Revisionist Licensing

Malcom Gladwell's new podcast is called Revisionist History (feed) and this title instilled in me a slightly different expectation than what I got in the first episode. I was expecting either a revision of any widely accepted narrative, or a study of any such widely accepted narrative that had been challenged, more or less successfully. What Gladwell does rather, is take on a certain subject and show how we would generally assume a certain history and in stead get another. It is not very different, but still it is not negating an established thought but rather revealing the twist of closer inspection versus superficial expectation.


There are two episodes out, while I write this and I have only heard the first one, but this episode, The Lady Vanishes was so powerful, I just had to review immediately. Gladwell asks us: If Hilary Clinton will be elected as president, will that pave the way for more women in office or will generally enhance the chances for any other woman to be elected president? The historical sample taken is from the 19th century when the female painter Elizabeth Thompson was about to enter the Royal Society of the Arts in England.

Yes, we would expect such occurrences to work as a sluice that opens, but Gladwell invokes the concept of Moral Licensing from social psychology to show that the opposite might be true and presents the historic examples to support this kind of revisionist history (which I maintain is not exactly revisionist history in the regular sense, but we catch the drift). His point is that frequently individuals and societies allow particular cases of minority members (Women, Colored people, Jews etc) to enter a realm otherwise closed for them, only to satisfy their conscience and consequently proceed to discriminate with renewed ardor. The saddest example Jews in Germany as he takes it from Amos Elon's study "The pity of ot all" - which shows the Jews in German society from 1743-1933 occasionally succeeding to break the glass ceilings and walls, but nevertheless finding themselves eventually in a land that embraced the lethal antisemitism of the Nazis.

It is a very bleak conclusion; it cautions us that when we think discrimination might be over it may come back with a vengeance. While this may exactly be the case, there are two major reservations I have here. One is that this line of thinking has a tendency to be irrefutable because no matter how many examples you may find that discrimination is receding, it might still be a case of moral licensing. The second is that this idea of moral licensing comes from psychology, hence it describes processes in individuals and Gladwell takes this micro-level theory and applies it on a macro-level which is a jump cannot be made just like that.

The alleged racism of Albert Camus

Albert Camus became my idol, when at the age of 16-17 I read The Stranger for the first time (L’Étranger - I read it in French and in Dutch). On one of the recent issues of Entitled Opinions (feed) host Robert Harrison discussed this novel with Alice Kaplan, Professor of French at Yale University: Alice Kaplan on Albert Camus and The Stranger. And from the start the discussion gave a new interpretation of the racism in The Stranger.

Albert Camus as my idol represented the ultimate personal moralism, cleansed from common hypocrisy and ideological and religious pomposity. However, soon enough my personal saint was seriously challenged in his sainthood: I read an analysis of The Stranger by Conor Cruise O'Brien. O'Brien attempted to show that The Stranger was the product of French colonialist bourgeois cultural baggage. In the novel all the French characters have names and a personalized identity. Yet all the native Algerians are 'Arabs' and Meursaults murder of an 'Arab' is a mere vehicle to bring about an unconvincing show trial which is a vehicle to show Meursaults sanctity of the Camusian kind, yet indifferently ignores the cruelties towards the Arabs in the book to which Meursault shows no protest, judgment or even regret. In short, the Arabs are treated as the subhuman the French colonial was used to treat them and hence the writer and his book are marred by inherent racism. My hero was markedly tainted now; I would not want to give up on him and kept on reading and studying his work, yet O'Brien's harsh criticism was impossible to overlook.

Alice Kaplan turns the issue completely around. She claims that Camus saw his society for what it was and as a court reporter was acutely aware that a case such as Meursault's would be treated as the murder of 'an Arab'. Hence, in her view, Camus' use of the French colonialist language and point of view is deliberate and entails among others a critical view on the inherent racism of his environment. I find it partly convincing for two reasons. For one it fits in with the naturalistic style of The Stranger which meticulously describes Meursault's world as it is, without making it grimmer or prettier and carefully abstaining from all judgment. Secondly, it fits in with Camus' independent moralism as expressed also in his later work. Listen and judge for yourself; as for me, as reluctant as I ever was to take in O'Brien's criticism I still feel that something holds.

The point where it holds connects with my personal experience, today, here in Israel, but also previously, when I still lived in The Netherlands. You see, it has always struck me that even the most politically correct people, those that reject racism wherever they see it and choose the side of the oppressed, they still talk of the oppressed in those generalizing terms. In the society where ethnic identity has such deep implications, even if you are totally against it, you are stuck with a language and public discourse that is drawn along the lines of ethnic categorization and profiling. It means that only if The Stranger would not be written in French and not be set in Algeria in the 1940's the novel would have a beginning of a chance to get away with this kind of inherent racism. It would no longer be The Stranger and would no longer be by Camus. So we will have to live with the criticism no matter what.

More Camus on the blog:
Entitled Opinions (2009),
In Our Time (2008),
In Our Time (2009),
The Partially Examined Life (2011),
Philosophy Bites (2008),
Philosophy Bites (2009).

Our brain dichotomies - Saeed Ahmed

Here is another guest-post written by Saeed Ahmed:

Have you ever thought about the question “Who am I?” or the question “Why do I do the things I do?”

On the surface, perhaps these seem trivial questions, and yet they have been discussed by philosophers for thousands of years, with no firm answers, and the dialog continues.

Modern neuroscience has reached a point that it can in some ways inform this dialog. Three recent podcast interviews, based on books written for lay audiences, illuminate slightly different aspects of the debate, provide some answers, and raise many more questions.

Two dichotomies are emphasized in these podcasts; conscious and unconscious mental processing, and the functions of the left and right hemispheres.

Each author has been interviewed several times, and I have posted below links for sessions with three very experienced interviewers.

David Eagleman, interviewed by Terry Gross, is a neuroscientist and talks about a competition for attention among the myriad of neural processes (central, peripheral, sympathetic, parasympathetic) that we all possess. Volition and action occur on the basis of which processes “win.” Virtually all of the competition occurs unconsciously. In a way, Eagleman provides an organic basis for what an aspect of “unconscious: may be. In the latter part of the book, he discusses implications of this, including those for our legal systems. Fresh Air - (feed)


Daniel Kahneman, interviewed by Leonard Lopate, is a nobel-prize winner in economics. While this may seem a bit odd (why economics; isn’t that about supply and demand curves, utility functions and mathematical models?), it isn’t really, because aspects of behavior, particularly “non-rational” behavior, are becoming very important in economics research, as it has become more and more apparent that participants in markets often do not act as rationally as traditional models have assumed. Kahneman describes two neural systems: one that operates quickly with virtually no sense of voluntary control and a second that allocates attention to effortful activities. He too speculates about legal implications, e.g. the effect of judicial decisions on whether judges are hungry or have just eaten. Leonard Lopate Show - Feed

Kahneman also wrote an article on the same subject matter as his book for Scientific American, which can be accessed here.

My favorite interview of the three, was of Iain McGilchrist a British psychiatrist, who sat with Phillip Adams of Australia’s Radio National, who discusses the implications of the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy. The left-right dichotomy is just as fundamental as the conscious-unconscious one (although both ultimately are reductionist). Briefly summarized, just as one may hypothesize that the phenomena of perception/conception/volition/action are determined in some way by a competition between multiple unconscious processes, so too may one say that these phenomena occur due to states generated by the cooperative/competitive “discussion” between the two “persons” who exist inside us, and very different persons they are, apparently. McGilchrist goes beyond mechanistic explanations, and it is his foray into the implications of this dichotomy that I found quite compelling, speculative though they might be. The basic hypothesis he puts forth is that due to a predominance of left-dominant thinking, certain tendencies of western civilization have become damaging. In his own words (from his book’s introduction):

“Here I suggest that it is as if the left hemisphere, which creates a sort of self-reflexive virtual world, has blocked off the available exits, the ways out of the hall of mirrors, into a reality which the right hemisphere could enable us to understand. In the past, this tendency was counterbalanced by forces from outside the enclosed system of the self-conscious mind; apart from the history incarnated in our culture, and the natural world itself, from both of which we are increasingly alienated, these were principally the embodied nature of our existence, the arts and religion. In our time each of these has been subverted and the routes of escape from the virtual world have been closed off. An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, has come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere.”

Right/Left brain speculations, in books and blog posts on the hidden power of the right brain, are becoming quite fashionable, but they sometimes overstate the implications of the evidence they put forth to support their claims. Gilchrist advocates balance between the left and the right hemispheres. It is always hard to judge how far one may speculate, given any line of evidence, and I don’t think Gilchrist went too far, but not everyone may see his suppositions about social and humanistic issues well-grounded in research in this area. But few will fault his effort to reach this far.

More about the three books can be found at Amazon, Wikipedia (thinking fast and slow) (the master and his emissary).

Taking courses with Saeed Ahmed

Here is a guest-post written by Saeed Ahmed:

Jean Jacques Rousseau “was a charlatan,” a “moral leach,” who “consciously set out to tickle the fancy of the cultural elite in France.”  Hegel “used technical terminology but wasn’t sure what he meant”; “he thought that the way to greatness was through obfuscation.”   “Nobody invented jargon with the viciousness and vengeance of Kant.” 
Containing such declarations, it is not surprising that Ronald Nash’s course on Modern Philosophy gets mixed reviews on itunes. 
https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/modern-philosophy/id412910038
Nash (who died in 2006) was an unapologetic Christian apologetic.  His lectures are full of attacks on moral relativism, modernism, post-modernism, enlightenment thinking, and just about anything that does not conform to his absolute, foundational belief in the Christian God.  
When it comes to worldview, there is virtually nothing that I find appealing in Dr. Nash’s ideas.  Nevertheless I found his course compelling at 3 levels. 

First, he has a surprisingly engaging style; he is not bashful, neutral or balanced.   You know exactly where he is coming from.  His is a full frontal assault on virtual all liberal ideas.  This is strangely refreshing and a change from the nuanced and “balanced” presentations in many lecture courses.  Agree with him or not, he will capture your attention.  His view is a full, undiluted measure of unabashed fundamentalist thought. There are no hidden levers; it’s all visible.  

Second, his summaries of philosophers, while reductionist, are quite pithy and at least to my non-professional view, accurate enough to be good introductions.   His basic approach is often something like “this guy was an idiot, but here are the three points he made” and then he lists them very systematically.  For Kant he summarizes: “Concepts without percepts are empty; Percepts without concepts are blind.”  Further, “Kant integrated rationalism and empiricism…rationalism entered Kant’s system because it encompassed the apriori set of categories with which experience was worked upon “; “With the categories, our minds organize percepts in ways that produce knowledge.”  Kant put “human mind at the center”.  “The reason we are conscious of space and time is not just because we apprehend something out there, but because our minds contribute notions of space and time to what we see.”  “There are 12 apriori categories (such as unity, equality, and causation) that allow the mind to organize and relate ideas.” “Laws of nature are in a way a product of the knowing mind.” “We believe x causes y because our minds force us think in this way.”  “We are never conscious of raw percepts; the moment we become conscious, of a raw percept, it has already been acted upon by the knowing mind; it has been given a structure, organization and a set of relationships.” “We cannot have knowledge of what we cannot perceive, thus we cannot know knowledge of our self” (the unifying transcendental self).
Category (apriori) -> Concept (direct object of human awareness) -> unified coherent field (transcendental unity of apperception). 

Not bad.  I am not a professional philosopher, and I would be very curious to know what people who really know the subject well think of Nash’s summaries.

Third, it is kind of fun to listen to someone who is confident enough to unabashedly bash some of the greatest minds of the last few thousand years.   Wrong or right (and usually wrong, I would submit), this is just plain fun to listen to at times.

If Nash leaves a bad taste in your mouth, and a ringing in your ears, I recommend four  antidotes:  1) Peter Milican’s general philosophy introduction (available in audio and video from Oxford), 2) Mythology by Gail Lavender, 3) episode 328 of Shrink Rap radio featuring an interview with the extremely erudite Dutch Jungian Analyst Robert Bosnak and 4)  and Buddhist Psychology by Eleanor Rosch.

Unlike Nash’s survey course, Dr. Milican’s is much more balanced and accurate.

http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/podcasts/general_philosophy

In Lavender’s course, I particularly direct you to the lecture on psychological theories of mythology, in which she mentions the dictum “dreams are the myths of the individual; myths are the dreams of the race”, then goes on to explain this using concepts developed by Freud and Jung. 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/mythology/id497995501

In the Shrink Rap podcast (#328), Bosnak discusses the astonishing Red Book of Carl Jung (that was published in 2009 for the first time) and in a very short time.   He mentions a plausible hypothesis about why religious fundamentalism is so prevalent these days.

http://www.shrinkrapradio.com/2012/11/29/328-the-red-book-and-cycles-of-change-with-jungian-analyst-robert-bosnak/

In the Buddhist Psychology course, Rosch demonstrates how in many ways, she is the polar opposite of Nash.  Her style is generous, open, non-judgmental, liberal, and compassionate.  She has a very deep knowledge of Buddhist philosophy and modern psychology, so is able to discuss the former, and place the latter in its context, and vice versa.   I would recommend starting this course from the beginning, but if time is limited, then skip ahead and listen first to the third lecture, where a specific form of meditation is introduced.  I have been doing this, and have noticed changes in me after only a few days. 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/psychology-107-001-fall-2010/id391538994

These courses complement each other.  Listening to lectures from all contemporaneously really blows one’s mind due to the sheer breadth of material that creates conflicts and tensions in one’s understanding and perspectives.  

Saeed Ahmed

More Saeed Ahmed:
Optimizing Brain Fitness,
Wittgenstein,
Political and current affairs podcasts,
International Political Economy,
A podcast on climate, energy and food,
Two podcasts on the brain.

The Meaning of Everything - Big Ideas

An exceptionally witty and entertaining lecture by Simon Winchester can be heard at the TVO podcast Big Ideas. (feed)

Winchester relates the history of the Oxford English Dictionary. How it came into being and how it attempts to be complete and impartial other than Webster's or Samuel Johnson's dictionaries. Or similar dictionaries of other languages.

A history with many maniacs, slips of paper and a huge crowd of anonymous contributors. Sounds familiarly modern?

More Big Ideas:
Meaning Systems,
The Elegance of the Hedgehog,
Age of Unequals,
Dan Dennett: what should replace religion?,
Chris Hedges.

Reith Lectures 2012 - BBC Podcast

Here is a quick heads up to announce that the Reith lectures Podcast has begun publishing the lecture series that was held about a month ago. Speaker is historian Niall Ferguson and the series title is The Rule of Law and Its Enemies. (feed)

This title is rather reminiscent of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) in which he pointed at Fascism and Communism as the ideologies that held the greatest threat to society. Underlying these ideologies were theories that, in Popper's view, had the kind of tendency towards totalitarianism that brought these ideologies about and what similar dangerous ideologies could emerge.

In 2012 such discourse is not taken to ideologies, as is to be expected. Ferguson takes a look at the institutions and their role in society. But the question is still the same: what helps and what threatens the kind of nation we would like to live in?

Reith Lectures 2011:
Reith Lectures 2011.

Reith Lectures 2010:
Reith Lectures 2010 (2),
Reith Lectures 2010.

Reith Lectures in 2009:
A new politics of the common good,
The bioethics concern,
Morality in Politics,
Morality and the Market.

Moral and Political thought of Gandhi (History 175c) - UCLA

Unfortunately, the audio is incomplete, but Vinay Lal's course at UCLA -History 175c- still gives a compelling series of lectures digging into the biography of Gandhi, his thought and his critics. (feed)

Even if the life of Gandhi and his thought are well-known, there are many surprises when you start digging into it. As a concept, nonviolence is not so difficult to understand, but a theory how this might work in a political theory and in a spiritual philosophy is far from self-explanatory. Vinay Lal's lectures are a good way to get acquainted. Although Lal certainly reveres Gandhi there is ample distance to let you feel you are getting a fair introduction.

In comparison, the old Berkeley courses on nonviolence are much more engaged. These two, PACS 164A&B are among those podcast lectures that are no longer available through Berkeley, not even among the classical courses on iTunesU. The Metta Center for nonviolence however still points at them, including video recordings of those lectures. Should you want to take on these, start with Lal's course.



Lal's course is a great complement to other podcasts about Gandhi. When Joseph Lelyveld published his controversial biography of Gandhi, I reviewed a couple of podcasts that paid attention to this book.

Also among other Indian History courses Lal teaches at UCLA this one stands out. It clearly is the subject that is most closely to Lal's areas of interest. The other courses are History of India and the History of British India.

Logan on Language - Big Ideas (TVO)

Finally I have regained some time and on-line connection to write a little more on the blog. I would like to take the opportunity to dig through a long list of podcasts I listened to in the past months and give them short reviews as yet.


The first I bump into, was relatively recently on my playlist. An issue from Big Ideas (TVO). They rerun a short lecture from 2002: Robert K. Logan on The Origin and Evolution of Language. In this lecture Logan not only explains how, in his view, language evolved, but also how it continues to evolve and affects human evolution until this day. In this respect he treats the internet also as 'language', which sounds more confusing than it pans out in the lecture. The basic tenet is that humanity has been able to progress dramatically every time it improved the efficacy and abstract quality of its communications. (feed)

The result is a stimulating and thought-provoking lecture. The only drawback is that the lecture is too short (24 minutes) to dig deep enough and with the amount of mental leaps Logan presents, I got to feel rather uncomfortable and unconvinced. It all seemed a bit too simplified. An example of such is to explain the progress of the West in comparison with China from the alphabet, which is more abstract and reductional than the Chinese character-based script. Really? That takes more than a claim, that needs quite a lengthy argument.

More Big Ideas:
Meaning Systems
The Elegance of the Hedgehog,
Age of Unequals,
Dan Dennett: what should replace religion?,
Chris Hedges.

The Moral Foundations of Politics (Yale)

Currently on my iPod features prominently an open Yale course The Moral Foundations of Politics with Professor Ian Shapiro (feed). This course kicks off with the promise to delve into questions of legitimacy of the political order, but as I am through half the course, we are for the time being, still, mostly delving into the history of political theory, with an additional emphasis on political economy. A lot of Bentham, Mill and by now Marx with a lot of Pareto, Ricardo and Adam Smith.

I am happy though with the four lectures' attention to Marx in this framework. It helped me to understand a little bit more, what I somehow could not digest in the all out reading of Marx's Das Kapital a podcast with Richard Harvey (feed)

Shapiro's delivery of Marx is more distant, more concise and applied. All in all a very interesting course, though I am still waiting to get less economics and more moral philosophy. Maybe in the second half...

More open Yale courses:
History of epidemics,
Early Modern England,
European Civilization 1648-1945,
France since 1871,
New Testament, history and literature.

Wittgenstein - Saeed Ahmed guest post

Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein are arguably two of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. However, whereas Heidegger is well-represented in academic podcasts (see previous reviews by Anne on offerings by Hubert Dreyfus of Berkeley and Sean Kelly of Harvard), Wittgenstein is not heavily featured.

Therefore, I would like to point out a recent post in Philosopher's Zone (ABC Radio National, Australia), in which Gavin Kitching, professor at University of New South Wales discusses Wittgenstein with Alan Saunders, the interviewer. What I liked about this podcast was the clarity of the questions and responses, culminating with a devastating and foundational critique of methodology used by the Social Sciences in the 20th century, specifically the deliberate removal of the personal voice from academic discourse. It is difficult to deliver such a blow after a 30 minute conversation, but this Kitching and Saunders make a case worth considering, which follows from principles laid down by Wittgenstein. (feed)

Generally speaking, Philosopher's Zone podcasts are kept on for about 4 weeks, so download while you can.

Saeed Ahmed

More Saeed Ahmed:
Political and current affairs podcasts,
International Political Economy,
A podcast on climate, energy and food,
Two podcasts on the brain,
Comedy podcasts and philosophy.

More on Heidegger:
Heidergger in podcasts - news,
Entitled Opinions - conversation,
J Drabinsky - university course,
Dichter und Denker in Freiburg - lecture (in German).

A Quiet Mind - Guest Post by Owen

This is a guest post by Owen from Podcast Reviews. Many thanks to Owen for his contribution.

In "A Quiet Mind", host Robert Jackson documents his journey from a corporate employee to a full time truth seeker on a quest for a simplified, spiritually fulfilling life. (feed)

Robert shares his thoughts on a range of topics related to mindfulness, awareness, meditation and positive thinking with practical advice from a largely Eastern viewpoint on how anyone, regardless of occupation or location, can better achieve a quiet mind. Robert has a comforting, compassionate tone and speaks at a leisurely pace which complements the subject matter and gives the listener time to reflect on these deep universal issues.

Personal favourite past episodes are "Bow in gratitude" released September 2010, "A Guided Meditation to open the heart to giving" released May 2009 and "Breeeeeeeathe" released May 2007 which are still available in the archive - though each episode is a delight and a much needed reminder to take time to slow down in an otherwise non stop western society.

Now it its 6th year and approaching 100 episodes, "A Quiet Mind" is consistently in the iTunes top Religion and Spirituality podcast section having gained a loyal following of subscribers.

Albert Camus - The Partially Examined Life

The best ideas for new podcasts to try, usually come from readers of the blog (keep them coming!) and so it went this time as well: a reader recommended I tried the philosophy podcast The Partially Examined Life. This podcast has very long (up to two hours) episodes in which a panel of philosophy students discuss an important philosopher or work of philosophy. They try to abide by two important rules that should make the podcast accessible for you and me: not to assume the listener has any prior knowledge or understanding of the matter; no name-dropping. (feed)

With already 36 episodes in the feed, there is a huge amount of content to choose from and by now I have listened to about three full issues, but I decided to kick off with me early life favorite: Albert Camus. The panel discussed the essay bundle that is usually known as The Myth of Sisyphus or as An Absurd Reasoning in which Camus explains his ideas about life being absurd and giving his reasoning against suicide. This was especially interesting to me, as I was never able to read this work until the end and not for lack of trying. Camus' novels have always been extremely accessible to me, but his essays, also other than The Myth of Sisyphus have not.

The guys on the podcast confirm my difficulty with the text - also they dread the way Camus drags on without getting to the point. The podcast allowed me to get more of a grip on how he did get to the point. The point being: Life is absurd, do not accept it, but do not commit suicide, because that is letting absurdity get the better of you. It shows his logical steps, it shows the philosophers he was influenced by and eventually also where his weak points lie. You have to bare the length of the podcast and the lack of structure in the discussion, but still this is a great entry into philosophy.

More Albert Camus:
Entitled Opinions,
In Our Time.

Samuel Beckett - Entitled Opinions

Entitled Opinions, Robert Harrison's weekly radio show at Stanford is a long standing, much revered, intellectual podcast which has seen long caesuras in the past. It is expected to have one of several months in the coming time as well. So, podcast listeners, be aware - many of you have let me know in the past they had thought the show was canceled. It was not and is not planned to be either. Harrison will be on a sabbatical and the show is planning to continue as soon as he is back. (feed)

As a parting gift, Harrison delivered a monologue about Samuel Beckett which I want to especially recommend to you. Harrison analyzes Beckett's work and philosophy and picks sections from Molloy and Malone Dies as illustrations - which he reads out most admirably.

Beckett is no great optimist about life and human nature. Harrison sees in this a kind of prophetic view that he ascribes to the poetic capacity of modern life and modern man. Again no pretty vista, but a very compelling listen.

More Samuel Beckett:
Waiting for Godot.

More Entitled Opinions:
Moby Dick,
Two issues of Entitled Opinions,
Heidegger,
Pink Floyd,
Alexander the Great.

Tapestry - Karen Armstrong - Compassion (a year hence)

Remember Karen Armstrong's Charter for Compassion? That initiative was launched a little over a year ago and one may wonder how that went further. Armstrong returned to the CBC program Tapestry to tell about it. (feed)


I did not know the Charter started with funding by TED that Armstrong won and was to invest any which way she saw fit. It was not felt when she spoke at TED about the Charter. By now TED's money has been used, but the Fetzer institute stepped in to continue the funding. Apart from the interfaith dialog, there is also a book Twelve steps to a compassionate life - is that a paraphrase of AA's twelve steps program? We do seem to be addicted to our selfishness all right.

Listen to Mary Hines's conversation with Karen Armstrong on Tapestry and and pay attention to what she says about dialog. For me that comes straight to my heart: how I love good conversation and how rare is it. Another podcast that pointed that subject out was On Being when Krista Tippet received John O'Donohue (feed) and he asked: when was the last time you truly conversed with someone else; when you had a conversation where you heard yourself say things you did not know you had in you and thus the dialog changed you both. How often is human interaction a senseless reiteration of the same sentences we speak on and on?

More Tapestry:
Giordano Bruno,
Surviving in the Wilderness,
Survival of the Kindest,
Fear,
Terry Eagleton.

Meaning Systems - Big Ideas

A very worthwhile piece of audio to pick up is the podcasted lecture by David Sloan Wilson on Religions and other Meaning Systems on the podcast Big Ideas also without the additional reading and listening that embedded it for me (feed). Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist who shines his perspective on religion in general and does so in a very integrated fashion and with fascinating insights.

My perspective on religion is sociological and anthropological and it makes me always feel a bit queasy when I see biologists take on religion. Whether it is Richard Dawkins (in The God Delusion that I recently read) or Stephen Gould or PZ Myers, I always feel they somehow miss a fundamental point. Sloan Wilson is an exception to that rule, he explicitly does not miss the point: even though religions carry claims about facts, claims that biology or other sciences are by far more qualified to make, religion is not essentially about facts, or even about salvation or morality - religions are a social construct that supply people with meaning. That is what Sociology and Anthropology could have told you in the first place and what Sloan Wilson presents as a zoological discovery: unlike other animals man is profoundly symbolic. And while we are at it, political ideologies and science are no less a product of that symbolic inclination of man than religion is. They all are meaning systems, in the terminology of Wilson. I would have called them symbolic universes, but again, that is my baggage from sociology.

It is also my baggage as a sociologist that I feel the social sciences are more qualified to analyze religion, yet I happily acknowledge that the biology perspectives of David Sloan Wilson and Richard Dawkins offer insight as well. It helped I was pointed by the DIY Scholar to the Stanford series with Robert Sapolsky: Human Behavioral Biology which is a very interesting and broad course in its own right, but in this context it gave me the much needed introduction in the tools, methods, terminology and mind set of the biologist. (feed)

More Big Ideas:
The Elegance of the Hedgehog,
Age of Unequals,
Dan Dennett: what should replace religion?,
Chris Hedges,
Needham about China.

Michel Montaigne

I knew the name Montaigne before I knew the person. There was a Montaigne school in Amsterdam, but I had no idea who Montaigne was. Michel Montaigne was a French writer from the 16th century who wrote philosophical essays about just anything that popped to his mind. Some of this I learned bit by bit, but a very fine summary I got from a recent issue of Philosophy Bites.


Sarah Blakewell was on the show to tell us about this writer and made me appreciate him a whole lot more. It turns out, Montaigne is more or less the inventor of the essay and with his essays he influences many thinkers of later age, from Descartes to Nietzsche. And it also seems he is very readable. It think I am off to the library to get a copy of his works. (feed)

More Philosophy Bites:
Justice according to Michael Sandel,
Three issues of Philosophy Bites,
Morality,
The genocide and the trial.
Dirty Hands,

Meaning of Life - LSE

At the London School of Economics (LSE Podcast) you can hear a lecture by Robert Rowland Smith about the Meaning of Life. As much as this subject is most interesting and the lecture laudable, it is also barely audible. Rowland Smith walks up and down the stage, causing varying levels in the sound and constantly interacts with his audience, while there are no microphones to catch what feedback he is reacting to. (feed)

Still, what will make it worthwhile to spend an hour and a half struggling with this irregular lecture is that Rowland Smith gives an amazing overview of what is implied in questions about the meaning of life. It is the broadest inventory of relevant issues to the meaning of life I recall to have heard. In stead of being bothered by the lapses in the audio, you can take them as breaks and ponder your own reaction to it, until the next tidbit comes up.

Nice, inspiring I hope, but scattered.

More LSE:
Palestinian perspectives - LSE and CNES,
The impending war,
Quest for meaning,
The plundered planet,
China and India.

Justice according to Michael Sandel - Philosophy Bites

Philosophy Bites just had a show in which they had Michael Sandel explain the ideas of Justice. The best podcast on philosophy with the most clear mind in the field of Justice - what more do you want? (feed)

If you have followed Sandel's vodcast about Justice (at Harvard), what he says is not new. Yet he manages to sum up in twenty minutes what takes hours in the series. The two polar approaches to justice are consequentialist utilitarianism on the one hand, which tries to capture justice by looking at the outcome of behavior and law and the measure to which the outcome is worthy or not. On the other side is the idea of fundamental right and wrong, which tries to find justice in a priori values. Sandel chooses neither side nor makes a suggestion for a third way as the one right approach, but rather comes up with the third approach in order to further inform and balance out the polarity.

The remaining thought then is that the search for Justice continues yet Sandel has enriched our tool box which helps us on the way.

More Philosophy Bites:
Three issues of Philosophy Bites,
Morality,
The genocide and the trial,
Dirty Hands,
Understanding decisions.

Moby Dick - Entitled Opinions

For the die-hard quality podcast lovers this week is a most splendidly happy one: Entitled Opinions is back. Last Tuesday with a great discussion of Moby Dick with repeat guest Andrea Nightingale. (feed)

Moby Dick is so much more than a novel, or an epic. It is an artful description of man's search for God, meaning and the essence of his being - man's or God's. This is not a claim of my own, but trather what one learns from Robert Harrison and Andrea Nightingale's discussion. For those who have read Moby Dick with Hubert Dreyfus's philosophy course at Berkely (Philosophy 6) this comes as no surprise.

Today Entitled Opinions moves on in full swing with a discussion about Classicism in America.

More Entitled Opinions:
Two issues of Entitled Opinions,
Heidegger,
Pink Floyd,
Alexander the Great,
Athanasius Kircher (Giordano Bruno).

More Philosophy 6:
KQED - all things shining,
Heidegger in Podcast - news,
Heidegger in podcast,
Philosophy 6 - Berkeley lecture series.

KQED - all things shining

Three days ago the radio program KQED Forum with Michael Krasny had a conversation with Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly about their book All Things Shining; Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.



In podcast we know Dreyfus and Kelly from their philosophy lecture series on Heidegger. The work they have done at UC Berkeley in teaching a course, year in year out, about the meaning of being and how this can be learned from reading classical literature has found its way to this book. Dreyfus and Kelly count as the leading existentialist philosophers today and this, obviously, is the framework in which this book should be understood.

Here is a tiny hint I can give: the question of the meaning of life can also be framed as: what makes life worthwhile, or what is the good life. Dreyfus and Kelly draw our attention to peak experiences that we have from time to time. When what we do or undergo is especially elevated in some way, when our lives acquire an additional shine - hence the title 'all things shining'. They want to argue that this shining is what counts and that our intent in life, as well as our dedication should be directed to it. Yet, in a modern age things seem to shine less. As if the shining is more of a thing of magic, or sacredness, or non-repeatable singularity which apparently is less accessible in the secular, demystified and rational world, or at least within the framework of monotheism.

I find it not so easy to catch the idea, but I was very inspired by the show on KQED and can tell it is at least much more accessible than the courses Dreyfus and Kelly teach. I feel like buying and close reading the book after this as well.

More KQED Forum:
The Iranian Elections,
Irvin Yalom,
Susan Jacoby,
Christopher Hitchins.

See also:
Heidegger in podcast - news