88 Philosophy Podcasts to Help You Answer the Big Questions in Life. The big questions of philosophy, simmering since antiquity, still press upon us as they did the Athenians of old (and all ancient people who have philosophized): what obligations do we really owe to family, friends, or strangers?
Do we live as free agents or beings controlled by fate or the gods (or genes or a computer simulation)? What is a good life? How do we create societies that maximize freedom and happiness (or whatever ultimate values we hold dear)? Did Plato have a woman problem? Maybe, but his vision of politics was still radical for its time. Updated 21 minutes agoSun 1 Mar 2020, 12:30am If you want to find ground zero for feminism in the West, Ancient Greece around the time of Plato probably isn't the best place to look.
On the other hand, it's not the worst place either — and this ambiguity is reflected in a classic text of the era. When Plato wrote the Republic around 375 BCE, Athenian women were (for the most part) second-class citizens. They were unable to vote, own land, inherit or play any role in political life.
Until marriage — which took place at an average age of 14 — women were under the guardianship of their fathers or other male relatives. "The Philosophy of "Flow": A Short Introduction to Taoism. “In the West,” the I Ching, or the Book of Changes, “is mainly known as a divination manual,” writes philosopher and novelist Will Buckingham, “part of the wild carnival of spurious notions that is New Age spirituality.”
But just as one can use the Tarot as a means of reading the present, rather than predicting future events, so too can the I Ching serve to remind us, again and again, of a principle we are too apt to forget: the critical importance of non-action, or what is called wu wei in Chinese philosophy. Non-action is not passivity, though it has been mischaracterized as such by cultures that overvalue aggression and self-assertion. It is a way of exercising power by attuning to the rhythms of its mysterious source.
In the religious and philosophical tradition that became known as Taoism, non-action achieves its most canonical expression in the Tao Te Ching, the classic text attributed to sixth century B.C.E. thinker Laozi, who may or may not have been a real historical figure. Guide to the classics: Plato’s Republic. Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, the old saying goes.
And The Republic (c. 375 BCE), featuring Plato’s teacher Socrates in dialogue with several friends, is unquestionably central to Plato’s thought. There are few subjects that Plato’s masterpiece does not touch or play on: political theory, education, myth, psychology, ethics, epistemology, cultural criticism, drama and comedy. Little surprise then, that The Republic continues to be claimed by people with the most diverse convictions and agendas. The Nazis pointed to the text’s seeming advocacy of eugenics. Yet Martin Luther King Jr nominated The Republic as the one book he would have taken to a deserted island, alongside the Bible. The Atomic Tree. A History of Philosophy in 81 Video Lectures: From Ancient Greece to Modern Times. Above, you can watch 81 video lectures tracing the history of philosophy, moving from Ancient Greece to modern times.
Arthur Holmes presented this influential course at Wheaton College for decades, and now it's online for you. The lectures are all streamable above, or available through this YouTube playlist. Philosophers covered in the course include: Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre and more.
A History of Philosophy has been added to our list of Free Online Philosophy courses, a subset of our meta collection, 1,300 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. Support Open Culture We're hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. A Data Visualization of Modern Philosophy, 1950-2018. Those of us who think of ourselves as philosophy enthusiasts remain free to read and think about whatever we like, no matter how obscure, marginal, or out-of-fashion the ideas.
But the academy presents a different picture, one fraught with political maneuvering, funding issues, and fretting about tenure. Does professionalization do philosophy a disservice by codifying the kinds of problems we should be thinking and writing about? Or do we need professional philosophy for exactly this reason? It depends on who you ask. Mother Forkin' Morals with Dr. Todd May - Part 1: Existentialism - The Good Place (Exclusive) Stephen Fry Narrates 4 Philosophy Animations On the Question: How to Create a Just Society? Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Animated: History’s Greatest Parable Exploring the Nature of Reality. By Maria Popova “Reality,” wrote Philip K.
Dick, “is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” And yet how are we to be sure that what we observe actually is? Oxford's Free Course Critical Reasoning For Beginners Will Teach You to Think Like a Philosopher. When I was younger, I often found myself disagreeing with something I’d read or heard, but couldn't explain exactly why.
Despite being unable to pinpoint the precise reasons, I had a strong sense that the rules of logic were being violated. After I was exposed to critical thinking in high school and university, I learned to recognize problematic arguments, whether they be a straw man, an appeal to authority, or an ad hominem attack. Faulty arguments are all-pervasive, and the mental biases that underlie them pop up in media coverage, college classes, and armchair theorizing.
Oxford's Free Introduction to Philosophy: Stream 41 Lectures. You don't need to go to Oxford to study philosophy.
Not when it will come to you. The 25 Principles for Adult Behavior: John Perry Barlow (R.I.P.) Creates a List of Wise Rules to Live By. 44 Essential Movies for the Student of Philosophy. What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “philosophical film”?
The Matrix, most likely, an obvious example of a movie—or franchise—that explores timeless questions: Who are we? What is reality? Are our lives nothing more than elaborate simulations programmed by hyperintelligent supercomputers? Okay, that last one may be of more recent vintage, but it’s closely related to that ancient cave allegory of Plato’s that asks us to consider whether our experiences of the world are nothing more than illusions emanating from a “real” world that lies hidden from view. Another influence on The Matrix is Rene Descartes, whose dualistic separation of consciousness and body receives the maximum of dramatic treatment. But The Matrix is only one film among a great many that concern themselves with classic problems of philosophy. Another category on the list is “Movies featuring a philosopher.”
Zizek! Related Content: Learn Philosophy, from the Ancients to the Moderns, with 350 Animated Videos. Philosophy is not an idle pursuit of leisured gentlemen and tenured professors, though the life circumstances of many a philosopher might make us think otherwise. A History of Philosophy in 81 Video Lectures: From Ancient Greece to Modern Times.
How Can I Know Anything at All? BBC Animations Feature the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, Hume, Popper & More. How did everything begin? What makes us human? What is the self? How do I live a good life? What is love? We’ve all asked these questions, if only within our heads, and recently a series of BBC animations written by philosopher Nigel Warburton and narrated by a variety of celebrities have done their level best to answer them–or at least to point us in the direction of answering them for ourselves by not just telling but wittily showing us what great minds have thought and said on the issues before we came along.
44 Essential Movies for the Student of Philosophy. What Does "Kafkaesque" Really Mean? A Short Animated Video Explains. We derive adjectives from great writers’ names meant to encapsulate entire philosophies or modes of expression. We have the Homeric, the Shakespearean, the Joycean, etc. Two such adjectives that seem to apply most to our contemporary condition sadly express much darker, more cramped visions than these: “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque.” These adjectives also---suggests writer Noah Tavlin---name two of the most misunderstood of authorial visions. In a TEDEd video last year, Tavlin attempted to clear up confusion about the “Orwellian,” a term that’s tossed around by pundits like a political Frisbee.
Tavlin returns in the video above to explain the meaning of “Kafkaesque,” a less-abused descriptor but one we still may not fully appreciate. But the word is much richer than such casual usage as describing a trip to the DMV. Tavlin references Kafka’s short story “Poseiden,” in which the god of the sea can neither explore nor enjoy his realm because he is buried under mountains of paperwork. The Ethics Centre - Ethics Explainer: The Other. The Other is a term used to capture the ways we think of people as different from us. It’s also used to describe the people who we keep distant because we decide they’re not like us. The process of Othering occurs when we turn fellow humans into abstract entities we can separate ourselves from or treat as less than human. We often think of our social relationships in terms of groups – we have an ‘in group’ and an ‘out group’. These groups are distinguished by who we identify ourselves with and who we identify ourselves against.
Othering happens when we treat the members of the out group – the people we don’t identify with – as though they were less important than the members of our in group. This may not be conscious. The Ship of Theseus: A Brilliant Ancient Thought Experiment Exploring What Makes You You. By Maria Popova. Who am I? A philosophical inquiry - Amy Adkins. Oxford's Free Course Critical Reasoning For Beginners Will Teach You to Think Like a Philosopher.