youth move­ment that blos­somed in the 1960s that it’s amus­ing to think that one of the main issues that ener­gized the movement–peace–came to the Bea­t­les through a 92-year-old man.

As Paul McCart­ney explains in this clip from a Jan­u­ary 14, 2009 inter­view on The View, it hap­pened when he decid­ed to pay a vis­it to philoso­pher Bertrand Rus­sell. A co-founder of ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy, Rus­sell had been a life-long social and polit­i­cal activist. Dur­ing World War I, he was not allowed to trav­el freely in Britain due to his anti-war views. He lost his fel­low­ship at Trin­i­ty Col­lege, Cam­bridge, and was even­tu­al­ly jailed for six months for sup­pos­ed­ly inter­fer­ing with British For­eign Pol­i­cy. After World War II, Rus­sell lob­bied stren­u­ous­ly for the abo­li­tion of nuclear weapons. In the 1960s, he opposed the Viet­nam War.

After the Bea­t­les became big in 1963 and 1964, McCart­ney began tak­ing advan­tage of his celebri­ty sta­tus by call­ing on peo­ple he admired. In an inter­view with Bar­ry Miles for the book Paul McCart­ney: Many Years From Now, McCart­ney describes his meet­ing with Rus­sell:

Some­how I got his num­ber and called him up. I fig­ured him as a good speak­er, I’d seen him on tele­vi­sion, I’d read var­i­ous bits and pieces and was very impressed by his dig­ni­ty and the clar­i­ty of this think­ing, so when I got a chance I went down and met him. Bertrand Rus­sell lived in Chelsea in one of those lit­tle ter­race hous­es, I think it was Flood Street. He had the arche­typ­al Amer­i­can assis­tant who seemed always to be at every­one’s door that you want­ed to meet. I sat round wait­ing, then went in and had a great lit­tle talk with him. Noth­ing earth-shat­ter­ing. He just clued me in to the fact that Viet­nam was a very bad war, it was an impe­ri­al­ist war and Amer­i­can vest­ed inter­ests were real­ly all it was all about. It was a bad war and we should be against it. That was all. It was pret­ty good from the mouth of the great philoso­pher. “Slip it to me, Bert.”

McCart­ney report­ed his expe­ri­ence to the oth­er mem­bers of the Bea­t­les, and it was John Lennon who real­ly took the anti-war mes­sage and ran with it. For a reminder of those days, watch the video below of Lennon and Yoko Ono at their “Bed-In” for peace in 1969:

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Socrates on TV, Courtesy of Alain de Botton (2000)

in Philosophy, Television | March 8th, 2012

We could call Alain de Bot­ton, in the clas­si­cal sense, a philo­soph­i­cal ama­teur: that is, one who loves phi­los­o­phy. But not every­body loves the way he approach­es the field. His 2000 book The Con­so­la­tions of Phi­los­o­phy drew a par­tic­u­lar­ly sharp line through the crit­ics: some found great refresh­ment in the acces­si­bil­i­ty he grant­ed philoso­phers like Seneca and Schopen­hauer by fram­ing them in an unex­pect­ed­ly sin­cere par­o­dy of a self-help book; oth­ers judged this method inad­e­quate to deal with the thinkers’ true seri­ous­ness and com­plex­i­ty. This clicks right in with what seems like de Bot­ton’s grand mis­sion: tak­ing West­ern civ­i­liza­tion’s most respect­ed words, writ­ten and spo­ken, and using them to adjust the nuts and bolts of our mod­ern, every­day pur­suit of hap­pi­ness. He wrote anoth­er book called How Proust Can Change Your Life; he estab­lished a school which offers cours­es like “How to Bal­ance Work with Life” and “How to Be Cool;” and his lat­est project involves adapt­ing reli­gion for use by athe­ists (watch relat­ed video here).

No sur­prise, then, that de Bot­ton’s work would extend to that most com­mon medi­um, tele­vi­sion, with a series called Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness. You can watch a num­ber of episodes on YouTube, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to “Socrates on Self-Con­fi­dence.” Zip­ping through the streets of Athens on a canary-yel­low Ves­pa, de Bot­ton tells us of the life and meth­ods of the fifth-cen­tu­ry-BC philoso­pher who seems to remain the dis­ci­pline’s most famous prac­ti­tion­er. Illus­trat­ing Socrates’ famous habit of pub­lic inter­ro­ga­tion, de Bot­ton strolls up to oth­er vis­i­tors in the mar­ket­place, ask­ing them to define the idea of jus­tice or their con­cep­tion of their per­son­al life. The answers don’t come eas­i­ly: a French­woman strug­gles to respond even when our intre­pid host shifts into her lan­guage, and a reli­gious­ly out­fit­ted local blows him off with­out even slow­ing down. A few hearty Aus­tralian trav­el­ers — a breed found at every point on the map, cra­dles of phi­los­o­phy and oth­er­wise — do lay out their self-styled philoso­phies with­out hes­i­ta­tion, but de Bot­ton has plen­ty more places to go and peo­ple to see, like a focus group whose vol­ley of opin­ions would have sum­moned Socrates’ gravest reser­va­tions about democ­ra­cy, and a pot­ter who crafts a tan­gi­ble metaphor for Socrates’ notion of the well-test­ed, water­tight belief.

Those who’ve ques­tioned whether de Bot­ton knows how to han­dle phi­los­o­phy may well come away from these pro­grams con­vinced that he does­n’t. I, how­ev­er, find some­thing almost rad­i­cal in the way his demeanor, unyield­ing­ly straight­for­ward and nev­er for­get­ful of con­cerns oth­ers might dis­miss as mun­dane, inter­acts with the great works of the philo­soph­i­cal canon. I sense an almost strate­gic naïveté at work, and it takes him places, intel­lec­tu­al­ly and geo­graph­i­cal­ly, to which his clos­est peers in let­ters may nev­er get around. The stark­ly divid­ed reac­tion de Bot­ton draws shows, to my mind, that he’s being just the right kind of provoca­tive — in his gen­tle man­ner.

Com­plete set of links to Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness episodes: Socrates on Self-Con­fi­dence, Epi­cu­rus on Hap­pi­ness, Seneca on Anger, Mon­taigne on Self-Esteem, Niet­zsche on Hap­pi­ness

Relat­ed con­tent:

Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness

Alain de Bot­ton: The Glass of Life is Half-Emp­ty

Alain de Bot­ton Wants a Reli­gion for Athe­ists

55 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Slavoj Žižek & Pres. Obama Give Their Take on The Wire (and More Culture Around the Web)

in Philosophy, Television | March 5th, 2012

Although HBO’s crit­i­cal­ly-acclaimed series, The Wire, end­ed its run in 2008, the show keeps get­ting back into the head­lines. Just last week Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, an acknowl­edged fan of The Wire, was asked dur­ing an audio inter­view with ESPN to name his favorite char­ac­ter on the show, to which he replied “It’s got to be Omar, right? I mean, that guy is unbe­liev­able, right?” And then this oth­er piece of audio sur­faced online — Slavoj Žižek, your favorite Sloven­ian philosopher/cultural crit­ic, pre­sent­ed a talk at The Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don (2/24/2012) called The Wire or The Clash of Civil­i­sa­tions in One Coun­try. And it takes the show seri­ous­ly as a work of trag­ic, real­ist art. Lis­ten here.

More Cul­ture Around the Web:

How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Aca­d­e­m­ic Paper? The MLA Weighs In.

The Cen­tral Phi­los­o­phy of Tibet by famed Bud­dhism Schol­ar Robert Thur­man (father of Uma). Added to our col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es.

William Car­los Williams Reads His Poems at 92nd St. Y in NYC  in 1954.

Rev­e­la­tions: Mes­si­aen’s Quar­tet for the End of Time. Writ­ten & pre­miered in a Nazi prison camp, 1941.

Lawrence Lessig’s Free Cul­ture as a Free Audio book.

Louis Menand on What Dr. Seuss Real­ly Taught Us. (2002)

The Guardian Rec­om­mends Silent Films

Tougher Than Leather, 1988. Run-DMC stars in cross between blax­ploita­tion film & spaghet­ti west­ern.

– Get more Cul­ture Links on our live­ly Twit­ter stream, or catch us on Face­book.

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75 Free Philosophy Courses

in Philosophy | March 1st, 2012

The Phi­los­o­phy sec­tion of our big Free Cours­es col­lec­tion just went through a major update, and it now lists more than 75 cours­es. Enough to give you a soup-to-nuts intro­duc­tion to a time­less dis­ci­pline. You can start with one of sev­er­al intro­duc­to­ry cours­es.

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, rock star philoso­phers — 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.

Explore our col­lec­tion of 400 Free Cours­es to find top­ics in many oth­er dis­ci­plines — His­to­ry, Lit­er­a­ture, Physics, Com­put­er Sci­ence and beyond. As we like to say, it’s the most valu­able sin­gle page on the web.

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Bertrand Russell’s ABC of Relativity: The Classic Introduction to Einstein (Free Audio)

in Audio Books, Books, Philosophy, Physics, Science | February 18th, 2012

“Every­body knows that Ein­stein did some­thing aston­ish­ing,” writes Bertrand Rus­sell in the open­ing pas­sage of ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty, “but very few peo­ple know exact­ly what it was. It is gen­er­al­ly rec­og­nized that he rev­o­lu­tion­ized our con­cep­tion of the phys­i­cal world, but the new con­cep­tions are wrapped up in math­e­mat­i­cal tech­ni­cal­i­ties. It is true that there are innu­mer­able pop­u­lar accounts of the the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty, but they gen­er­al­ly cease to be intel­li­gi­ble just at the point where they begin to say some­thing impor­tant.”

Eighty-sev­en years after it was writ­ten, ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty still stands as one of the most intel­li­gi­ble intro­duc­tions to Albert Ein­stein’s the­o­ries. Rus­sell wrote the book in 1925 as a com­pan­ion to his ear­li­er vol­ume, ABC of Atoms. The project of writ­ing books for a gen­er­al read­er­ship was born of neces­si­ty. Rus­sell had no aca­d­e­m­ic appoint­ment, and need­ed the mon­ey. But as Peter Clark explains in his intro­duc­tion to the Rout­ledge fifth edi­tion to ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty, the ear­ly 1920s were also a time when Rus­sell was becom­ing increas­ing­ly pre­oc­cu­pied with social and polit­i­cal issues. He believed that many of the social ills of the peri­od, includ­ing the rise of nation­al­ism, were con­se­quences of a wide­spread and entrenched irra­tional­i­ty, born of igno­rance and a lack of edu­ca­tion. Writes Clark:

It was cer­tain­ly a hero­ic peri­od in Rus­sel­l’s life, when he earnest­ly believed that the sort of blind unthink­ing prejudice–which he con­ceived to be fun­da­men­tal­ly respon­si­ble for the hor­rors of the First World War–could be tran­scend­ed by the dis­sem­i­na­tion of knowl­edge and the exer­cise in crit­i­cal rea­son­ing pow­er by all class­es of soci­ety. His huge out­put in this peri­od was designed to bring with­in, as far as pos­si­ble, every­one’s grasp the free­dom of thought and action which knowl­edge and learn­ing brings. That spir­it of enlight­en­ment cer­tain­ly per­vades the ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty.

Thanks to UbuWeb, you can lis­ten to an abridged audio ver­sion of ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty online. The book is read by Eng­lish actor Derek Jaco­bi (who also starred in the film we fea­tured last week on Alan Tur­ing: Break­ing the Code). Jaco­bi reads one of the lat­er edi­tions of ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty. In 1959, and again in 1969, Rus­sell con­sent­ed to revi­sions by physi­cist Felix Pirani. Chap­ter 11 was rewrit­ten by Pirani to incor­po­rate the expan­sion of the uni­verse, which was­n’t announced by Edwin Hub­ble until four years after the first edi­tion of Rus­sel­l’s book. The one trou­bling thing about the text, as it now stands, is that Pirani did­n’t lim­it him­self to the revi­sions made under Rus­sel­l’s super­vi­sion. He made more changes in 1985, fif­teen years after Rus­sel­l’s death.

Stel­lar cours­es focus­ing on Ein­stein’s physics can also be found in our big col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es Online. Just scroll down to the Physics sec­tion.

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