Stanford's great podcasts

I am a great lover of the content delivered by Stanford University. Whenever I have had some criticism in the past on how this content was delivered I have usually had to retract my words and this is the case again. The fact that the content is exclusively presented through iTunes U, implies some restraints for some listeners, but again, Stanford has taken steps to take away the biggest of thresholds.

The new feature, and one that I am very happy about, is that the web-site (http://itunes.stanford.edu) these days does more than just push you through to iTunes. It contains several pages of explanation and help, among others a guide how to install and work with iTunes. The best addition is the list of RSS feeds. The best of Stanford's content (not all of it) is available in a feed and thus a veritable podcast and this page lists all of them. The best are there, most notably all of those lecture series from Stanford I have so happily reviewed in the past.

Hannibal, (review, site:Stanford on iTunes U, feed).
Stanford University delivers some phenomenal audio, but you have to have iTunes in order to get there. This lecture series about Hannibal gives insight in the history of Hannibal, his trip over the Alps and Professor Patrick Hunt's efforts to reconstruct Hannibal's route over the Alps.

Historical Jesus, (review, site:Stanford on iTunes U, feed).
The very best of Stanford is a lecture series, including syllabus and link to the central book, by theology professor Thomas Sheehan about the Historical Jesus. Sheehan carefully takes the listener through the intricacies of dissecting Scripture to the most authentic sources to Yeshua of Nazareth himself.

Geography of World Cultures, (review, site:Stanford on iTunes U, feed).
Although this podcast is mostly about geography, in effect it is filled with history - one cannot talk about the spread of languages and religion, without entering history. The focus is on maps and the maps are added as visuals, which means, this is an enhanced podcast. (Wikipedia on enhanced podcasts)

Global Geopolitics (review, site:Stanford on iTunes U, feed).
The latest addition: an enhanced podcast following up on Geography of World Cultures showing the international relations in geopolitics. Of course with the help of great many maps.

History of the International System, (review, site:Stanford on iTunes U, feed).
This is a course, not just in history, but in a sense also in geopolitics and political science. Starting around 1870, the lecture series takes the audience through global history and observes and explains how the international relations wobbled from stability to disruptiveness back and forth.

Global Geopolitics - Martin Lewis

Stanford has done it again. This is apparently their preferred modus operandi, but it is the one least accessible to podcast listeners. They have a new course available on audio. You cannot find the audio on the Stanford website, it is only on iTunes U. There, you can download the audio as regular audio files, not as podcasts (that is, iTunes will not treat the files as podcast files, which means, they do not show up in the podcast section and they do not operate as podcast files: skip in music shuffle and remember playing position). Finally, you cannot subscribe. Stanford starts out like this with most of its courses. Some, like Hannibal, History of World system, Historical Jesus and more, later on, turn into podcasts.

I have waited for nearly a week. Two lectures have become available. The course has already been reviewed on Open Culture and we are still in the previously described mood. Other than that, the course looks to be great. The predecessor of this course was Geography of World Cultures, also by Martin Lewis. Again this is an enhanced podcast; we get the lectures with the maps as graphics along with the podcast. The advice is therefore to listen on the laptop and enlarge the maps in order to get a good look. For people with average players: the files are not in MP3 format and if you transfer, you will likely lose the graphics, the maps. And the maps are in this course the strawberries on the pudding.

Martin Lewis will, in nine lectures, systematically discuss all areas on the globe and disclose the problems in geopolitics. An example is given in the introduction with the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Pakistani side of the border is a place called Waziristan where Islamabad rules more formally than effectively and this has become relevant globally since this is where the Taliban are hidden. See map.



Relevant other reviews:
The History of the International System,
A listener's guide to Geography of World Cultures,
Geography of World Cultures by Martin W. Lewis,
The End of Hegemony.

Hiroshima Mon Amour

Philosophy 7 featured the French movie Hiroshima Mon Amour, which of course was not available for us podcast listeners. What was available was the analysis afterwards. One that I enjoyed enormously.

I had seen the film. It may be twenty five years ago, but as the lecture on the film proceeded it all came back to me. The love affair and the complicated communication between the lovers. We analyzed it at the time, but that was high school level and it was struggling with the French more than with the literary and philosophical matter. Yet, enough remained to be refreshed and from there the insights came.

I can applaud my French teacher for letting us taste French literature through this work of Marguerite Duras, but I can also appreciate my German teacher who never did such things. You guys are too young to understand he used to explain. I didn't understand half of it indeed. But then again, what I did understand made huge impression and the experience has been reserved for 25 years for Hubert Dreyfus to build on and expand the podcast enjoyment. It is also a very general recommendation into listening to educational podcasts - never mind what you do not understand, cannot pick up. Whatever you do take with you is what makes the listening worthwhile.

Previously on Philosophy 7:
Existentialism - Philosophy 7

Missing Link with Popper

In this review I am not going to talk too much about the main item in the ninth issue of the Missing Link. It continued the history of the Evolution - Creation divide and delved into the cultural associations with evolution. What is shown is that evolution is either shunned or embraced in the US, for its associations. When it was perceived as something anti-communist, it could be embraced, but when it was perceived as anti-christian, it was shunned. (site, feed, audio)

I'd like to talk about Karl Popper - again. Popper has become part of a consecutive series in this blog, that somehow stirs up many reactions. The Missing Link's host, Elizabeth Green Musselman, begins with Popper. She wishes to elaborate about a remark she made in issue #8 of The Missing Link. Her reaction, for all intents and purposes, addresses what I wrote about it in my review of #8.

Why does Musselman suggest she herself doesn't agree with Popper's views, but does nothing to indicate what her criticism might be? The effect is that the essay is labeled with an alleged naivety before it even starts.

Musselman says she had no intention to denigrate the essays of her students and spends a few words on her criticism to Popper. In her mind, Popper's falsification theory fall short of propelling science as it doesn't deal with paradigms, as shown by Thomas Kuhn. That is a pretty widely held view on Popper and I had it myself, using it in a review I wrote about an issue of the UChannel Podcast. The Popperian Pathway had a lecture of a medical doctor showing the progress in cancer research in the past decades by means of Popper falsification theory. It was here that I myself wrote, that we see a paradigm shift described, but that Popper doesn't address the paradigm shift.

A reader, Rafe Champion from Australia, corrected me on that. He has written several articles and from his website points to a range of sources that intend to show Popper has addressed the issue. Popper is not just about falsification, which is indeed merely an epistemological technique, but extended his writings to the realm of how in more general terms scientific theory and research should be conducted. What seems to be ignored among writers in logic of science are the writings of Popper about MRP's, Metaphysical Research Programs.

So, the last word has not been said. And the subject continues to give rise to heated debate.

Previously about Popper:
An evolved controversy,
The Popperian Pathway,
Researching Bush,
Shrinkrapradio on Freud and Jung,
Gravitational waves.

More about The Missing Link on this blog:
An evolved controversy,
Time's Arrow,
On Time and on Counting - The Missing Link,
Strength in Numbers,
Constant Companions.

Engines of our Ingenuity

Occasionally I pick up an episode of the podcast Engines of Our Ingenuity. This is a series of very short podcasts on the technologies of man. Speakers from the University of Houston in Texas speak their light monologue in issues that last less than 5 minutes.

I was surprised to find Hebrew and Yiddish as a subject recently. However, Hebrew is of course a in many ways a constructed language even if it is built on the age old foundations of a natural language. With the addition of Yiddish and an antiquarian find of the speaker, the point was built. His book discovery were two books from the 40s, one teaching Yiddish and the other Hebrew. The connection this essay makes with human constructions (loosely this fits in the technology framework of subjects) is how both languages were kept with the intention to help Jewish survival. One (Yiddish) through its cosmopolitanism and the other with its claim to re-vitalization.

In a 4 minute podcast, this opens up a can of worms, for those who are familiar with the subject. I am currently reading Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness and he is making this point with considerable irony and a sense of tragedy. The Jews of Europe in the early twentieth century were the first true Europeans, way before the gentile Europeans were to re-invent this idea and build a peaceful Europe and a European Union. The survivors wound up in Israel. Their cosmopolitanism actually opposes the use of Yiddish, as it has a provincial shtetl taste to it and embraced the newly living Hebrew, but got entrenched in a new kind of Israeli provincialism. Many of these old cosmopolitans, like the characters in Oz's book, do not so well in Israel. Not as well as they did in Europe.

There is this constant yearning for Europe. If the new Hebrews do not yearn for Europe, they yearn for the US. The promised land, for many, is not here with the Holy Places. This the Engines of Ingenuity doesn't fathom, but begins to point out, with the simple comparison of Yiddish and Hebrew.

Other recent issues that I recommend are Building Railroads (way before airlines and freeways, the tracks made the world small) and Tour de France (how we reduce man to a machine and what is gained and what may be lost by the example of the Tour de France).

An earlier review, in February, about Engines of our Ingenuity.

Making of the Modern World - UCSD

MMW was my first choice from the various lecture series UC San Diego has put on line as podcasts. MMW stands for Making of the Modern World and it is a lengthy series of history lectures presented at the Roosevelt College. It is cut into numbered consecutive series of which MMW 3 is the current.

MMW 3, is subtitled, Medieval Heritage and it consists of two different series delivered by two different lecturers. One by Matthew Herbst and one by Charles Chamberlain. I am still trying to figure out how they have divided the Medieval Heritage between themselves, but I have heard enough to know we have a great history podcast on our hands. Chamberlain's first two lectures did not make it to the podcast, but with the third lecture we dive head first into the roots of Christianity - viewed from within. Herbst's first lecture I advise to skip as it is too much of an overview and too much of administrative deliberation for the students, but with lecture two, we kick off into the hellenistic world and prepare for the roots of Christianity, but more from a state and religion perspective.

Here we see an approach which surprised me as to what I expected under the title Medieval Heritage. For me, Medieval stands for Middle Ages and I roughly place that between 500 and 1500 AD. The San Diego history course on the other hand, kicks off 100 BC and projects to continue till 1200 AD. Starting this early also shifts geographically the attention to the Middle East. Presumably, attention will shift westwards, as this is the direction in which the Modern World developed.

Apart from this lack of framework, which will keep the listener somewhat at a loss in the beginning, the series kicks off to a very promising start. One of the great advantages for me: it takes on the foundations of Christianity and the political and cultural developments that made Europe into the Renaissance, where Berkeley's History 5 starts.

Previously on UC San Diego's podcast courses.