Then & Now: Philosophy, History & Politics

Metaphors We Live By is an influential book by linguists and philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published in 1980. It has since revolutionized the way we understand language and how we relate our own experiences to the world around us. But what exactly are metaphors? Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphors aren’t just poetry, but a fundamental part of our brain conceptual system. That is,...

Albert Camus was an early twentieth century French philosopher whose works expressed a philosophy of the absurd. In the Myth of Sisyphus, published in 1952, Camus challenges the idea of reason, logic and rationality, describing the limits of our understanding of the world as humans, protesting that philosophy itself is an almost useless and self-negating task. Camus is always asking that age old q...

You’re probably already a stoic in someway. It’s part of our culture. Influenced by Socrates and emerging in Ancient Greece in the 3rd century BC, it’s a foundation of Christianity, is maybe the first psychology, contributed to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, guided a Roman Emporer, and has become increasingly popular in recent years, through events like Stoicon, Annual Stoic Week, and a fl...

In this introduction to the work and theory of René Girard, I look at mimetic desire, scapegoating, mimetic crisis, ritual, sacrifice, culture, and religion. Rene Girard, born in 1923 and died in 2015, was a French thinker whose thought spanned across disciplines. His focus was on mythology, violence, sacrifice, and religion, but the range and implications of his thought touch on history, psycholo...

In this video I look at the second part of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment on the Culture Industry. They write, ‘culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines forms a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together. Even the aesthetic manifestations of political opposites proclaim the same inflexible rhyt...

In this video, I look at the first part of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. I takes an introductory look a the first three parts: The Concept of Enlightenment; Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment; and Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality. The first part, through some general reflections on Enlightenment, reason, mythology, and t...

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was interested in how the organisation of culture and the social world around us could affect our individual view of the world. How we didn’t just pick the culture we liked, but in some ways culture picked us – made us more or less likely to act in certain ways. I look at Bourdieu’s ideas about cultural capital, social capital, and institutional capital, primarily t...

In this introduction to Pierre Bourdieu, I look at a number of his key concepts: Habitus, Field & Cultural Capital, while focusing primarily on habitus. First I contextualize Bourdieu's sociology in the debates between structuralism, existentialism, and postmodernism. I look at how Bourdieu can help us understand emotions, class and children's health inequalities. Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support...

In this introduction to Baudrillard, I look at his thought as it developed from a Marxist framework in Symbolic Exchange and death through to his hyperreal postmodern period exemplified in Simulacra and Simulation. I take an in-depth look at a number of his concepts. First I look at sign-value, which he argued must supplement Marx’s framework of use-value and exchange-value. He then takes this cen...

I introduce the thought of Gilles Deleuze through his 1968 book, Difference and Repetition. I look at Deleuze's basic concepts - especially difference, repetition and the virtual; his relationship to philosophers like Spinoza and Kant; and how he provides some of the ontological foundations for other 'poststructural' or postmodern theorists like Foucault and Derrida. I also look at the relationshi...

In this introduction to Foucault I look at the poststructuralist philosopher’s influences and context (Nietzsche, Levi-Strauss & Sartre, among others), and summarise his position through his three most influential works, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. Foucault’s thought takes two approaches that are loosely related – the archaeological and the genealogica...

In this video, I take an introductory look at the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction. I look at the basic tenets of Derrida's thought, and his relationship with Ferdinand de Saussure and Jean-Jacques Rosseau in Of Grammatology. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An introduction to John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An introduction to John Stuart Mill's important and influential, On Liberty. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.