Adora Svitak - What Adults Can Learn from Kids

Have you ever wondered what could happen if you respected the intelligence and potential of your children, and read to them a little Aristotle, some history and science instead of just simple bedtime stories?

Well, wonder no more. Here's a great example of the positive influence of intellectual stimulating your children's brains.

Now, pick up that dusty philosophy book that's been sitting in your book shelf for years and put it to good use :)

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Three Minute Philosophy - Aristotle

When scholars refer to you as "the philosopher" for about two thousand years, and everyone understands what that means, you're kind of a big deal. That's exactly what happened to Aristotle because, let's face it, the man's depth and breath of intellectual sophistication simply blew everyone out of the water for two millennia.

If you want a nice introduction to his thought, you could go the comedic route with Mark Steel. For the more ambitious of you, there's always the eloquent Martha Nussbaum discussing Aristotle with Bryan Magee, or Barry Schwarts lecturing on Aristotle's virtue ethics and practical wisdom, or Michael Sandel's teaching his excellent Harvard course on Justice.

But if you have absolutely no idea who Aristotle was, give us 3 minutes:

Ok, so he's too important to distill in only 3 minutes, so give us 3 more:

And to get an even better idea, here is an explanation of Aristotle's four causes:

If you liked that, check out the excellent History of Philosophy podcast; your brain will thank you.

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To Infinity and Beyond

Apparently the title of this documentary also has something to do with Toy Story? Well, I haven't seen that movie, but I can tell you what this documentary is about... Infinity. The most obvious way to start thinking about infinity is through numbers: take any number, and you'll soon realize that there is no such thing as the biggest number because you can always add 1. No, a googol won't do it, nor even a googolplex or Graham's number. Yes, these numbers contain more zeros than there are atoms in the observable universe, but they still fall short, infinitely short, in fact, of infinity.

But the strangeness doesn't end there because infinity may not only be a mathematical conceptual idea: infinity raises all kinds of interesting scientific and philosophical questions and paradoxes (what Immanuel Kant called antinomies of reason) about the physical universe that even modern cosmology doesn't quite know what to do with: is space infinite? If not, what's beyond its edge? Infinite empty space? What about time? If it is, and the amount of matter in the universe is finite, then everything that could logically happen has happened, and will continue to happen, an infinite number of times... And hey, are there an infinite amount of universes? And as you'll see in this fascinating documentary, this is just the beginning of the weirdness:

For a fascinating treatment of the problems of infinity, check out the documentary Dangerous Knowledge.

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Adam Savage - How Simple Ideas Lead to Scientific Discoveries

We live in a world in which we presuppose as a given that great scientific discoveries require the existence of great, expensive technological equipment: lasers, the Large Hadron Collider, microscopes, computers, the Hubble and Kepler telescopes, synchrotrons, super-duper cameras, you name it...

But more than great technology, the real secret to discovery is creativity, because creativity helps you make good use of whatever tools are actually available to you, even if they happen to be, as in the case of Eratosthenes, two sticks on the ground. In the following TEDTalk animated presentation, Myth Buster Adam Savage recounts a few examples (starting with Richard Feynman, moving on to Eratosthenes,  Galileo, and Armand Fizeau's toothed wheel to measure the speed of light,) about how small ideas can give rise to mind-blowing ideas and revolutionary discoveries.

And if Carl Sagan is more your style, you might be interested in his take on Eratosthenes.

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Critical Thinking Animated Primer

One cannot stress enough the importance of critical thinking. Without it, we would be defenseless against the manipulative tactics of other people, governments, religions, the media, corporations, politicians, swindlers, etc. Without it, we would not be able to make progress in our knowledge of the world, society and ourselves; we would not be able to make wise decisions; we would not know how to become better citizens of the world; and we would not be able to have a hope of engaging with, and maybe even discovering the answers to, some of the deepest philosophical and scientific questions the human mind has ever pondered.

Hopefully I've been able to give you a comprehensive and fun introduction to logical fallacies in the past, but it's never a bad idea to sometimes go back to the basics, as the following animated clips on argumentation, fallacies and cognitive biases demonstrate:

Part 2: Broken Logic

Part 3: The Straw Man fallacy

Part 4: Ad hominem attacks

Part 5: The Gambler's Fallacy

Part 6: A Cautionary Tale

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Christopher Hitchens - Philosophy and Booze

If you're familiar with the late Christopher Hitchens, you probably know that besides being a prolific writer, social commentator, public intellectual, fierce debater and a master rhetorician, the man loved his booze and his smokes.

In the following clip, and true to form, Hitch decides to give an impromptu performance of Monty Python's famous philosophers' song, which he sings/recites by heart.

Since my own memory sucks big time, that's really impressive :)

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Damon Horowitz - Philosophy in Prison

As you probably already know from this blog, TEDTalks are awesome: bring in some of the greatest minds in the world, working on the greatest and most interesting questions, with the best and most creative ideas, give them 18 minutes, and they will awe and wow you.

Well, when they brought in philosopher Damon Horowitz, he only needed about three minutes to inspire a standing ovation and blow everyone out of the water in what can only be described as one of the best TEDTalks of all time...

But you don't have to be in prison to study philosophy and be free. There are plenty of other practical reasons for deciding to study this mother of all intellectual disciplines.

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Everything and Nothing - Nothing

The idea of a vacuum, nothingness or the void has troubled Western thinkers since at least the time of Parmenides. The problem started as a logical puzzle: how could nothingness, something non-existent by definition, be?

This rejection of the very possibility of nothingness is captured in the famous medieval dictum ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing), used among other things to prove the existence of God, since the universe, it was thought, could not have sprung from nothing all on its own (never mind where God came from). You probably won't find it surprising that it would be David Hume who would first challenge this notion when he declared that, logically speaking at least, anything could come from anything :)

But the problem isn't merely a logical one: it's also empirical. Since at least the time of Aristotle, attempts to create a vacuum consistently failed for almost two thousand years; that is, until Evangelista Torricelli serendipitously managed to create one when he invented the barometer and proved that we live at the bottom of an invisible ocean of air.

With the creation of a vacuum, and as Professor Jim Al-Khalili shows in this fascinating documentary, scientists have slowly come to understand not only the nature of vacuums and nothingness but that the entire universe may owe its existence, literally, to nothingness... There will be some quantum weirdness here, but of the real kind...

Couldn't those fluctuations be due to something as mundane as neutrinos flying through the tanks?

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Peter Millican's Introduction to General Philosophy

You know what's missing from your life? More philosophy. Sure, the practical benefits may not always be obvious (though they are most decidedly there), but philosophy deals with the deepest, the most elusive, the most important and the most interesting questions human beings can think of.

Here at the philosophy monkey blog, we've featured Michael Sandel's popular course on Justice before. Now we get to cross the ocean and switch from Harvard to Oxford, as philosopher Peter Millican gives us a fascinating overview of modern philosophy (with a beautiful English accent) in eight gripping lectures covering everything from the nature and sources of knowledge to skepticism of the external world, Cartesian dualism (and the mind-body problem), primary and secondary qualities, the problem of induction, free will and determinism, and the metaphysics of personal identity.

In today's first lecture, Professor Millican traces the history of philosophy from its roots in Ancient Greece and Rome, and how it would undergo a revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries, as great thinkers like Galileo and Descartes would rebel against the previously unchallenged authority of Plato, Aristotle and religious dogma, and would attempt to develop new and useful methods of inquiry. The world would never be the same again...

Click here to see the course slides.

And check out the rest of this excellent course.
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Philosophy Jam

I'm too busy to post any thoughtful entries at the time, so I'll just leave each of you to ponder what the hell the following philosophy jam is all about...

Warning: before you know it, this is going to be stuck in your head for days :)

And don't ask me what the footage had to do with the audio... I have no clue.
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David Brooks - The Social Animal

Our mastery over the physical world over the past few centuries has been based on our newly acquired ability to understand the structural intricacies of that world. Understanding that world has required that we make certain reductive assumptions about how it works, and although they have been incredibly fertile, many of these assumptions, especially when applied to our understanding of human nature itself, have turned out to be rather simplistic, mechanistic and individualistic.

As David Brooks explains in the following thought-provoking and funny TEDTalk presentation, because of our intellectual drive toward quantification, we've focused a lot of attention on those aspects of our humanity that can be measured while ignoring many of the more subtle, rich and complex intricacies of what it means not only to be human but to be a social animal.

Drawing on insights from philosophers like Aristotle and David Hume, and from the cognitive and neurosciences, Brooks attempts to lay the foundation for certain concepts that could provide the basis for a more enriched and nuanced understanding of who we are, as well as set the stage to solve many of our economic and political challenges.

And for similarly relevant entries, check out Daniel Pink on our carrots-and-sticks incentives mentality, or Matthew Taylor on 21st century enlightenment.
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Nigel Marsh - How to Make Work-Life Balance Work

One of the most prevalent problems of modernity involves the following set of circumstances which, statistically speaking, probably apply to you: you spend the majority of your time working for a job you hate to buy shit you don't need to impress people you don't like, or to provide for the family you never see because you're so busy selling your soul to your corporate masters...

In the following engaging and funny TEDTalks presentation, and without using any technical jargon, Nigel Marsh explains one of Marx's insights (that corporations are designed to get out of you as much as they possibly can get away with), and seamlessly incorporates that idea with the Aristotelian notion that the good life is a life that balances all the different aspects that make that life worth living.

Fortunately, The Onion reports that entrepreneurs in third-world countries are doing what they can to help you balance work with home... by letting you bring your work home :)

Sure, you may laugh at them, but do you have a work laptop or blackberry? Yeah, you're your company's bitch :)
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Barry Schwarts on Aristotle and Practical Wisdom

In his famous Nicomachean Ethics, the ancient philosopher Aristotle argued that ethics is not an exact science, and that looking for mathematical precision in such a discipline is bound both to fail and to distort ethics itself.

Instead of thinking of ethical principles as rules that everyone ought to follow categorically, as more modern philosophers have argued, Aristotle was deeply concerned with the role of judgment and flexibility in our moral assessments. Aristotle's concern was not with rules (or misguided incentives) but with character and virtue. Since ethics for Aristotle is about living a good life (and not just blindly following a set of maxims or working for the sake of bonuses), different circumstances may require that our choices vary accordingly, and deciding what to do will require that we apply some practical wisdom to our endeavors.

In the following thought-provoking TEDTalk presentation, and using a number of powerful examples, Barry Schwartz makes a very compelling case for the many ways in which a return to Aristotle and virtue ethics may just literally save the world and help us see again what really matters.

Check out more on the awesomeness of Aristotle.
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