On Emerson: A Collection of Christopher Lydon's Discussions

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

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The Harold Bloom Tapes: Chris Lydon Interviews Bloom about Emerson

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)

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Conversations with History: Stanley Cavell

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

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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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" 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

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

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)

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."