Media Catalogue

On Water

2011-04-29T23:21:00.000-07:00

Produced by the Surfrider Foundation

Their Mission Statement:

A little over 25 years ago three people in Malibu, California found out that their favorite wave was about to be destroyed. Think about that for a second.

Think about something you love... something that gives you enjoyment. Taken away.

First Point, pictured to the right, the quintessential perfect, California wave was about to be destroyed. Those three people organized and worked with the local municipalities until they were satisfied that their efforts to preserve that iconic wave would be successful.

This was the genesis of Surfrider Foundation.

Today, we are doing this same thing in about 15 countries around the world.

Our mission is the protection and enjoyment of oceans, waves and beaches through a powerful activist network.

You can think about that as three concepts. "Protection and enjoyment", we don't want to put a velvet rope around a beach and tell people to keep off. We're surfers, we're beach goers, we're watermen... we enjoy the coasts. We're a user group. Next up is "oceans, waves and beaches." Think coastlines, we're engaged with environmental issues that affect our coastlines. "Powerful activist network" speaks to how we go about this mission. We are a grassroots organization. We're local in many coastal regions.

We're moms, we're surfers, we're kids and teens... we're you. We're engaged to protect what we love; oceans, waves and beaches.

Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental 'heresies'

2011-04-16T17:41:00.000-07:00

Photo by Ted Streshinsky

Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of the Well and the Long Now Foundation, writer, editor and game designer, Stewart Brand has helped to define the collaborative, data-sharing, forward-thinking world we live in now.

Since the 1960s, he has maintained that -- given access to the information we need -- humanity can make the world a better place. One of his early accomplishments: helping to persuade NASA to release the first photo of the Earth from space. The iconic Big Blue Marble became the cover for his Whole Earth Catalog, a massive compendium of resources and facts he thought people might like to know. And we did: the 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies. In 1987, he wrote The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT; in 1994, How Buildings Learn.

Currently Brand is working with computer scientist Danny Hillis to build the Clock of the Long Now, a 10,000-year timepiece; his Long Now Foundation also runs a number of spinoff projects, including the Rosetta Project, cataloguing the world's languages, and the Long Bets website. He's also busy with the Global Business Network (part of the Monitor Group), helping businesses plan for the near and way-far future. (bio taken here)

Entitled Opinions: A conversation with Thomas Sheehan, Stanford Professor of Religious Studies, about Heidegger's Being and Time.

2011-04-12T10:42:00.000-07:00

Heidegger 1968

Thomas Sheehan is Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford and specializes in contemporary European philosophy and its relation to religious questions, with particular interests in Heidegger and Roman Catholicism. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Loyola University of Chicago since 1972. He received his B.A. from St. Patrick's College and his Ph.D. from Fordham University. He has been the recipient of many academic honors including: Ford Foundation Fellow (1983-85), Resident Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (1983), National Endowment for the Humanities (1980), Fritz Thyssen Foundation (1979-80), and a Mellon Foundation Grant. His books include: Martin Heidegger, Logic: The Question of Truth (trans., 2007); Becoming Heidegger (2007); Edmund Husserl: Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Encounter with Heidegger (1997); Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations (1987); The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986); and Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker (1981). (bio taken here)

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Dave Meslin: The antidote to apathy

2011-04-12T09:21:00.001-07:00

Local politics -- schools, zoning, council elections -- hit us where we live. So why don't more of us actually get involved? Is it apathy? Dave Meslin says no. He identifies the 7 barriers that keep us from taking part in our communities, even when we truly care.

Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education

2011-03-13T17:53:00.000-07:00

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

RadioLab - The Good Show

2011-02-18T12:14:00.000-08:00

In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another?

The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today's plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness ... or even, self-sacrifice. Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?

C. K. Williams on Whitman’s Music: Whose Words These Are

2011-01-30T13:08:00.000-08:00

C.K. Williams has won nearly every major poetry award. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Repair (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the National Book Award in 2003. In 2005, he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Since 1996, he has taught in the creative writing program at Princeton University, and he divides his time between Princeton and France. (bio taken here)

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How Analytic Philosophy has Failed Cognitive Science?

2010-03-24T18:19:00.000-07:00

Robert Brandom is Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, a fellow of the Center for the Philosophy of Science, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His interests center on philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of logic. He has published more than 50 articles on these and related areas. He is currently at work on a book on Hegel's Phenomenology He has been a Nelson Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (1990), delivered the Hempel Lectures at Princeton (1994), and the Townsend Lectures at Berkeley (1997). (bio taken here)

"How Analytic Philosophy Has Failed Cognitive Science," Collège de France, 26 May, 2009

On Aggression: The Politics and Psychobiology of Evil

2010-03-13T21:45:00.000-08:00

"The motive hunting of motiveless malignity" is a famous line that Coleridge wrote in his copy of Othello. Everybody has a little larceny in their souls, but there are those singular human beings who seem to be agents of Lucifer. Hitler certainly represents a form of evil that falls outisde the scale of human psychological consideration. But where, for example, do huxters, grifters, scam artists, and frauds stand in this context? Dahmer and other serial killers might qualify, but their acts seem to beg some kind of psychological understanding. And how do catastrophic events like Pompeii or, in recent history, the Tsunamis in Southeast Asia reconcile with a beneficent view of nature and belief in a higher power or God? If there is a God, is such a being or force indifferent or even retributive? And what is the effect of extreme manifestations of evil on our faith in the enlightened notions of science and reason? These and other questions will be addressed in this final roundtable in the series, On Aggression.

Richard Bernstein is Vera List Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation and The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11.

Jacques Lezra is Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, Portuguese and English, and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. Previously he taught at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, at Yale, Harvard, and at the Bread Loaf School of English. Lezra's research concerns the literature, philosophy, and visual culture of the early modern period (Shakespeare, Cervantes, Descartes, Velazquez), as well as contemporary ethical philosophy. He has published Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe and edited Spanish Republic and Depositions: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey and the Labor of Reading. His 1992 translation into Spanish of Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight won the PEN Critical Editions Award. Lezra’s next book, Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror in the Modern Republic, will be published in 2009. Economía política del alma: El suceso cervantino, a book on the political economy of the soul in Cervantes, is also in press and will appear this fall.

Edward Nersessian is Co-Director of the Philoctetes Center. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weil-Cornell Medical College, and a Training & Supervising Psychoanalyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

Kent Reynolds is a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Biblical Languages Instructor at the Union Theological Seminary. Previously, Dr. Reynolds served as a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In his current research, Dr. Reynolds focuses on the pedagogic nature of texts in the Hebrew Bible, especially in the area of character formation, and how these texts were received and transmitted by the earliest interpreters. He has several studies in process, including a book on Psalm 119, a collection of essays, and conference presentations. Dr. Reynolds has published an article in Vetus Testamentum and has a forthcoming article in Zeitschrift für Althebräistik.

Joel Whitebook is a philosopher and practicing psychoanalyst. He is on the faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and, beginning in fall of 2010, he will be Director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program in Columbia's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He is writing an intellectual biography of Freud for Cambridge University Press and his book, Der gefesselte Odysseus: Studien zur Kritischen Theorie und Psychoanalyse has just been published by Campus Verlag.

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Psychotherapy in the Age of Neuroreceptors and Genes

2010-03-12T18:22:00.000-08:00

Is there a place for dynamic psychotherapy in the age of genes and neurotransmitters? This roundtable will attempt to situate the role of intensive psychotherapy among the various options available today for the treatment of serious mental disorders. Panelists will present and examine different viewpoints and assess the efficacy of divergent approaches.

Brian Koehler is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with a strong neuroscience background. He is in the private practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in New York City and on the teaching faculty at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, at the School of Social Work at New York University, as well as at a number of other psychoanalytic training institutes in New York City and State. Dr. Koehler is a scientific advisor and former reviewer for the journal, Schizophrenia Bulletin, and a reviewer for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Ze’ev Levin is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Director of Residency Training in Psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine. He received his medical degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and was a resident in Psychiatry and Chief Resident at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. A graduate of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Centre for Training and Research, he has been the Associate Director and Director of the residency training in-patient unit at Bellevue Hospital Center. In addition to his training job, Dr. Levin has a private practice in Manhattan.

Charles Marmar is the newly appointed Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center. Most recently, Dr. Marmar served as Professor and Vice Chair at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and the Associate Chief of Staff for Mental Health and Director of the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Research Program at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He has served as the President of both the Society of Psychotherapy Research and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and served as a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Psychotherapy Research and Practice and the Journal of Traumatic Stress. He has been a reviewer for The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, The American Journal of Psychiatry and The Journal of Psychiatric Research.

Ira Steinman is a psychiatrist in private practice in San Francisco. He is the author of Treating the "Untreatable": Healing in the Realms of Madness, a chronicle of the successful, at times curative, out-patient intensive psychotherapy of 12 previously "untreatable" patients. Steinman has focused on schizophrenia for 45 years. His early training ranged from working with R.D. Laing to running the psychiatric drug component of the National Academy of Sciences' Drug Efficacy Study, which evaluated all the antipsychotic medications available at the time to studies at Chestnut Lodge and Mount Zion Hospital.

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Claude Levi-Strauss

2010-01-19T22:21:00.000-08:00

Claude Lévi-Strauss (28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called the "father of modern anthropology".

When young, Lévi-Strauss organized expeditions into the French countryside, and later studied in Paris, where he went on to teach. He later traveled and did research in Brazil with his first wife, Dina. Returning to France, he was drafted into the French army, but after France was invaded by the Nazis, he escaped to New York, where he taught at The New School for Social Research. In 1948, he returned to France.

Levi-Strauss never accepted the notion that Western civilization was unique and privileged: in his contact with Indigenous peoples in Brazil and Indigenous peoples in North America, he emphasized that the 'savage' mind had the same structures to the civilized mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book Tristes Tropiques, which positioned him as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought, where his ideas reached into fields including the humanities and philosophy. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity."

He was honored by universities throughout the world and held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France (1959–1982); he was elected a member of the Académie Française in 1973. (bio taken here)

The Birth of Historical Societies (Hitchcock Lectures)
October 3 and 4, 1984. Berkeley Language Center, UC Berkeley
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The Champions, Part 1: Unlikely Warriors

2009-12-29T20:39:00.000-08:00

In Part 1 of this 3-part documentary series, director Donald Brittain chronicles the early years of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and René Lévesque. From their university days in the 1950s to 1967 when Lévesque left the Liberal Party and Trudeau became the federal Minister of Justice, Brittain attempts to get at the heart of what makes these men so fascinating.

The Champions, Part 2: Trappings of Power

2009-12-29T20:36:00.000-08:00

Part 2 of this 3-part documentary series about Pierre Elliott Trudeau and René Lévesque covers the years between 1967 and 1977, a colourful decade that saw Trudeau win three federal elections, the 1970 October Crisis and the sweeping rise to power of the Parti Québécois.

The Champions, Part 3: The Final Battle

2009-12-29T20:18:00.000-08:00

The final instalment of this 3-part documentary series about Pierre Elliott Trudeau and René Lévesque spans the decade between 1976 and 1986. The film reveals the turbulent, behind-the-scenes drama during the Quebec referendum and the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution. In doing so, it also traces both Trudeau's and Lévesque's fall from power.

Manuel de Landa: Deleuze and the Use of the Genetic Algorithm in Architecture

2009-11-09T22:29:00.000-08:00

Manuel De Landa, (born 1952 in Mexico City), is a writer, artist and philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University (New York), the Gilles Deleuze Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, a lecturer at the Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and adjunct professor at Pratt Institute the School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York. He has a BFA from New York's School of Visual Arts. (bio taken here)

Tommy Douglas

2009-10-21T17:43:00.000-07:00

Thomas Clement "Tommy" Douglas, PC, CC, SOM (20 October 1904 – 24 February 1986) was a Scottish-born Baptist minister who became a prominent Canadian social democratic politician. As leader of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) from 1942 and the seventh Premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961, he led the first socialist government in North America and introduced universal public healthcare to Canada. When the CCF united with the Canadian Labour Congress to form the New Democratic Party, he was elected as its first federal leader and served in that post from 1961 to 1971. (bio taken here)

George Grant: Canadian Identity, Technology, Nietzsche

2009-10-21T04:23:00.001-07:00

George Parkin Grant OC, D.Phil., FRSC (Toronto, November 13, 1918 - Halifax, Nova Scotia, September 27, 1988) was a Canadian philosopher, teacher and political commentator, whose popular appeal peaked in the late 1960s and 1970s. He is best known for his nationalism, political conservatism, comments on technology, pacifism, Christian faith, and conservative views regarding abortion and is credited as one of Canada's most original thinkers.

Academically, his writings express a complex meditation on the great books, and confrontation with the great thinkers, of Western Civilization. His influences include the "ancients" such as Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine of Hippo, as well as "moderns" like Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Leo Strauss, Simone Weil, and Jacques Ellul. (bio taken here)

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Jacques Rancière: Revisiting Nights of Labor

2009-10-20T04:47:00.000-07:00

Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Rancière has departed from the path set by his teacher and published a series of works probing the concepts that make up our understanding of political discourse. What is ideology? What is the proletariat? Is there a working class? And how do these masses of workers that thinkers like Althusser referred to continuously enter into a relationship with knowledge? We talk about them but what do we know? An example of this line of thinking is Rancière's book entitled Le philosophe et ses pauvres (The Philosopher and His Poor, 1983), a book about the role of the poor in the intellectual lives of philosophers.

Mark Kingwell vs. Malcolm Gladwell: Awareness

2009-10-18T16:11:00.000-07:00

A thought-provoking discussion featuring two of the world’s leading popular thinkers / theorists / speakers: Malcolm Gladwell and Mark Kingwell. The evening will encourage thought and dialogue about social change.

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is best known as the author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Mark Kingwell is Professor of Philosophy at UofT, a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, and a former columnist for both The National Post and The Globe and Mail. Among his award-winning books are the bestsellers Better Living and The World We Want.

Conversion of St. Paul, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

William R. Catton

2009-10-15T05:40:00.000-07:00

William R. Catton graduated from Oberlin College with an A.B. degree in 1950, whereupon he entered the graduate program in sociology at the University of Washington. He earned his M.A. there in 1952 and his Ph.D. in 1954. He is now Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Washington State University. Catton served as President of the Pacific Sociological Association 1984-85 and as the first chair of the American Sociological Association Section on Environmental Sociology. (bio taken here)

Jacques Ellul

2009-10-15T04:18:00.000-07:00

Jacques Ellul (January 6, 1912 – May 19, 1994) was a French philosopher, law professor, sociologist, lay theologian, and Christian. He wrote several books about the "technological society" and the intersection between Christianity and politics.

A philosopher who approached technology from a deterministic viewpoint, Ellul, professor at the University of Bordeaux, authored 58 books and more than a thousand articles over his lifetime. (bio taken here)

Antonio Damasio

2009-10-11T14:58:00.001-07:00

Antonio Damasio is an internationally recognized leader in neuroscience. His research has helped to elucidate the neural basis for the emotions and has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making. His work has also had a major influence on current understanding of the neural systems, which underlie memory, language and consciousness. Damasio directs the newly created USC Brain and Creativity Institute. (bio taken here)

Shelly Kagan: A Course on Death

2009-10-09T00:37:00.000-07:00

Shelly Kagan is the Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and the former Henry R. Luce Professor of Social Thought and Ethics. Originally a native of Skokie, Illinois, he received his B.A. from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University under the supervision of Thomas Nagel in 1982. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh and at the University of Illinois at Chicago before arriving at Yale. (bio taken here)

There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?

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Hubert Dreyfus

2009-09-26T21:09:00.000-07:00

Hubert Dreyfus was educated at Harvard, earning three degrees there (B.A in 1951, M.A in 1952, and Ph.D. in 1964). He is considered a leading interpreter of the work of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but especially of Martin Heidegger. While spending most of his teaching career at Berkeley, Professor Dreyfus has also taught at the Brandeis University (1957 to 1959), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (from 1960 to 1968), the University of Frankfurt, and Hamilton College. In addition to criticizing artificial intelligence, Dreyfus is well known for making the work of continental philosophers, especially Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault, intelligible to analytically trained philosophers. (bio taken here)

Discussion of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty:

Host Harry Kreisler welcomes philosopher Hubert Dreyfus for a discussion of why machines cannot become human. In their discussion, they talk about the role of philosophy in clarifying what it means to be human.

Podcast of a philosophy class
on Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time"
UC Berkeley Fall 2007
Philosophy 185 Heidegger
Instructor Hubert Dreyfus

Willie Smits: Restoring a Rainforest

2009-09-23T19:09:00.000-07:00

Photo taken by Suzie Katz at TED Conference 2009

Willie Smits works at the complicated intersection of humankind, the animal world and our green planet. In his early work as a forester in Indonesia, he came to a deep understanding of that triple relationship, as he watched the growing population of Sulawesi move into (or burn for fuel) forests that are home to the orangutan. These intelligent animals were being killed for food, traded as pets or simply failing to thrive as their forest home degraded.

Smits believes that to rebuild orangutan populations, we must first rebuild their forest habitat -- which means helping local people find options other than the short-term fix of harvesting forests to survive. His Masarang Foundation raises money and awareness to restore habitat forests around the world -- and to empower local people. In 2007, Masarang opened a palm-sugar factory that uses thermal energy to turn sugar palms (fast-growing trees that thrive in degraded soils) into sugar and even ethanol, returning cash and power to the community and, with luck, starting the cycle toward a better future for people, trees and orangs. (bio taken here)

Free Will

2009-09-21T00:31:00.000-07:00

The question of free will has been debated by philosophers, psychologists and religious thinkers from the beginning of recorded history. Any system of thought that seeks to deal with man's place in nature must inevitably consider this question. The roundtable examines free will from the points of view of philosophy, psychoanalysis and neuroscience. In particular, findings from psychoanalysis, such as the death instinct and trans-generational transmission, as well as discoveries in neuroscience about implicit memory, are employed to provide a new perspective from which to relate free will to current discussions of human behavior.

Akeel Bilgrami is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and the author of Belief and Meaning, Self-Knowledge and Resentment, and Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity.

Annaik Feve is a neurologist, psychoanalyst, and member of the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris. She lectures and publishes regularly in the fields of neuroscience and psychoanalysis, focussing on movement disorders, dreams, and psychoanalytic education. She organizes monthly meetings of the Philoctetes Center in Paris.

Rebecca Goldstein, a novelist and philosopher, is the author of eight books, the last of which was Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. The recipient of numerous prizes for her fiction and scholarship, including a MacArthur Fellowship, she is currently a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.

Siri Hustvedt is the author of The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, as well as numerous essays and short stories. Her last novel, What I Loved, was nominated for the Prix Etranger Femina.

Jaak Panksepp is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Bowling Green State University and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the Medical College of Ohio at Toledo. He is the author of Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, Textbook of Biological Psychiatry and Advances in Biological Psychiatry.

Joel Whitebook is a philosopher and practicing psychoanalyst. He is on the faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and is writing an intellectual biography of Freud for Cambridge University Press.

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Clay Shirky: It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure.

2009-09-18T23:05:00.000-07:00

Mr. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.

In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology -- how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. (bio taken here)

Herbert Marcuse

2009-09-05T04:56:00.001-07:00

Herbert Marcuse (July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a German-Jewish philosopher, political theorist and sociologist, and a member of the Frankfurt School. His best known works are Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man and The Aesthetic Dimension. (bio taken here)

Andrew Feenberg discusses his new collection of essays by Herbert Marcuse.

Andrew Feenberg is Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, where he directs the Applied Communication and Technology Lab. He has also taught for many years in the Philosophy Department at San Diego State University, and at Duke University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the Universities of California, San Diego and Irvine, the Sorbonne, the University of Paris-Dauphine, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and the University of Tokyo.

Paul Goodman

2009-09-04T17:17:00.000-07:00

Paul Goodman (9 September 1911 New York City – 2 August 1972) was an American sociologist, poet, writer, anarchist, and public intellectual. Goodman is now mainly remembered as the author of Growing Up Absurd and an activist on the pacifist Left in the 1960s and an inspiration to that era's student movement. He is less remembered as a co-founder of Gestalt Therapy in the 1940s and '50s. (bio taken here)

Paul Goodman speaks on the changes in the university system made necessary by the Free Speech Movement (1965).
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Denise Gigante

2009-08-30T14:47:00.000-07:00

DENISE GIGANTE, Associate Professor of English, teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature with a focus on Romanticism. Her books include Taste: A Literary History (Yale UP, 2005), Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy (Routledge, 2005), The Great Age of the English Essay: An Anthology (Yale UP, 2008), and Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (Yale UP, 2009). She is currently working on The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George with Lawrence M. Crutcher (a descendant of George Keats) and a book about American bibliophilia and British Romanticism. (bio taken here)

Click here for a radio interview on her book Life: Organic Form and Romanticism

Dan Pink

2009-08-25T13:32:00.001-07:00

With a trio of influential bestsellers, Dan Pink has changed the way companies view the modern workplace. In the pivotal A Whole New Mind, Pink identifies a sea change in the global workforce -- the shift of an information-based corporate culture to a conceptual base, where creativity and big-picture design dominates the landscape.

His latest book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, is an evolutionary transformation of the familiar career guide. Replacing linear text with a manga-inspired comic, Pink outlines six career laws vastly differing from the ones you've been taught. Members of the Johnny Bunko online forum participated in an online contest to create the seventh law -- "stay hungry."

A contributing editor for Wired, Pink is working on a new book on the science and economics of motivation for release in late 2009.

"Pink has a knack for teaching in such an entertaining way that you'll forget you are learning." -Lexi Feinberg, Forbes.com (bio taken here)

Malcolm Gladwell

2009-08-08T23:37:00.000-07:00

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His 1999 profile of Ron Popeil won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. He is the author of three books, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference," (2000) , "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" (2005), and "Outliers: The Story of Success" (2008) all of which were number one New York Times bestsellers.

From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter with the Washington Post, where he covered business, science, and then served as the newspaper's New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City. (bio taken here)

The Outliers

George Lakoff

2009-08-07T01:53:00.000-07:00

George P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. Although some of his research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is most famous for his ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior and society. He is particularly famous for his concept of the "embodied mind", which he has written about in relation to mathematics. In recent years he has applied his work to the realm of politics, exploring this in his books. (bio taken here)

John Dewey

2009-08-05T02:48:00.000-07:00

John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose thoughts and ideas have been highly influential in the United States and around the world. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism. He is also one of the founders of functional psychology and was a leading representative of the progressive movement in U.S. schooling during the first half of the 20th century. (bio taken here)

Here is an audio reading of John Dewey's 1897 seminal essay on his educational beliefs called "My Pedagogic Creed." This version was a project recorded and edited by students at the University of Illinois's Music Education Technology class MUS243 (fall 2008).

Peter Singer

2009-07-23T04:22:00.001-07:00

Peter Albert David Singer (born July 6, 1946) is an Australian philosopher. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics, approaching ethical issues from a secular preference utilitarian perspective. (bio taken here)

Richard Dawkins interviews Peter Singer for "The Genius of Charles Darwin", the Channel 4 UK TV program which won British Broadcasting Awards' "Best Documentary Series" of 2008.

Craig Venter

2009-07-23T03:43:00.000-07:00

J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., is regarded as one of the leading scientists of the 21st century for his numerous invaluable contributions to genomic research. He is Founder and President of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit, research and support organization with more than 400 scientist and staff dedicated to human, microbial, plant and environmental genomic research, the exploration of social and ethical issues in genomics, and seeking alternative energy solutions through genomics.

Dr. Venter began his formal education after a tour of duty as a Navy Corpsman in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. After earning both a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and a Ph.D. in Physiology and Pharmacology from the University of California at San Diego, he was appointed professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. In 1984, he moved to the National Institutes of Health campus where he developed Expressed Sequence Tags or ESTs, a revolutionary new strategy for rapid gene discovery. In 1992 Dr. Venter founded The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), a not-for-profit research institute, where in 1995 he and his team decoded the genome of the first free-living organism, the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae, using his new whole genome shotgun technique. Dr. Venter and his teams have now sequenced hundreds of genomes using his techniques and tools.

In 1998, Dr. Venter founded Celera Genomics to sequence the human genome using new tools and techniques he and his team developed. The successful completion of this research culminated with the February 2001 publication of the human genome in the journal, Science. He and his team at Celera also sequenced the fruit fly, mouse and rat genomes. Dr. Venter and his team at the Venter Institute continue to blaze new trails in genomics research and have published numerous important papers covering such areas as the first complete diploid human genome, environmental genomics, and synthetic genomics.

Dr. Venter, one of the most frequently cited scientists, is the author of more than 200 research articles. He is also the recipient of numerous honorary degrees, public honors, and scientific awards, including the 2001 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, and the 2002 Gairdner Foundation International Award. Dr. Venter is a member of numerous prestigious scientific organizations including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Society for Microbiology. (bio taken here)

Richard Dawkins interviews Craig Venter for "The Genius of Charles Darwin", the Channel 4 UK TV program which won British Broadcasting Awards' "Best Documentary Series" of 2008.

William James & Josiah Royce

2009-06-27T23:39:00.000-07:00

This conference took place, as part of the "William James Lecture on Religious Experience" series, May 25-27, 2007, in Harvard University's Lowell Lecture Hall, to assess the interactions, contributions, and continuing resonance of two major American philosophers and Harvard professors.

Speakers included John Clendenning, Harvey Cormier, Mathias Girel, Peter Hare, Jacquelyn Kegley, James T. Kloppenberg, Felicitas Kraemer, David Lamberth, John Lachs, John J. McDermott, Frank Oppenheim, Hilary Putnam, Robert Richardson, Sandra Rosenthal, Linda Simon, Chris Skowronski, Ignas Skrupskelis, Cornel West, and others.

Click here for Realplayer recordings of the conference

Isaiah Berlin

2009-05-25T13:11:00.000-07:00

Isaiah Berlin (1909–97) was a British philosopher, historian of ideas, political theorist, educator and essayist. For much of his life he was renowned for his conversational brilliance, his defence of liberalism, his attacks on political extremism and intellectual fanaticism, and his accessible, coruscating writings on the history of ideas. His essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958) contributed to a revival of interest in political theory in the English-speaking world, and remains one of the most influential and widely discussed texts in that field: admirers and critics agree that Berlin's distinction between positive and negative liberty remains, for better or worse, a basic starting-point for theoretical discussions of the meaning and value of political freedom. Late in his life, the greater availability of Berlin's numerous essays began to provoke increasing scholarly interest in his work, and particularly in the idea of value pluralism; that Berlin's articulation of value pluralism contains many ambiguities and even obscurities has only encouraged further work on the subject by other philosophers. (bio taken here)

Below is the final of a series of Mellon lectures delivered by Berlin in Washington in 1965. A book has been assembled titled The Roots of Romanticism that is a book format of the series of lectures.

Click here for lecture

philosophy bites: podcasts of top philosophers interviewed on bite-sized topics

2009-05-25T12:52:00.000-07:00

David Edmonds (on the right in the photo) is co-author of Wittgenstein's Poker - this focuses on a ten minute argument between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. His other books - also written with John Eidinow - include Bobby Fischer Goes to War (on the notorious chess match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky) and Rousseau's Dog, which dissects the famous quarrel between David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His day job is making radio documentaries for the BBC.

Nigel Warburton (on the left in the photo) has written a number of books including Philosophy: The Basics, Philosophy: The Classics (some of which is available as a podcast) , Thinking from A to Z and The Art Question. He is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University. He has also made a number of programmes for BBC Radio 4, writes a weblog called Virtual Philosopher and regularly leads courses on the philosophy of art at Tate Modern. His latest book, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction, will be published in February 2009

Simon Blackburn, Quentin Skinner, Alain de Bottom, Roger Crisp, Barry Stroud, Peter Singer, Michael Sandel, Tim Scanlon, and Ray Monk are among the over 90 people interviewed so far.

Click here for an archive of past interviews

John Searle

2009-05-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932 in Denver, Colorado) is an American philosopher and the Slusser Professor of Philosophy and Mills Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he was the first tenured professor to join the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004. (bio taken here)

Below is a celebration of John Searle’s 50 years of distinguished service to the UC Berkeley campus, with reflections by Tom Nagel, Barry Stroud, Robert Cole, Alex Pines, Peter Hanks, and Maya Kronfeld.

Click here for program website

Louis Menand

2009-03-12T16:29:00.000-07:00

Though readers of the New Yorker might identify him as a gifted book critic and stylish essayist—his pieces are 2004 National Magazine Award finalists in both categories—professor of English and American literature and language Louis Menand considers himself an "intellectual historian. I’m interested in where ideas come from, and the influence of one writer on another." His book The Metaphysical Club absorbed 10 years ("It was fun," he says), and won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history. It shows how Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey launched pragmatism and moved "American thought into the modern world." Menand does "a version of American studies," he says. "But nothing before the nineteenth century." Known as "Luke" since childhood (his eponymous father taught political science at MIT), Menand earned a degree in creative writing from Pomona College in 1973, then spent one year at Harvard Law School. "I didn’t have the personality to be a lawyer," he says. "I don’t like to argue." Instead, he earned a Ph.D. in English from Columbia, then taught at Princeton and CUNY before coming to Harvard last fall. Menand teaches courses on the Jameses (Henry, William, and Alice), and on the art and thought of the Cold War period from 1945 to 1965, the subject of his next book. With his wife, Emily, and two adolescent sons in Manhattan, he commutes between there and Beacon Hill. Menand’s elegant prose doesn’t emerge from revision: "I don’t write drafts," he explains. "My habit is to write one draft, very deliberately." Will there someday be a novel, a screenplay? "Ha!" he says. "I wish." (bio taken here)

A conversation (interview) between Louis Menand and Michael Bernstein:

*Also, click here for a lecture by Louis Menand regarding his Pulizer Prize winning book The Metaphysical Club

Father George Coyne

2009-03-08T01:21:00.000-08:00

Professor Coyne completed his bachelor's degree in mathematics and his licentiate in philosophy at Fordham University, New York City, in 1958. He carried out a spectrophotometric study of the lunar surface for the completion of his doctorate in astronomy at Georgetown University in 1962. He spent the summer of 1963 doing research at Harvard University, the summer of 1964 as a National Science Foundation lecturer at the University of Scranton, and the summer of 1965 as visiting research professor at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (UA LPL).

A member of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) since the age of 18, he completed a licentiate in sacred theology at Woodstock College, Woodstock, Maryland, and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1965. Coyne was visiting assistant professor at the UA LPL in 1966-67 and 1968-69, and visiting astronomer at the Vatican Observatory in 1967-68. (bio taken here)

Richard Dawkins and Father George Coyne discuss various topics related to science and religion:

Jonah Lehrer

2009-03-08T01:11:00.000-08:00

Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. He's also written for The New Yorker, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributer to Radio Lab and Scientific American Mind. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.

Click Here for a conversation between Jonah Lehrer and Christopher Lydon

Polyworld: Using Evolution to Design Artificial Intelligence

2009-02-23T04:29:00.000-08:00

This presentation is about a potential shortcut to artificial intelligence by trading mind-design for world-design using artificial evolution. Evolutionary algorithms are a pump for turning CPU cycles into brain designs. With exponentially increasing CPU cycles while our understanding of intelligence is almost a flat-line, the evolutionary route to AI is a centerpiece of most Kurzweilian singularity scenarios. This talk introduces the Polyworld artificial life simulator as well as results from an ongoing attempt to evolve artificial intelligence and further the Singularity.

Speaker: Virgil Griffith
Virgil Griffith (was) a first year graduate student (at the time of this lecture) in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. On weekdays he studies evolution, computational neuroscience, and artificial life. He did computer security work until his first year of university when his work got him sued for sedition and espionage. He then decided that security was probably not safest field to be in and he turned his life to science.

Click Here to Watch Presentation

Jane Elliott: A Class Divided

2009-01-21T13:02:00.000-08:00

This is one of the most requested programs in FRONTLINE's history. It is about an Iowa schoolteacher who, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, gave her third-grade students a first-hand experience in the meaning of discrimination. This is the story of what she taught the children, and the impact that lesson had on their lives.

The 1985 National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational, Cultural, or Historical Programming

Sidney Hillman Prize Award (1985)

Click Here to Watch Program

The Presumption of Rationality: Psychological Challenges to Legal Certainty

2008-12-29T23:05:00.000-08:00

A roundtable discussion concerning, but not limited to, the following themes:

Rationality has long prevailed as the dominant model of individual decision making in law. For the most part, legal rules assume that people act rationally and that most individual behavior is the product of reasoned choice. What this dominant model of individual decision making ignores is the fundamental role of imagination in individual thought and behavior. In his seminal 1930 book, Law and the Modern Mind, Jerome Frank drew on psychoanalytic ideas about imagination in describing the distorting effects of infantile wishes and fantasies on the decision making of legal actors and judges. More recently, legal thinkers and judges, including David Bazelon, Peter Brooks, and Martha Nussbaum, have applied psychoanalytic and related ideas about imagination to particular legal problems. This roundtable takes a step back to consider more broadly the interplay between law and imagination. What would it mean for law to take seriously the idea of imagination? How do we reconcile the law's emphasis on objective behavior with a psychodynamic understanding of unconscious fantasy? How does a focus on imagination threaten the liberal legal ideal of the rational, autonomous individual? Does imagination inevitably lead us toward a more romantic, but arguably more authoritarian and less democratic, vision of law?

Peter Brooks has recently joined the faculty of Princeton University as Mellon Visiting Professor, after many decades of teaching at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature. A recent recipient of the Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, he plans to lead a three-year seminar at Princeton's University Center for Human Values on "The Ethics of Reading and the Cultures of Professionalism." He is the author of a number of books, including Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Reading for the Plot, and The Melodramatic Imagination.

Anne Dailey is the Evangeline Starr Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Professor Dailey received her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School. Her current research focuses on the application of psychoanalytic developmental psychology to modern conceptions of children's rights. She is the recipient of the 2003 CORST prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association, and recent Guest Editor for the Fall 2007 issue of American Imago, entitled "Legal Analysis."

Carol Gilligan is a psychologist, professor, and novelist. She was named by Time Magazine as one of 25 most influential Americans. Harvard University Press describes her 1982 book, In a Different Voice, as "the little book that started a revolution." Her first novel, Kyra, published in January 2008, was reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "a rare thing: an engrossing, deeply emotional, thinking person's love story." In 2002, The Birth of Pleasure was described by the Times Literary Supplement as a "thrilling, new paradigm" and characterized by National Public Radio as the work of a psychologist who writes like a novelist. She is currently University Professor at New York University.

Nomi Stolzenberg is the Nathan and Lilly Shapell Professor of Law at the University of Southern California Law School. Her research spans a range of interdisciplinary interests, including legal fictions, law and religion, law and liberalism, and the complex relations between property, community, and sovereignty. A strong proponent of multidisciplinary research and teaching, she helped establish the USC Center for Law, History and Culture, which involves scholars and students from throughout USC's campus. She is currently at work on two books on liberalism and religion in American law and culture, as well as several other research projects—one exploring the relationship between liberalism and romanticism, another examining the concept of "creating facts on the ground."

Kenji Yoshino is a Chaired Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law. Educated at Harvard, Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar), and Yale Law School, he taught at Yale Law School from 1998 to 2008, most recently as the inaugural Guido Calabresi Professor of Law. He has published in both academic journals, such as the Columbia Law Review and the Yale Law Journal, and in more popular media, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. His book, Covering: The HIdden Assault on our Civil Rights, was published in 2006. He is currently at work on his second book on Shakespeare and the law.

Click Here to Watch Program on Source Website

Click Here to Watch Program on Youtube

One Laptop Per Child

2008-12-27T19:43:00.000-08:00

"The mission of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In order to accomplish our goal, we need people who believe in what we’re doing and want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege."

It’s not a laptop project. It’s an education project

"In 2002, MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte experienced first-hand how connected laptops transformed the lives of children and their families in a remote Cambodian village. A seed was planted: If every child in the world had access to a computer, what potential could be unlocked? What problems could be solved? These questions eventually led to the foundation of One Laptop per Child, and the creation of the XO laptop."

"OLPC’s mission is to provide a means for learning, self-expression, and exploration to the nearly two billion children of the developing world with little or no access to education. While children are by nature eager for knowledge, many countries have insufficient resources to devote to education—sometimes less than $20 per year per child (compared to an average of $7,500 in the United States). By giving children their very own connected XO laptop, we are giving them a window to the outside world, access to vast amounts of information, a way to connect with each other, and a springboard into their future. And we’re also helping these countries develop an essential resource—educated, empowered children." (Info Here)

David Foster Wallace

2008-12-27T09:05:00.000-08:00

David Foster Wallace was born in 1962 in Ithaca, New York to James Donald Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace.

As a young child, Wallace and his family lived in Champaign, Illinois. In fourth grade, Wallace moved to Urbana and attended Yankee Ridge school.

As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College, and majored in English and philosophy, with a focus on modal logic and mathematics. His philosophy senior thesis on modal logic was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize, while his English senior thesis would later become his first novel. He graduated with summa cum laude honors for both theses in 1985. He next pursued a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Arizona, which he earned in 1987. (bio taken here)

"Artists on the Cutting Edge" [10/1997]

Michel Foucault: The Culture of the Self

2008-11-23T04:36:00.000-08:00

Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, on October 15, 1926. His student years seem to have been psychologically tormented but were intellectually brilliant. He became academically established during the 1960s, when he held a series of positions at French universities, before his election in 1969 to the ultra-prestigious Collège de France, where he was Professor of the History of Systems of Thought until his death. From the 1970s on, Foucault was very active politically. He was a founder of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons and often protested on behalf of homosexuals and other marginalized groups. He frequently lectured outside France, particularly in the United States, and in 1983 had agreed to teach annually at the University of California at Berkeley. An early victim of AIDS, Foucault died in Paris on June 25, 1984. In addition to works published during his lifetime, his lectures at the Collège de France, being published posthumously, contain important elucidations and extensions of his ideas.

It can be difficult to think of Foucault as a philosopher. His academic formation was in psychology and its history as much as in philosophy, his books were mostly histories of medical and social sciences, his passions were literary and political. Nonetheless, almost all of Foucault's works can be fruitfully read as philosophical in either or both of two ways: as a carrying out of philosophy's traditional critical project in a new (historical) manner; and as a critical engagement with the thought of traditional philosophers. (bio taken here)

April 12, 1983: UC Berkeley Language Center:

The Culture of the Self: Introduction and Program, Part I

The Culture of the Self: Introduction and Program, Part II

The Culture of the Self: Introduction and Program, Part III

Hannah Arendt

2008-11-21T00:48:00.001-08:00

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. She is best known for two works that had a major impact both within and outside the academic community. The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon. The second, The Human Condition, published in 1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action). In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a number of influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging). (bio taken here)

A two part series on the thought of Hanna Arendt, from the show Entitled Opinions, which is a weekly literary talk show that ranges broadly on issues related to literature, ideas, and lived experience. The host, Robert Harrison, is the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford University and is Chair of the Department of French and Italian, where he has been since 1985.

Guest: Karen Feldman teaches in the Departments of Rhetoric and German at UC Berkeley. Her areas of specialization include hermeneutics and phenomenology, the Frankfurt School, German Idealism, feminist theory, literary theory and aesthetics. She is the author of Binding Words: Conscience and Text in Hobbes, Hegel and Heidegger (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming in 2005) and co-editor of Continental Philosophy: An Anthology (Blackwell, 1998).

Click Here for Part 1
Click Here for Part 2

Martha Nussbaum: Interview

2008-11-08T22:52:00.000-08:00

University of Chicago: Professor Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School. She is an Associate in the Classics Department and the Political Science Department, a Member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and Co-Chair of the Human Rights Program. She is the founder and Coordinator of the Center for Comparative Constitutionalism and Co-director of the Center for Laws, Philosophy, and Human Values. (Bio taken here)

Philosophy Talk Radio Show

2008-11-05T20:58:00.000-08:00

Philosophy Talk is a weekly, one-hour radio series produced by Ben Manilla. The hosts' down-to-earth and no-nonsense approach brings the richness of philosophic thought to everyday subjects. Topics are lofty (Truth, Beauty, Justice), arresting (Terrorism, Intelligent Design, Suicide), and engaging (Baseball, Love, Happiness).

This is not a lecture or a college course, it's philosophy in action! Philosophy Talk is a fun opportunity to explore issues of importance to your audience in a thoughtful, friendly fashion, where thinking is encouraged.

The Hosts:

Kenneth Allen Taylor is an American philosopher. He is currently chairman of the department of philosophy at Stanford University. Professor Taylor specializes in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. His interests include semantics, reference, naturalism, and relativism. He is the author of numerous articles, which have appeared in journals such as Noûs, Philosophical Studies, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and two books, Meaning and Truth: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language (Blackwell Publishers) and Reference and the Rational Mind (CSLI Publications).

Taylor received his Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of Chicago, where he completed a his dissertation under the supervision of Leonard Linsky. He received his B.A. from Notre Dame University in 1977. (Bio taken here)

John R. Perry is Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. He has made significant contributions to areas of philosophy, including logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is known primarily for his work on situation semantics (together with Jon Barwise), reflexivity, indexicality, and self-knowledge. (Bio taken here)

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS ARCHIVE

John Ralston Saul: Canadian Identity

2008-11-03T23:12:00.001-08:00

Award-winning essayist and novelist, John Ralston Saul has had a growing impact on political and economic thought in many countries. Declared a “prophet” by TIME magazine, he is included in the prestigious Utne Reader’s list of the world’s 100 leading thinkers and visionaries. His works have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

In his latest book, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada, Saul unveils 3 founding myths. He argues that the famous “peace, order, and good government” that supposedly defines Canada is a distortion of the country’s true nature. Every single document before the BNA Act, he points out, used the phrase “peace, welfare, and good government,” demonstrating that the well-being of its citizenry was paramount. He also argues that Canada is a Métis nation, heavily influenced and shaped by aboriginal ideas: egalitarianism, a proper balance between individual and group, and a penchant for negotiation over violence are all aboriginal values that Canada absorbed. Another obstacle to progress, Saul argues, is that Canada has an increasingly ineffective elite, a colonial non-intellectual business elite that doesn’t believe in Canada. It is critical that we recognize these aspects of the country in order to rethink its future. (Bio taken here)

On the Edge: Latest views from Andrés Duany

2008-10-30T21:28:00.000-07:00

(painting by Antoine Blanchard Théâtre des Variétés)

Andrés Duany is an American architect and urban planner. He was born in New York City but grew up in Cuba until 1960. He received his undergraduate degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton University, and after a year of study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, he received a master's degree in architecture from the Yale School of Architecture. (bio taken here)

Duany gave a lecture in Vancouver on January 16, 2008. Click link below to watch.

On the Edge: Latest Views from Andrés Duany

Stephen Pinker: The Stuff of Thought

2008-10-28T02:57:00.000-07:00

Owen Flanagan: Mind & Reality Symposium on Consciousness, Presented by Columbia's Center for the Study of Science and Religion (Keynote Address)

2008-10-26T02:33:00.000-07:00

Owen Flanagan is the James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Philosophy. He is also Professor of Psychology and Brain Science, and Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University. In 1999-2000, Dr. Flanagan held the Romanell Phi Beta Kappa Professorship awarded by the national Phi Beta Kappa office to an American philosopher for distinguished contributions to philosophy and to the public understanding of philosophy.

Dr. Flanagan works primarily on the mind-body problem, moral psychology, and the conflict between the scientific and the humanistic image of persons. His publications include: The Science of the Mind (MIT University Press, 1991), Varieties of Moral Personality (Harvard University Press, 1991), Consciousness Reconsidered (MIT University Press, 1992), Self-Expressions: Mind, Morals and the Meaning of Life (Oxford University Press, 1996), Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind (Oxford University Press, 2000), and The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (Basic, 2002). His newest book, The Bohisattva's Brain: Neuroscience, Virtue, and Happiness, will be completed this summer and published by MIT Press. (Bio taken here)

Keynote

Q&A

Click here to view full conference

George Koob: Neuroscience and Human Flourishing

2008-10-26T00:22:00.000-07:00

George F. Koob, Ph.D. is a Professor and Chair of the Committee on the Neurobiology of Addictive Disorders at The Scripps Research Institute and Adjunct Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego.

Dr. Koob is a pioneering researcher in the field of substance abuse and stress. He has proposed, with Dr. Michel Le Moal, a contemporary model of drug addiction termed "the allostatic model of addiction". He is one of the most highly cited contemporary neuroscientists. Dr. Koob has co-authored a book in collaboration with Dr. Le Moal called "Neurobiology of Addiction." (Bio taken here)

Click here to view entire conference

Warren Buffett: On Economic Crisis

2008-10-19T02:51:00.000-07:00

University of Nebraska Lincoln, Bachelor of Arts / Science
Columbia University, Master of Science

America's most beloved investor is now the world's richest man. Soared past friend and bridge partner Bill Gates as shares of Berkshire Hathaway climbed 25% since the middle of last July. Son of Nebraska politician delivered newspapers as a boy. Filed first tax return at age 13, claiming $35 deduction for bicycle. Studied under value investing guru Benjamin Graham at Columbia. Took over textile firm Berkshire Hathaway 1965. Today holding company invested in insurance (Geico, General Re), jewelry (Borsheim's), utilities (MidAmerican Energy), food (Dairy Queen, See's Candies). Also has noncontrolling stakes in Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo. Insurance operations flourished in 2007. "That party is over. It's a certainty that insurance-industry profit margins, including ours, will fall significantly in 2008." The Oracle of Omaha issued a challenge to members of The Forbes 400 in October; said he would donate $1 million to charity if the collective group of richest Americans would admit they pay less taxes, as a percentage of income, than their secretaries. Had long promised to give away his fortune posthumously. Irrevocably earmarked the majority of his Berkshire shares to charity in 2006, mostly to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gift was valued at $31 billion on day of announcement; donation will far exceed that sum so long as Berkshire shares continue to rise. (Bio taken here)

What is Pragmatism?

2008-10-14T19:12:00.000-07:00

The pragmatic school of philosophy is discussed by Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam and James Conant on Chicago Public Radio. April 24, 2002

Click the Radio

New York Remembers Jacques Derrida

2008-10-11T23:36:00.000-07:00

A tribute to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) hosted by NYU's Center for French Civilization and Culture, the Department of German, and the faculty of Arts and Science. Video includes segments of tributes given by scholars including Richard Foley, Tom Bishop, Peter Goodrich, Shireen Patell, Anselm Haverkamp, Ulrich Baer, Mary Ann Caws, Michel Beaujour, Emily Apter, Gil Anidjar, Drucilla Cornell, Judith Friedlander, Béatrice Longuenesse, Gayatri Spivak, and Avital Ronell.

Summer Philosophy Series with Christopher Lydon circa 2000

2008-10-11T20:19:00.000-07:00

Below are several links to a philosophy radio series that took place in the summer of 2000.

Part One: The Examined Life Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law, Philosophy, and Classics at the University of Chicago.

Part Two: Justice Michael Sandel, Professor of Government at Harvard University Bernard Williams, Professor of Philosophy at All Souls College, Oxford.

Part Three: Ethics and Morality Thomas Scanlon, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University. Ralph Wedgwood, Professor of Philosophy, MIT

Part Four: Love Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law, Philosophy, and Classics at the University of Chicago

Part Five: The God Problem Hilary Putnam, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. Alvin Plantinga, Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame University.

Part Six: Freedom and Freewill Simon Blackburn, Cambridge University author of The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy and Think. Susan Wolf, Chair of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University author of Freedom Within Reason.

Part Seven: Science Daniel Dennett, Tufts University. Richard Rorty, Princeton University.

Part Eight: The Philosophy of Mind Patricia Churchland, Chair of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego Antonio Damasio, Neuroscientist and Head of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine.

Part Nine: Living the Philosophical Life Cornel West, Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy of Religion at Harvard University.

Stephen Pinker: Chalking it up to the Blank Slate

2008-09-27T22:38:00.000-07:00

Steven Pinker, a native of Montreal, received his BA from McGill University in 1976 and his PhD in psychology from Harvard in 1979. After teaching at MIT for 21 years, he returned to Harvard in 2003, where he is Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Professor of Psychology. Pinker's experimental research on cognition and language won the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize from the Royal Institute of Great Britan, and two prizes from the American Psychological Association. He has also received several honorary doctorates and numerous awards for graduate and undergraduate teaching, general achievement, and his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. Pinker has also appeared in many television documentaries and writes frequently in the popular press, including in The New York Times, Time, and The New Republic.

Slavoj Žižek: What is the Question (Interview with Christopher Lydon)

2008-09-24T19:17:00.000-07:00

Slavoj Zizek is a professor at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana and at the European Graduate School EGS who uses popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and the theory of Jacques Lacan to explain politics and popular culture. He was born in 1949 in Ljubljana, Slovenia where he lives to this day but he has lectured at universities around the world. He was analysed by Jacques Alain Miller, Jacques Lacan's son in law, and is probably the most successful and prolific post-Lacanian having published over fifty books including translations into a dozen languages. He is a leftist and, aside from Lacan he was strongly influenced by Marx, Hegel and Schelling. In temperament, he resembles a revolutionist more than a theoretician. He was politically active in Slovenia during the 80s, a candidate for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia in 1990; most of his works are moral and political rather than purely theoretical. He has considerable energy and charisma and is a spellbinding lecturer in the tradition of Lacan and Kojeve. (Click Here for Full Biography)

In New York on the last day of an American tour, absorbing the demise of Yankee Stadium and maybe of Wall Street as we thought we knew it, Zizek’s talk is a blast-furnace but not a blur. The theme through all Zizek’s gags is that the financial meltdown marks a seriously dangerous moment — dangerous not least because, as in the interpretation of 9.11, the right wing is ready to impose a narrative. And the left wing is caught without a narrative or a theory. “Today is the time for theory,” he says. “Time to withdraw and think.”
Audio Interview September 23, 2008.

Jill Bolte Taylor: My Stroke of Insight

2008-09-23T18:28:00.000-07:00

Jill Bolte Taylor (1959–) is a neuroanatomist who specializes in the postmortem investigation of the human brain. She is affiliated with the Indiana University School of Medicine, is the national spokesperson for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, and is the consulting neuroanatomist for the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute. Her own personal experience with a massive stroke, experienced in 1996 at age 37, and her subsequent nine-year recovery, has informed her work as a scientist and speaker. For this work, in May 2008 she was named to Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. (Bio taken here)

Martin Seligman: What Positive Psychology Can Help You Become

2008-09-22T21:37:00.000-07:00

Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D., works on positive psychology, learned helplessness, depression, and on optimism and pessimism. He is currently Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is well known in academic and clinical circles and is a best-selling author.

His most recent book is the best-selling, Authentic Happiness (Free Press, 2002). He is the recipient of two Distinguished Scientific Contribution awards from the American Psychological Association, the Laurel Award of the American Association for Applied Psychology and Prevention, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society for Research in Psychopathology. He holds an honorary Ph.D. from Uppsala, Sweden and Doctor of Humane Letters from the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology.

Dr. Seligman received both the American Psychological Society's William James Fellow Award (for contribution to basic science) and the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award (for the application of psychological knowledge). (Bio taken here)

Jonathan Haidt: The Real Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives

2008-09-22T21:26:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Haidt is associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on the psychological bases of morality across different cultures and political ideology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology in 2001. His book The Happiness Hypothesis examines ten "great ideas" dating from antiquity and their continued relevance to the happy life. A certain portion of his research has been focused on the emotion of elevation. (bio taken here)

Robert Brandom: Interview

2008-09-20T01:36:00.000-07:00

Amartya Sen: The Violence of Illusion

2008-09-19T00:27:00.000-07:00

Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University and was until recently the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has served as President of the Econometric Society, the Indian Economic Association, the American Economic Association and the International Economic Association. He was formerly Honorary President of OXFAM and is now its Honorary Advisor. Born in Santiniketan, India, Amartya Sen studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, India, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is an Indian citizen. He was Lamont University Professor at Harvard also earlier, from1988 – 1998, and previous to that he was the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University, and a Fellow of All Souls College (he is now a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls). Prior to that he was Professor of Economics at Delhi University and at the London School of Economics. (bio taken here)

John McDowell: Intention in Action

2008-09-17T20:57:00.000-07:00

John H. McDowell is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Before coming to Pittsburgh in 1986, he taught at University College, Oxford. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, UCLA, and Princeton University. He was the John Locke Lecturer at Oxford University in 1991. His major interests are Greek philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology, and ethics. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (Bio taken here)

McDowell is a contemporary philosopher whose most influential work has been in the philosophy of mind and language. He questions whether empirical thought is rationally grounded in experience in this Howison Lecture in Philosophy from UC Berkeley.

Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty: A Discussion

2008-09-16T23:53:00.000-07:00

Donald Davidson was one of the most important philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century. His ideas, presented in a series of essays from the 1960's onwards, have been influential across a range of areas from semantic theory through to epistemology and ethics. Davidson's work exhibits a breadth of approach, as well as a unitary and systematic character, which is unusual within twentieth century analytic philosophy. Thus, although he acknowledged an important debt to W. V. O. Quine, Davidson's thought amalgamates influences (though these are not always explicit) from a variety of sources, including Quine, C. I. Lewis, Frank Ramsey, Immanuel Kant and the later Wittgenstein. And while often developed separately, Davidson's ideas nevertheless combine in such a way as to provide a single integrated approach to the problems of knowledge, action, language and mind. The breadth and unity of his thought, in combination with the sometimes-terse character of his prose, means that Davidson is not an easy writer to approach. Yet however demanding his work might sometimes appear, this in no way detracts from either the significance of that work or the influence it has exercised and will undoubtedly continue to exercise. Indeed, in the hands of Richard Rorty and others, and through the widespread translation of his writings, Davidson's ideas have reached an audience that extends far beyond the confines of English-speaking analytic philosophy. Of late twentieth century American philosophers, perhaps only Quine has had a similar reception and influence. (bio taken here)

J.B. Schneewind: What Has Moral Philosophy Done For Us Lately?

2008-09-16T01:27:00.000-07:00

Jerome B. Schneewind is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He received his B.A. from Cornell and his Ph.D. from Princeton. Schneewind taught at Chicago, Princeton, Yale University, the University of Pittsburgh (where he was also for several years Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences) and Hunter College CUNY where he was also Provost before coming to Hopkins as chair of the philosophy department in 1981. He has also taught at Leicester, Stanford, and Helsinki. He taught courses on the history of ethics, types of ethical theory, the British empiricists, Kant's ethics, and utopian thought.

He has held Mellon, Guggenheim, and NEH fellowships and spent 1992-1993 as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. He is a past president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as Chair of the American Philosophical Association's Board of Officers from July 1999 to June 2002. (bio taken here)

A discussion of Richard Rorty's challenge to the relevance of contemporary ethics.

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Henry Louis Gates Jr. & Cornel West: A Discussion About Race

2008-09-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

A discussion with Henry Louis Gates, chairman of the Department of African American studies at Harvard University, and Cornel West, professor of African American studies at Harvard, about their book "The Future of the Race", which examines the W.E.B. Du Bois essay, "The Talented Ten". Gates and West also discuss civil rights, apartheid, affirmative action and what race relations in America will look like over the next fifty years.

Sam Harris: The Problem with Atheism

2008-09-13T10:12:00.000-07:00

Mr. Harris' writing has been published in over ten languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.

Mr. Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University. He is completing a doctorate in neuroscience, studying the neural basis of belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). (Bio taken here)

AAI Lecture: The Problem with Atheism

Billy Collins

2008-09-08T01:23:00.000-07:00

About Collins, the poet Stephen Dunn has said, "We seem to always know where we are in a Billy Collins poem, but not necessarily where he is going. I love to arrive with him at his arrivals. He doesn't hide things from us, as I think lesser poets do. He allows us to overhear, clearly, what he himself has discovered."

In 2001, Collins was named U.S. Poet Laureate. His other honors and awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Click Here to watch a reading by Billy Collins, introduced by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, where he gives the final reading of his tenure as U. S. Poet Laureate.

Giogio Agamben: What is a Paradigm?

2008-09-06T00:47:00.000-07:00

Giorgio Agamben, Phd.,: Baruch Spinoza Chair at EGS, is a professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy and teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. As Post-Doc he participated in seminars with Martin Heidegger in Freiburg and directed the Italian Walter Benjamin Edition. Agamben's unique blending of literary theory, continental philosophy, political thought, religious studies, literature and art makes him one of the most challenging thinkers of our time. He was a visiting professor in Paris and taught at American universities such as UC Berkeley, Los Angeles, Irvine, Santa Cruz, and Northwestern. (Click Here for full bio)

Robert Hass

2008-08-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

Robert Hass is an award-winning UC Berkeley professor of English and former U.S. poet laureate. He has won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his latest book, "Time and Materials."

Charles Taylor: Keynote Lecture

2008-08-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

Author and philosopher Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill University. He obtained a B.A. in history from McGill (1952). A Rhodes Scholar, he pursued his studies in political science, philosophy and economics at Oxford University, where he obtained a B.A. (1955), an M.A. (1960) and a Ph.D. (1961).

Professor Taylor has taught in numerous institutions, including Northwestern, Berkeley, Stanford and Yale, Frankfurt University in Germany, and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also held the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University. His research focuses, in particular, on modernity, pluralism, multiculturalism, the question of identity, and secularism. (Bio taken from CCAPRCD

The New School
New York, NY
May 4th, 2007

A Key Note Lecture by Philosopher Charles Taylor at the Secular Imaginaries Conference.

The New School for Social Research at the New School and the Center for Transcultural Studies, a Chicago-based scholarly network, jointly sponsored a conference on the work of Charles Taylor.

The conference focus was on Taylor's work in the last two decades, starting from Sources of the Self published in 1989 and reaching into the present with the forthcoming book, A Secular Age (2007) originating from his more recent Gifford Lectures.

Judith Butler

2008-08-12T10:55:00.000-07:00

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, (Verso Press, 2000). In 2004, she published Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning with Verso Press which considered questions of war, representation, and ethics.That same year, The Judith Butler Reader appeared, edited by Sara Salih, with Blackwell Publishers. In 2004, collection of her essays on gender and sexuality, Undoing Gender, appeared with Routledge. Her most recent book, Giving an Account of Oneself, appeared with Fordham University Press (2005) and considers the relation between subject formation and ethical obligation, situating ethics in relation to critique and social theory. She is currently working on essays pertaining to Jewish Philosophy, focusing on pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence, under contract with Columbia University Press. She is also working on a set of essays on current wars, focusing on the relation between violence, non-violence, sexual politics and allied forms of resistance. She hopes to write a small book on Kafka's parables in the future. She continues to write on contemporary politics, cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics. (Bio taken from UCBerkeley)

Judith Butler, feminist philosopher lecturing about "Primo Levy for the Present"; narrative accounts, forgiveness, holocaust, Auschwitz, victims, execution, war, and crime, while asking the question: "What is to give an Account of Oneself?".

Donna Haraway

2008-08-12T10:07:00.000-07:00

In terms of research, writing, and teaching, Donna Haraway is one of the most important practitioners in a field broadly defined as science studies. Having done an undergraduate degree at Colorado College with a major in Zoology and minors in Philosophy and English, she went on to complete her Ph.D. at Yale in Biology (but with an "interdisciplinary arrangement" with the Departments of Biology, Philosophy, and History of Science and Medicine). She began her teaching career at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, moved to Johns Hopkins, and joined the History of Consciousness Board at UC Santa Cruz in 1984. Once again defying traditionally defined departmental categorization, however, Professor Haraway holds associate memberships in Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and Women's Studies.

Donna Haraway is a leading theorist of the relationships between people and machines, her work having incited debate in fields as varied as primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. A cyborg, she explained in her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), is a "hybrid of machine and organism." It is a "fusion of the organic and the technical forged in particular, historical, cultural practices." "The Cyborg Manifesto," first published in 1985, is now taught in undergraduate classes at countless universities and has been reprinted or translated in numerous anthologies in North America, Japan, and Europe.

Also:

Donna Haraway, Avenali Lecture Fall 2003 - From Cyborgs to Companion Species: Dogs, People, and Technoculture
September 16, 2003, 10:59AM
Morrison Library

Click Here to Watch

Slavoj Žižek: Violence Interview

2008-08-12T09:29:00.000-07:00

Cornel West on Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism

2008-08-11T13:32:00.000-07:00

One of America's most provocative public intellectuals, Cornel West has been a champion for racial justice since childhood. His writing, speaking, and teaching weave together the traditions of the black Baptist Church, progressive politics, and jazz. The New York Times has praised his "ferocious moral vision."
Currently the Class of 1943 Professor at Princeton University, West burst onto the national scene in 1993 with his bestselling book, Race Matters, a searing analysis of racism in American democracy. Race Matters has become a contemporary classic, selling more than a half a million copies to date. In addition, West has published 16 other books and has edited 13 texts.
West earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard in three years, magna cum laude. Martin Kilson, one of his professors there, describes West as "the most intellectually aggressive and highly cerebral student I have taught." After earning his Ph.D. at Princeton, he became a professor of religion and director of the Afro-American Studies program there. West has also taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Paris.
In his last book Democracy Matters, West analyzes the arrested development of democracy both in America and in the crisis-ridden Middle East. He argues that if America is to become a better steward of democratization around the world, it must first recognize its own long history of imperialist corruption. His latest CD, Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations is a collection of socially conscious music featuring collaborations with Prince, Outkast, Jill Scott, Talib Kweli. West also offers commentary weekly on The Tavis Smiley Show from PRI.
West was an influential force in developing the storyline for the popular Matrix movie trilogy and has served as its official spokesperson, as well as playing a recurring role in the final two films. (Information taken from cornelwest.com)

On Emerson: A Collection of Christopher Lydon's Discussions

2008-08-11T13:21:00.000-07:00

Christopher Lydon speaks to biographer Bob Richardson, Cornell West and others on some things Emerson.

Click Here to Listen

The Harold Bloom Tapes: Chris Lydon Interviews Bloom about Emerson

2008-08-11T12:56:00.000-07:00

Christopher Lydon remarks that,

"In the summer of 2003, around the bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s birth, I spent an afternoon with the Sage of New Haven, Professor Harold Bloom of Yale, in conversation around the Sage of Concord. Bloom had been a critical figure in the revival of interest in Emerson, the “father of the American Religion,” Bloom has called him. But what also emerges here, with some gentle prodding from your humble interviewer, is that Bloom’s attachment to Emerson is vitally and intimately personal. Bloom discovered the power of the bond in what he says was the most severe depression of his life — a period in his mid-late thirties in the mid-late Sixties, when he read and reread Emerson’s essays and especially his journals, with the avidity for which Bloom is famous. What he discovered was that Emerson spoke with Bloom’s own inner voice, as “the god within,” he said. These conversations are, among other things, a lesson in how to take a magisterial writer to heart, as a contemporary and something more than a best friend." (Quote taken from Open Source)

Part I

Part II

Part III

Conversations with History: Stanley Cavell

2008-08-10T10:01:00.000-07:00

On this episode on Conversations with History, Stanley Cavell, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Harvard University, joins UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler to talk about his life as a philosopher and his passion for movies.

Stanley Cavell received his A.B. in music from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D., in philosophy, from Harvard. After teaching at Berkeley for six years, he returned to Harvard in 1963, where he became the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value. He became Professor Emeritus in 1997.
His major interests center on the intersection of the analytical tradition (especially the work of Austin and Wittgenstein) with moments of the Continental tradition (for example, Heidegger and Nietzsche); with American philosophy (especially Emerson and Thoreau); with the arts (for example, Shakespeare, film and opera); and with psychoanalysis.
Among his recent publications are: A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises; Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, and Derrida; and two pieces for the London Review of Books: "Nothing Goes Without Saying", a discussion of the language of three Marx Brothers films, and "Time After Time." An investigation of several Hollywood melodramas from the 1930s and 1940s, entitled Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, was published in 1997.
Professor Cavell is a recent recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and is a Past President of the American Philosophical Association.

The Mirror and the Lamp

2008-08-09T11:51:00.000-07:00

Achille-Etna MICHALLON Landscape with Philoctetes on the Island of Lemnos

Roundtable discussion with Paul Bloom, Margaret Browning, Bhismadev Chakrabarti, Paul Harris, and Alan Leslie.

Creative artists have always received inspiration both from the objective world and from cortical processes on both the right and left hemispheres of the brain that play an essential role in the formation of imaginative constructs. Mimesis, the means by which so called objective reality is mirrored, has traditionally been counter-posed to inspiration, in which images, words, and music are considered to be vestiges of neurophysiological processes. Recent advances in neuroscience have refined the distinction between imaginative process and the mimetic process. In particular, the concept of neuroplasticity has fostered an understanding of the ways in which the brain interacts with and is shaped by external stimuli. Relying on findings derived from a broad arena of psycho-biological studies of adults and children (including those with autism) that delve into concept and belief formation, theory of mind (the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others), memory and emotion, this multidisciplinary panel will focus on the building blocks of imaginative processes.

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Click Here for Source Website

Paul Bloom is Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. He is the author or editor of four books, including, most recently, Descarte's Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human. He is currently writing a book about pleasure.

Margaret Browning has recently argued in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly that the work of philosopher Susanne Langer provides a unique framework for combining scientific and artistic perspectives on the human mind. Dr. Browning received her doctorate at The University of Chicago from the interdisciplinary Committee on Human Development. After conducting research with premature infants as an Associate Attending, Scientific Staff, in the Department of Pediatrics at Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center in Chicago, she has moved to the other end of the developmental trajectory and is currently engaged in health services research as a Health Science Specialist in the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Bhismadev Chakrabarti is the Charles and Katharine Darwin Research Fellow at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. He holds a degree in Chemistry from the University of Delhi, India, and a degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge. His doctoral research with Simon Baron-Cohen focussed on genetic, neuroimaging and behavioural studies of emotion processing and empathy. He is currently a Senior Research Associate at the Cambridge Autism Research Centre.

Paul Harris is a developmental psychologist with interests in the development of cognition, emotion and imagination. He has taught at the University of Lancaster, the Free University of Amsterdam, and the London School of Economics. In 1980, he moved to Oxford where he became Professor of Developmental Psychology and Fellow of St. John's College. In 1998, he was as elected as fellow of the British Academy. He currently teaches developmental psychology in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. His latest book is The Work of the Imagination.

Alan Leslie is Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, where he directs the Cognitive Development Laboratory. He was formerly Senior Scientist at the Medical Research Council's Cognitive Development Unit at the University of London. There he was a member of the team that discovered the "theory of mind"ÃƒÆ’Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â impairment in autism. He is interested in the basic design of the early cognitive system. In 2005 he gave the Kanizsa Memorial Lecture at the University of Trieste, Italy and in 2006 was the inaugural recipient of the Ann L. Brown Award for Excellence in Developmental Research. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

Reawakening the American Soul

2008-08-09T11:35:00.000-07:00

Called the "cradle of liberty," historic Faneuil Hall was the gathering place in the mid-1700s for the Sons of Liberty as they met to protest the arbitrary taxation policies of Great Britain. From these and subsequent meetings, protests were planned, including the Boston Tea Party, leading the way towards the ultimate liberation from British rule. Now, in our own time of crisis, with destructive forces taxing us once again, the bicentennial celebration of Emerson's birth calls for a new birth of freedom. It was Emerson's re-visioning of the founding principles of America, as voiced eloquently in his essays, lectures and poems, that sounded a clear, resonant and unifying note, tuning the disparate instruments and voices in his own time. This note has been heard by all the great American writers and poets down to the present."Reawakening the American Soul" is led by three prominent writers and scholars with this vision. Their collective works represent a major contribution to defining and reassessing what one of them has called the "American Soul." They are Professors Richard Geldard, Jacob Needleman and Robert Thurman.

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Richard Geldard received his education at Bowdoin College, Middlebury College and his doctorate from Stanford University. He currently teaches at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in California and was Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Yeshiva University in New York. He is author of numerous books, including The Spiritual Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson; God in Concord; Remembering Heraclitus; and the Travelers' Key to Ancient Greece. Long a student of the philosophy of Emerson, Dr. Geldard has made the challenging and inspirational work of the Seer of Concord accessible once again to a new generation of readers. His vision of Emerson allows us to take part in the spiritual quest for self-recovery in a time when immensesocial and intellectual forces are arrayed against us. Geldard has shown us that indeed the examined life as described by Socrates and Plato is not only possible for us but also absolutely necessary.

Jacob Needleman is professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University and the author of many books, including A Little Book on Love, Time and The Soul, The Heart of Philosophy, Lost Christianity and The American Soul. In addition to his teaching and writing, he serves as a consultant in the fields of psychology, education, medical ethics, philanthropy and business and has been featured on Bill Moyers' acclaimed PBS series A World of Ideas.

Robert Thurman was named as one of Time magazine's 25 Most Influential People of 1997. He holds the first endowed chair in Buddhist Studies in the West, the Jey Tsong Khapa Chair in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University in New York. After education at Philips Exeter and Harvard, he studied Tibetan Buddhism for almost thirty years as a personal student of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He has written both scholarly and popular books, and has lectured widely all over the world. His special interest is the exploration of the Indo-Tibetan philosophical and psychological traditions, with a view to their relevance to parallel currents of contemporary thought and science. One of his most recent books is entitled Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Real Happiness. In a passage particularly relevant to the Faneuil Hall Forum, Thurman wrote: "To finish building the free society dreamed of by Washington, Franklin and Jefferson, we must draw upon the resources of the enlightened imagination, which can be systematically developed by the spiritual sciences of India and Tibet. We have not yet tamed our own demons of racism, nationalism, sexism and materialism. We have not yet made peace with a land we took by force and have only partly paid for. We are a teeming conglomeration of people from different tribes who have yet to embrace fully the humanness in one another. And none of us can be free until all of us are free."

Debate: James Baldwin vs. William F. Buckley

2008-08-09T09:55:00.000-07:00

Debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, October 26, 1965. Sponsored by the Cambridge Union Society, Cambridge University. The topic of the debate was "The American Dream is at the Expense of the American Negro".

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Randy Pausch: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams (The Last Lecture)

2008-08-09T09:33:00.000-07:00

With equal parts humor and heart, Carnegie Mellon professor and alumnus Randy Pausch delivered a one-of-a-kind last lecture that moved an overflow crowd at the university — and went on to move audiences around the globe.
Randy died July 25 of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 47. Here is "The Last Lecture."

Manuel DeLanda - The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze

2008-08-06T10:33:00.000-07:00

Noam Chomsky BBC Interview

2008-08-03T10:29:00.000-07:00

Jacques Derrida at Oxford

2008-08-03T10:26:00.000-07:00

Peter Singer on Hegel and Marx

2008-08-03T10:21:00.000-07:00

Iris Murdoch on Philosophy and Literature

2008-08-03T10:13:00.000-07:00

Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris

2008-08-03T10:04:00.000-07:00

On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated 2-hour discussion, convened by RDFRS and filmed by Josh Timonen.

All four authors have recently received a large amount of media attention for their writings against religion - some positive, and some negative. In this conversation the group trades stories of the public's reaction to their recent books, their unexpected successes, criticisms and common misrepresentations. They discuss the tough questions about religion that face the world today, and propose new strategies for going forward.

PART 1

PART 2

Noam Chomsky

2008-08-03T09:58:00.000-07:00

An hour conversation with linguist, political activist, writer and professor at MIT Noam Chomsky. He talks about the crisis in the Middle East, language, and the incredible communicative power of the Internet. He also discusses his book "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance".

Harold Bloom

2008-08-03T09:55:00.001-07:00

A conversation with renowned literary scholar and Sterling professor at Yale Harold Bloom about his book "Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine".

Harold Bloom

2008-08-03T09:52:00.000-07:00

A conversation with professor Harold Bloom of Yale University about his book "Hamlet: Poem Unlimited". (starts 14:40)

Harold Bloom

2008-08-03T09:49:00.000-07:00

Yale professor Harold Bloom on his love of literature and his book "How to Read and Why".

Harold Bloom

2008-08-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

A conversation with scholar Harold Bloom, renowned literary critic and professor at Yale University, about his book on William Shakespeare called "Shakespeare The Invention of the Human", which was nominated for a National Book Award. It examines the plays of the Bard from a critical point of view and states that Shakespeare has invented the highest number of memorable characters of any author in literary history.

Harold Bloom

2008-08-03T09:41:00.000-07:00

Yale professor and author Harold Bloom discusses his book "The Western Canon", and the increasing politicization of literary study.