Archive for August, 2010

Should children be exposed to Philosophy?

Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on August 9, 2010

I recently posted a review of Julian Baggini’s Philosophy Monthly.  In his latest episode he covers a reenactment of the famous Monty Python’s Philosophers’ Football Match, for which there is a dedicated website, complete with video of the original.  It is, of course, FANTASTIC that someone has gone to the trouble of recreating the event (“…and Marx, claiming he was offsides…”), what is interesting is who/why.  The event was put on by The Philosophy Shop, a social enterprise whose goal it is to teach philosophy in schools and in the community.  Their site leads with this quote from Montaigne:

“Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?”

Being a fan of Montaigne’s Essays, having just finished our episode on Rousseau (who is known to have had some views on Education) and being a philosophile myself, I’m sympathetic to the undertaking – in principle. Read the rest of this entry »

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Favorite Philosophy Blogs?

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on August 8, 2010

As I’ve been checking out various philosophy podcasts, it struck me that I’ve neglected looking into online philosophy blogs. There’s good reason for this, of course: if I’m at a computer (or iPhone or whatever) reading philosophy, I’m probably doing research for one of our episodes. If podcasting weren’t such a new medium, and you all had ready access to a myriad of recordings of, e.g. Rousseu and Hume mixin’ it up over drinks, then no doubt we’d have a harder time getting an audience for our little recorded study group.

So, I’m requesting your help in telling us what philosophy blogs out there provide you with some entertainment value, as opposed to self-important Nietzsche-wannabes putting up cryptic treatises that could not stand up to peer review or polemically charged screeds documenting the author’s ongoing battle with the forces of ignorance.

On second thought, go ahead and link me to the terrible blogs you know about as well, so we can all feel uncomfortable together.

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Social contract R&B video

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on August 4, 2010

Just to get that last icky video off of the top spot of our blog here, I’m posting one more Rousseau-related video before I give up on that line of searching.

So here’s a parody song video about Rousseau produced by an unidentified high school student. Largely due to the goofiness of the music, this made me smile:

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The Social Contract and libertarianism

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch on August 3, 2010

Unlike pragmatism or the philosophy of mind, social contract theory is not so hot a topic among academic philosophers in youtube land. Rousseau (and Locke and Hobbes) are, of course, part of the canon and so taught as historical ideas, but I at least can’t name any big time current “social contract” philosophers like some of the folks I’ve presented in past weeks here for these other topics.

Something I did want to throw out for discussion is libertarianism and its relation to social contract theory. Here’s one of the more coherent videos of several I ran across of this sort:

The commentator here (Stefan Molyneux) claims to disprove social contract theory using bad logic and a bogus analogy. He begins in his “The SC as Justification” slide by mis-characterizing government as presenting itself as an arbiter of morality (whereas of course the relationship between these is purposely complex). Then in “The SC in Action” makes an obviously illogical move of giving some characteristics of the social contract (that it is implicitly made, geographically directed, and requires duties of citizens without requiring duties of the government to citizens, i.e. it’s unilateral) and saying that these characteristics imply that “all contracts that fulfill these requirements must also be just.” From there, he shows that this leads to absurd conclusions, which it does. Read the rest of this entry »

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More on Rousseau: Steven Smith

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on August 1, 2010

Here’s a lecture by Steve Smith from Yale University which kicks off with some additional juicy details re. Jean-Jacques’s life (Did you know he abandoned five of his kids to an orphanage? What a bastard!) and mentions a few specific points of influence beyond just hippies (also agrarian communist experimenters!) You can follow the links that appear after this clip ends to see the subsequent parts of the lecture, which presents the work we talked about on our episode.

Personally, I have a short attention span, and liked the fact that I could just move manually move the progress bar forward and read the caption to get through this video at twice its actual speed. Smith gets pretty into it eventually, however, and has some interesting things to say even if he just does read his lectures straight out of his notes (which always leads me to think, “why am I not just reading this myself?”).

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