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Now it’s time for something a little more modern — Mike McCubbins offers an animated adaptation of Albert Camus’ classic, The Fall, published in 1957, the same year that Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his work that “illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.” Give McCubbins five minutes and he’ll give you the visual essence of the philosophical novel. You can watch it here.
When Slovenia’s hip Marxist/Lacanian critical theorist takes center stage at a Wall Street protest, it’s news for a culture site. No doubt. How can we not observe a rare moment of praxis? But, what it all means for the Occupy Wall Street movement, we’ll let you wrestle with that. Part 2 appears here. H/T Biblioklept.
Once again, we’re heading back to 1971. Yesterday we had Dick Cavett’s 1971 interview with George Harrison. Today, it’s the clash of two intellectual titans, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. In ’71, at the height of the Vietnam War, the American linguist and French historian/social theorist appeared on Dutch TV to debate a fundamental question: Is there such a thing as innate human nature? Or are we shaped by experiences and the power of cultural and social institutions around us?
40 years later, you can find the classic debate on YouTube. If you need subtitles, make sure you turn on the captions function at the bottom of the video.
Jacques Derrida, the founder of Deconstruction, was something of an academic rock star during his day. He packed auditoriums whenever and wherever he spoke. Films were made about him. And a generation of academics churned out Derridean deconstructions of literary texts. All of this made Derrida’s star rise ever higher. But whether it did much good for Comp Lit, French and English programs across the US, that’s another story.
But we digress from the main point here. Our friendly French philosopher spent a fair amount of time teaching in the US and got acquainted with American attitudes. Sometimes, he says, we can be manipulative and utilitarian. What exactly do you mean Mr. Derrida? Can you please elaborate? Of course, he does above.
Note: If you aren’t quite clear on what deconstruction is all about, you can watch two lectures devoted to the subject (here and here) from Yale’s course on Literary Theory. Entitled “Introduction to Theory of Literature,” this course, taught by Paul Fry, is listed in the Literature section of our big collection of Free Online Courses.
On Monday, we told you where you can download Free Courses from Top Philosophers (Foucault, Searle, Russell and the rest). As the day went along, our list grew thanks to reader suggestions, and we also discovered another promising resource — a podcast called “The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps,” created by Peter Adamson, Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at King’s College London:
Beginning with the earliest ancient thinkers, the series will look at the ideas and lives of the major philosophers (eventually covering in detail such giants as Plato, Aristotle, Avicenna, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant) as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition.
That’s what Adamson promises, and he doesn’t disappoint. Over the past 34 months, Adamson has produced 136 episodes, each about 20 minutes long, covering the PreSocratics (Pythagoras, Zeno, Parmenides, etc) and then Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. That’s roughly 45 hours of audio, and there’s no telling how many more hours of audio will bring us to the modern period. The more, the better, we say.
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.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
You can download hundreds of Free Courses from Great Universities. (Perhaps you already knew that.) And that includes courses by some of the biggest minds teaching in philosophy. (Is that old news too? Or some welcomed good news?) So we’re starting the week by giving you a rundown of some notable mentions.
John Searle began teaching philosophy at UC-Berkeley in 1959, and first did important work on “speech act” theory. Later he turned to consciousness and artificial intelligence, out of which came his famous “Chinese room” thought experiment. You can find a nice trio of classes online.
Walter Kaufmann spent 33 years teaching philosophy at Princeton. And more than anyone else, Kaufmann introduced Nietzsche’s philosophy to the English-speaking world and made it possible to take Nietzsche seriously as a thinker. Here he delivers three lectures on existentialists.
Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre — Web Site
Leo Strauss landed at The University of Chicago in 1949, where he spent decades teaching and writing on political philosophy, especially the political thought of the Ancients. His intellectual legacy is controversial, but his courses valuable.
Bertrand Russell was one of the most important British philosophers of the last century — a logician, essayist and social critic best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. When it comes to this lecture series, start with the bottom lecture first and then work your way up.
Authority & the Individual: Six BBC Lectures — Web Site
Michel Foucault taught history and philosophy at the Collège de France and published influential writings on power, knowledge, and discourse.
Six Lectures on Truth & Subjectivity presented on the UC Berkeley campus (English) - YouTube
Michael Sandel has taught political philosophy at Harvard since 1980. His course on justice (below) has been taken by more than 15,000 students, making it the most popular undergraduate course at Harvard. This version aired on PBS and the web.
Justice: A Journey in Moral Reasoning - YouTube — Web Site
In 2008, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins presented The Genius of Charles Darwin, a three-part documentary that was later named “Best TV Documentary Series” at the British Broadcast Awards. During the filming of the program, Dawkins interviewed various experts — biologists, philosophers, clergyman, evolutionary psychologists, etc. — and wound up with 18 hours of raw footage. Some of the uncut interviews have now made their way online (as well as DVD), and we’re highlighting a few today.
Above, Dawkins spends a good while with Peter Singer, the Princeton philosopher, otherwise known as the Father of the Animal Rights Movement. The wide-ranging conversation continually comes back to animal rights and vegetarianism and why Darwinism lends support to both. The best part comes toward the end, when Singer tells Dawkins (a meat eater), “I have assimilated Darwin on this issue better than you have because .… you’re still influenced by these vestiges of religious belief that separate us from the animals.…” Dawkins out-Dawkinsed.
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