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Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Pluckrose and Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs ideas like these, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Pluckrose and Lindsay warn that the unchecked proliferation of anti-Enlightenment...
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In this book the author transports readers to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature of Things from certain oblivion. In this work he has crafted both a work of history and a story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred...
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Kierkegaard wasn't really a philosopher in the academic sense, yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. He didn't write about the world, he wrote about life, about how we live, and how we choose to live. His subject was the individual and his or her existence, the "existing being." In Kierkegaard's view, this purely subjective entity lay beyond the reach of reason, logic, philosophical systems, theology, or even "the pretenses of
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A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred...
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From Freud to Babbitt, from Animal Farm to Sartre to the Great Society, from the Theory of Relativity to counterculture to Kosovo, The Modern Mind is encyclopedic, covering the major writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers who produced the ideas by which we live. Peter Watson has produced a fluent and engaging narrative of the intellectual tradition of the twentieth century, and the men and women who created it.
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"One of the most stunning achievements of moral philosophy is something we take for granted: moral universalism, or the idea that every human has equal moral worth. In What We Owe the Future, Oxford philosopher William MacAskill demands that we go a step further, arguing that people not only have equal moral worth no matter where or how they live, but also no matter when they live. This idea has implications beyond the obvious (climate change) - including...
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"We live in an age of disenchantment. The number of self-professed "atheists" continues to grow. Yet many still feel an intense spiritual longing for a connection to what Aristotle called the "eternal and divine." For those who do, but demand a God that is compatible with their modern ideals, a new theology is required. This is what Anthony Kronman offers here, in a book that leads its readers away from the inscrutable Creator of the Abrahamic religions...
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This program from the Famous Authors series provides an overview of the life and writings of Victor Hugo, author of the novels The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables. The video contextualizes Hugo's childhood as the son of an officer in Napoleon's army during the French Revolution. As a schoolboy, Hugo began cultivating his talents as a journalist and poet, and his older brother nurtured these talents and arranged for the publication of his...
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This overview of Henrik Ibsen's life and writing from the Famous Authors series contextualizes Ibsen's upbringing in tight-knit, strictly religious communities in isolated Norway. As a young man, he left his family home in a desire to break away from the staid and religious environment, and worked toward university and made friends that supported his talents. While he failed to pass matriculation exams in Oslo, he began to publish plays and continued...
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This program from the Famous Authors series takes a close look at the life and literature of Franz Kafka. Contextualizing Kafka's upbringing in turn-of the-century Prague, the video illuminates how the politics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and coming from a Jewish family shaped his life. Young friends Hugo Bergmann and Oskar Pollak were important influences and the first readers for the young writer. The dull but depressing nature of Kafka's office...
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In this program from the Famous Authors series, the audience is offered an overview of the life and work of Emile Zola, starting with an introduction to the writer's parents and his important boyhood friendship with Paul Cezanne. The film discusses Zola's attachment to themes of nature and liberty. Eventually he was hired by the French publisher Hachette and began gaining social and literary success in Paris. The program also discusses the Dreyfus...
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This dramatization of Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts opens with Jakob Engstrand attempting to convince Regina, his daughter and a maid in the Alving household, to come work for him. She refuses, happy with her position in a proper household, but we are soon introduced to scandal and moral debate when we learn from Mrs. Alving that Regina is actually the daughter of the philandering late Mr. Alving and when we meet Oswald Alving, Mrs. Alving's son who...