Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

This famous phrase, made famous by Sir Isaac Newton, and celebrated ever since, may have been a public attempt at modesty and historical gratitude that was sure to endear him to, and inspire, subsequent generations of natural philosophers, but it may also have been a little bit of an underhanded insult to Robert Hooke, just the kind of thing Newton would do when his gigantic and fragile ego was wounded if anyone dared to question some of his ideas...

Still, the phrase has taken on a life of its own, and it is now used to describe the incredible scientific and technological progress that has taken humanity to the unique position of being able to question its own origin and place in the universe, and to actually start to answer those questions, change its environment, make its dreams more ambitious and then make those dreams come true. The following captivating video is a beautiful celebration of the cumulative knowledge and insight we've gained about ourselves and the universe in only a few centuries, and the amazing feats we've accomplished as a result, by standing on the shoulders of giants:

Hope you're inspired!

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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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Steven Pinker - The Better Angels of Our Nature

Having just published a voluminous book whose title was inspired by the immortal words of a guy who met his tragic end by having his brains blown out in public :), Steven Pinker argues that despite some obvious fluctuation, violence has seen an overall historical decline over the past few thousand years, and that we are living today in the least violent era our species has ever seen.

That may sound ridiculous to you, what with the world wars of the 20th century and our increasing technological capabilities to wreak havoc in scales our predecessors couldn't have dreamed of, but Pinker is no dummy who argues in lazy generalizations, and he's got plenty of corroborating evidence to make his point.

More interestingly, perhaps, is why violence has declined over time, and if you're already familiar with Pinker's work, you know things are about to get interesting when he starts invoking philosophy, history, evolutionary psychology, economics, cognitive psychology, rational-decision theory and other fascinating disciplines. And as if that weren't stimulating enough, the lecture is followed by a discussion with Matt Ridley and some Q&A.

For more, check out the Steven Pinker tag.

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Geoffrey Warnock on Kant

Imagine if the conceptual basis of just about every single belief you ever had, not just as a layman but as a professional and conscientious intellectual, were suddenly shattered by the writings of a single man? That's exactly what happened to Immanuel Kant when he read the work of David Hume.

To his credit, and despite the tremendous existential angst he must have experienced as a result of reading the skeptical arguments proposed by the Scotsman, Kant recognized that Hume had to be taken seriously, and subsequently spent the rest of his mature career trying to overcome the problems posed by Hume. Whether or to what extent Kant succeeded in refuting Hume is still a matter of debate, but no one can deny that in his attempt, Kant would become the one of the most important and influential philosophers of all time, perhaps second only to Aristotle.

Here to discuss the history, importance, breadth and influence of this German thinker are philosophers Bryan Magee and Geoffrey Warnock:

And for more on these fascinating discussions, check out the Bryan Magee tag.

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Lecture 3 - David Hume and the Problem of Induction

Look at Newton's cradle on the right and ask yourself this question: what justification do you have for thinking that it will continue to behave in the future the way it has behaved in the past?

This is not something you know a priori, through pure reason alone, since it implies no contradiction to imagine this behavior might change. It's also not something you know a posteriori, through experience, because your experience is of the past, and the question confronting you right now concerns the future. If you think that you can appeal to past experience to support the idea that nature is regular, you'd be begging the question, since past experience is a good indicator of the future only if you assume the orderliness of nature, which is the very point in question. Yes, your head is probably spinning right now from that massively circular argument...

And yet, this assumption that nature behaves according to regular and predictable principles is the very basis of virtually all our knowledge about the world, ordinary and scientific, so it's kind of a really big deal. In this week's lecture, Professor Millican gives us a brief introduction to the empiricism of David Hume, as well as one of the questions for which he is most famous: the problem of induction...

Click here to see the course slides

And check out how John Stuart Mill's attempt to solve this problem through his methods of induction.
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Lecture 2 - Introduction to Modern Philosophy

After a brief introduction to ancient philosophy and the intellectual revolution started by Galileo and Descartes in the 17th century, Professor Millican begins to provide a concise and fascinating summary of the intellectual developments and questions that the new science and philosophy would produce.

To begin with, we start with an account of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes is mostly famous for his political philosophy, but in the context of this course, his importance is due to his thorough commitment to a naturalistic and scientific account of everything, including minds. His materialism, as you might imagine, was immediately understood to imply atheism, which is why he received the dubious distinctions of being considered the monster of Malmesbury, as well as the cause of certain natural disasters. Pretty powerful for a guy who didn't believe in hocus-pocus :)

Being dissatisfied with the Cartesian account of matter as extended space, Robert Boyle would produce a theory of matter as being composed of tiny corpuscles. He also introduced the idea of empty space, thereby clearing the conceptual landscape for Sir Isaac Newton to come up with his universal laws of motion. Newton's predictive success was unimpeachable, but his instrumentalist introduction of the notion of a 'force' of gravity got many wondering whether we were back to postulating obscure and occult explanations a-la Aristotle or a-la Christianity. Wisely, Newton claimed not to understand the nature of such a force ("I feign no hypothesis"), only that its postulation (right or wrong) helped him describe the phenomena experienced with more accuracy than any previous thinker. David Hume would jump on this idea soon.

Finally, we move on to John Locke's empiricism, as well as to Malebranche's occasionalist attempt to explain the necessary connection behing causal inferences, and to Bishop Berkeley's idealism as a response to the skepticism that kept coming from all directions.

Click here to see the course slides.
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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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