History of Philosophy Audio Archive

Judith Herman wrote an incredible book called "Trauma and Recovery" which I would wholeheartedly recommend to everyone. Advisory: Discusses incest, sexual assault, and PTSD. --- The original video can be found here: https://youtu.be/USTKmffoQms?si=mikorNz7weMjdNpu My thanks to University of California television for providing and maintaining this recording which was first recorded in Mar...

In this talk, Jonathan Lear reviews one of my favorite philosophers, the British virtue ethicist and founder of the Neoareatic movement Alasdair MacIntyre, whose 2016 book Ethics In the Conflicts of Modernity has been hugely influential in my own thinking about how we relate, socially and individually, to the questions about justice, beauty, goodness, and truth that run through our lives. Professo...

On March 22, 2005, Martha Nussbaum visited the John Adams Institute to talk about Upheavals of Thought - The Intelligence of Emotions. For everybody who thinks that philosophy is a stuffy dull science, practiced by unworldly absent-minded professors: Martha Nussbaum isn’t an abstract scientist who occupies herself with the universe and metaphysics. She is in touch with daily life. The underlying a...

This talk describes the ethics and aesthetics of unsentimentality as practiced by some of the late twentieth-century’s most notable women artists and intellectuals. We will consider what it would mean to have an ethics without empathy even in the face of extreme suffering. Deborah Nelson's Franke Forum talk is titled “An Unsentimental Education: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil.&q...

Chris Hedges explores the cultural, economic, and political forms of fascism that are dredged up by the political phenomenon of Donald Trump's presidency. Advisory: This presentation is graphic, and contains many detailed descriptions of violence. --- The original video can be found here , my thanks to Media Sanctuary for providing and maintaining this recording which was first recorded in Nov...

In this 2014 lecture, famed philosopher of mind John Searle, originator of the " Chinese Room " critique of machine intelligence discusses competing theories that attempt to explain the emergence from/relation of consciousness and matter. Searle focuses especially on refuting ideas put forward by Nick Bostrom and other AI theorists which suggest that AI can have a consciousness of its ow...

Ladies and Gentlemen, comrades and compadres, narcs and Feds I proudly present: the only Michael Parenti lecture in existence with good quality audio. The gentlemen requires no introduction, but the book on imperialism in the Roman Republic he mentioned in the "E. Badian" quote is none other than Roman Imperialism in the Late Republic , which was less than simple to find. Repuloaded to f...

“Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs that may be severe, even in a society that lacks such means of control as death squads, psychiatric prisons, or extermination camps. The very structure of the media is designed to induce conformity to established doctrine. In a three-minute stretch between commercials,...

“Some studies actually showed that that Russian drinkers lived longer than non-drinkers. [Michelle Parsons] suggested an explanation for the apparent vodka paradox: for what it is worth, alcohol may help people adapt to realities that otherwise make them want to curl up and die. Parsons, who called her book "Dying Unneeded", argued that Russians were dying early because they had nothing...

“The impoverished families of the long-term unemployed strained to the point of dysfunction, communities deprived of viable economies, interrupted educations, lost skills: these and many more results of capitalism’s crisis will put difficult demands on governments for years." -Richard Wolff, Democracy at Work Richard Wolff is an economist and political theorist associated with the Democratic...

“There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to...

“When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and "whites only" signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners--and wished...

On May 4th, 2016 journalist and political activist Naomi Klein delivered the Edward Said Lecture at the London Review of Books. She addressed the hierarchies implicit in who survives and who dies in a warming world, the role that transnational capitalism has played in subverting democracy, and the potential vectors for resistance that are available for averting an ecocidal collapse. Her aim in thi...

"Bohr was the recipient of the Atoms for Peace Prize . None of us knew what the prize was for, but everyone knew that this was the right man to give it to." - J. Robert Oppenheimer , May 14th, 1964. In this talk, the father of the atom bomb explores the perils of the nuclear arms race, the weaponization of science, the tragedy of confrontational Cold War politics, and the loss of his fri...

In his final Gifford Lecture, Professor Cornel R. West’s jazz-soaked philosophy looks unflinchingly at our own catastrophic times, and says that ‘perhaps’ we can find a way out. How do we go on loving, living, fighting, laughing, crying, swinging and singing? One answer, he proposes, lies in his tradition: the rich tradition of Black love in freedom and Black freedom in love. In literature, the tw...

In this lecture, Prof. West argues that the two great philosophically-inclined artists in early twentieth-century America were T.S. Eliot and Eugene O’Neill. Eugene O’Neill’s 49 plays constitute the greatest literary exploration of the cultural and spiritual dynamics of the American empire. Eliot’s work, especially his poems and criticism from 1917-1942, explored the end of the age of Europe with...

In this lecture, Prof. West argues that the greatest breakthrough in modern philosophy is found in the works of the Italian Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), whose perceptions wedded wisdom, eloquence, prudence, and providence. His 1725 work, The New Science, was the first great philosophic European response to the New World. In it, Vico saw Europe as locked into a dominant ‘barbarism of reflection’,...

This third lecture presents Prof. West’s consideration of early modern philosophy, focusing on Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly (1511), as a response to an era that saw devastating religious warfare, plagues, and famines, and the onset of European imperial conquests. The great public intellectual, Erasmus of Rotterdam, directed his classic work to the sheer absurdity, indeterminacy and frailty of hum...

Dr. Cornel West, a leading philosopher and activist was invited to give the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh this year (2024). His series, entitled "A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane" is an attempt to explore issues at the intersection of art, race, politics, and philosophy. Dr. West continues his discussion from the first lectu...

Dr. Cornel West, a leading philosopher and activist was invited to give the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh this year (2024). His series, entitled "A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane" is an attempt to explore issues at the intersection of art, race, politics, and philosophy. This is Lecture One of Six, titled a "Philosophic...

Economist and political scientist Yanis Varoufakis breaks down his concept of 'technofeudalism' or the successor paradigm to neoliberalism. This address, at the National Press Club of Australia, aired March 13th 2024. Varoufakis' recent book, Technofeudalism , describes these developments in greater detail. The original video is found here . --- As always these talks are syndicated for...

Veteran war correspondent and journalist Chris Hedges describes the cultural patterns of the COVID era, and elucidates the work of Fritz Stern, a German cultural critic who witnessed the rise of Nazi ideology. Stern's book, The Politics of Cultural Despair , is the foundation of the talk, and Hedge's book America: The Farewell Tour which I have read and recommend, expands on everything in...

Renowned activist and scholar Noam Chomsky summarizes his lifetime of experience in education, and provides overviews of the divergent mentalities that apply to the goals, curricula, and structure of a real education. The original video on YouTube is found here . I have omitted some noisy and unnecessary parts of the video, including the intro and Q&A so that Chomsky comes through on his own....

An interview between the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who specialize(d) in Ancient Greek philosophy and tragedy and Bryan Magee. Aired originally in 1987. Discusses in particular Aristotelian metaphysics and epistemology, describes the intellectual quarrel between Plato and Aristotle, and describes Aristotle's epistemic method as presented in the Posterior Analytics. YouTube Source PhilosophyO...

Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist and philosopher. He has written two recent books, The Master and His Emissary , and The Matter with Things (2 Volumes) on the mechanism and consequences of the divided brain theory. This talk, an address given at the Darwin Medical College of Cambridge University, is an overview of right hemisphere versus left hemisphere cognition, and attempts to explain how the...