Ethics Bites - BBC, open university, open2.net

Occasionally I have run into the cooperation between the BBC and The Open University at Open2.net. I should engage one day in a systematic search for the podcasts over there. Until then, here is one among them I discovered when I researched my review of Michael Sandel's appearance at Philosophy Bites. As it turns out, Dave Edmonds and Nigel Warburton have made a podcast for Open2.net under the name Ethics Bites (feed). Ethics Bites seems to have podfaded, but the feed is still accessible and full of great content.

I have listened to the last two episodes, Free Speech and The ethics of Climate Change. These interviews are conducted along the same lines as Philosophy Bites, where Nigel Warburton interviews the guest and in around a quarter they summon up the field. James Garvey's remarks on climate change, gives a good inventory of what the dilemmas are and this is ethics that is immediately relevant for politics. Garvey, in this respect, is very outspoken and even if you think prejudiced, the podcast forces us to ponder.

The talk with Tim Scanlon about Free Speech was especially useful for me, because of the added attention I have given lately to podcasts with Michael Sandel, John Gray and Isaiah Berlin. The subject of freedom and the evaluation of John Stuart Mill has turned out to be a returning subject in all of these. Tim Scanlon's appearance on Ethics Bites touched on Mill and Freedom as well, thus greatly contributing to the overall picture.

More Open2.net:
Things We Forgot to Remember.

More Philosophy Bites:
Aristotle's Ethics,
Sartre,
Idealism,
Alternative Hedonism,
Non-realism of God.

New Learning - Don Tapscott on Big Ideas

TVO's podcast Big Ideas had a fantastic lecture by Don Tapscott in which he laid out how learning has drastically changed since we entered the digital era. The generation of people born as of 1978 have grown up with computers and the internet and developed a radical different approach to knowledge, learning and intellectual exchange in general.

The essence of Tapscott's message is though that this is not necessarily bad. Quite to the contrary, he shows a lot of admiration for the new learners and expresses the hope that this new generation is actually better at handling the challenges of the day. In his mind, the former learners were too passive for this. Growing up with TV, frontal education and information gathered in books, made earlier generations wait for knowledge to arrive and take it at face value. Modern learners immediately compare and actively collect information.

His favorite example is that of an excellent student who admits he never reads books and thus on the face of it symbolizes how our intellectual world goes down the drain. Yet, Tapscott follows up on this and shows what the student is capable of and extracts from him how he does acquire knowledge and even knows what is in the books he did not read. This is the lecture for all those who fear our youth goes down the drain and feels guilty for wasting ones time on the internet in stead of learning the good old fashioned way.

More Big Ideas:
On Crime,
Why isn't the whole world developed?,
The role and place of the intellectual,
Disaster Capitalism,
The Bad News about Good Work.

Biological Anthropology - Berkeley

In my days as a student I have learned a little bit of cultural anthropology. Thanks to a course on Berkeley I have learned much of the missing component in my knowledge, that of biology. Aptly, the course is called An introduction to Biological Anthropology, or simply anthropology 1. As in number 1, the course to kick anthropology off. (feed)

So it is really the basics that I lacked and were added here. The importance of evolution for the human beings and their social behavior. The way in which human evolved and what all of this means for humanity today. It is something that I completely overlooked, that the rural habitat seems an eternity for man in comparison with industrial and urban modernity. However, in terms of evolution, these are a blip on the human clock and this essentially means, man is physically shaped to be a hunter gatherer.

Nevertheless, and this is the strength of the course and I recommend especially the last lectures for this subject, the recent developments of agriculture and industrialization are still significant biologically. They imply a radical change of the habitat and consequently completely different constraints on genetic developments. So even if our history is too recent and almost too short for out biology, there is an effect. All of this leads to better understanding of human beings and their society.

Michael Sandel - Philosophy Bites

Philosophy Bites had an exquisite guest in Michael Sandel. On a side note, Sandel will be giving the prestigious BBC Reith Lectures and they will be podcast as well. So there will be more Sandel soon.

The interview on Philosophy Bites delivers us the concise and comprehensive thing you must know about Sandel's thinking: about morality and the market. It is the best preparation for the more extensive lectures on the BBC.

Sandel basically responds to the capitalist notion that is hardly challenged these days, that market forces are good and it is best to leave as much regulation as possible to the market. Essentially this means that anything is open for trade and Sandel asks the question whether there are things that cannot be sold. The exemplary subject is surely slavery. The strength of Sandel, and he is challenged by Nigel Warburton, is to show non-utilitarian reasons for this. Another example is that of war. It turns out, warfare, these days, is largely outsourced and the US have discovered they fight in Iraq with mostly mercenaries. Sandel points out, that here the market has brought about a policy that was never debated in public. So, not only is the market not necessarily as far as results is concerned, it can also be of dubious morality and eventually replaces public policy and political conscious debate, if completely free.

More Philosophy Bites
Aristotle's Ethics,
Sartre,
Idealism,
Alternative Hedonism,
Non-realism of God.

University of Warwick history podcasts

From the University of Warwick there are a load of podcasts to be had from various disciplines. They come all in one feed and on my previous review came a comment that they will try to cut them up in several feeds. So far this has not been done.

On the subject of history there are a number of promising subjects that you might want to take as a whole and not have them clogged with all the rest. For those who have iTunes, this is possible: go to Warwick on iTunesU and there you can sign up for them separately. Among them I really liked the series about Islamic Medicine, which I have already reviewed. Three others fitted me less all for very different reasons and I want to mention them here, because other people definitely may find it worthwhile to look into them.

Early American Social History (iTunesU, iTunes feed) is a fair and extensive series that has to compete with many other such podcasts about US History before 1870 and then suffers because of its low audio of recorded live lectures.

Many of the Warwick podcasts are not recorded live lectures, but rather monologues by the professor. Monologue podcasts tend to lack a certain liveliness and Georgian Britain (iTunesU, iTunes feed) is a very clear example of that. The scholarly subject is delivered in such a plain tone, you have to be really, really dedicated to the subject lest you lose track. The series also lacks a general introduction that places the subject in its historical context and lays out the themes that will be discussed in each separate lecture.

In Guns and Rubles (iTunesU, iTunes feed) the podcast producers may have understood the above problem and more or less put the lecturer in a kind of interview system, gave him an introduction and kept the issues short. After three such podcast episodes, you feel so much more could be said about the Soviets and their Military Industry. But at last they have hit on a style that works well and is repeated also in Islamic Medicine and the next series: Drinking matters (iTunesU, iTunes feed), the latest series and it discusses the history of early modern pubs in Europe and their influence on the history of Europe.

Religion and the Market - John Gray on LSE

This is a lecture not just by John Gray, but I was drawn to it by the previous one in which Gray made a huge impression on me. At the London School of Economics (LSE Public Lectures and Events) John Micklethwait was invited to speak on the book he co-authored 'God is Back'. John Gray featured as discussant.

The resulting conversation was very interesting. The most important point that stuck with me is that the assumption there is ongoing secularization is false. Secularization never was much of a phenomenon outside Western Europe, but, so it seems, even there religion is marching back. Of course we hear a lot from fervent atheists, but as Gray points out: they wouldn't make so much uncompromising noise if they didn't feel they are in the defensive. My own private addition was: and the fervor also looks more like religion than anything else.

There is however something different, I noticed. The way people turn to religion is of a secular nature. That is, they turn by choice and they do not necessarily turn to the tradition they stem from. Research in the US, I am told on the podcast, shows that 44% of Americans has chosen their religion differently from their tradition. This does seem like a kind of secularization to me. In any case this podcast gave much food for thought and I highly recommend it.

More LSE Events:
John Gray's cultural pessimism,
Omniculturalism,
Controversies in the Economics of Climate Change,
Nudge: decision architecture,
The EU and the Middle East.