virtual philosopher

Philosophy Bites One Year Old Today!

We have just posted the 52nd episode of our Philosophy Bites podcast series:

Listen to Chandran Kukathas on Hayek's Liberalism

A year into the series and the download figures are amazing - beyond anything we expected. And we are currently at no. 15 of the US iTunes top 100 podcasts.

Readership of leading UK political magazine, The New Statesman, 26,000
Attendance at today's Liverpool v Manchester City, 43,074
Last week's downloads for Philosophy Bites, 56,633

Tate Modern Course: Appearances: Philosophy, Photography and the Self

Booking is now open for the course I'm leading at Tate Modern on Monday evenings in June. The course is called Appearances: Philosophy, Photography and the Self and runs during the Street and Studio: An Urban History of Photography exhibition. There are four sessions. Booking is via the Tate Modern website or by telephone on 020 7887 8888..

INTUTE - How to Research Philosophy Online - Internet Philosopher

INTUTE has launched a basic online tutorial on how to search the Internet for Philosophy content. You can check it out here: Internet Philosopher. A bit restricted in its range of examples but worth a look - and you might want to give them some feedback (if you can work out where the feedback form is - I couldn't - I gave up after 5 minutes). This could be worth watching as a teaching resource if it develops and includes a few more examples - at the moment the list of sites to explore is quite restricted (David Chalmers and Barry Smith are the only examples of philoosphers with websites, for example). I suppose they didn't want to duplicate INTUTE's extensive listing of Philosophy Resources - but I think they need a wider range of links to make this training effective (and the shopping basket of links they provide is really irritating for anyone who uses the Internet regularly - what's wrong with hyperlinks? I half expected them to invoice me for what I'd put in the basket).

They also seem to have completely forgotten about audio and audio-visual content. This is a shame as it is one of the growth areas for Philosophy. I'm not saying this just because of my own involvement with Philosophy Bites, Ethics Bites and Philosophy: The Classics. Downloadable  Philosophy MP3s have huge potential in our subject, and there are some excellent podcast lectures and discussions at a variety of levels already available that students using the Internet would definitely want to know about (e.g. if you were researching Heidegger, you would want to download Hubert Dreyfus' lecture series from iTunesU see my previous post about this podcast lecture series).

What's odd is that INTUTE does list Philosophy Bites in their main resources page (here's the listing) - but audio content didn't make the cut when it came to designing the Internet Philosopher tutorial.

Podcast on Mill's On Liberty

Richard Reeves, author of a recent biography of John Stuart Mill, is the interviewee on this episode of Philosophy Bites:

Listen to Richard Reeves on Mill's On Liberty

Read 'Mill is Dead White Male with Something to Say'

Hume's Atheism: Peter Millican provides textual evidence

Peter Millican, who edits Hume Studies, has responded to some sceptical comments about David Hume on Mark Vernon's weblog (stimulated by Peter Millican's interview on Philosophy Bites). Millican provides some interesting textual evidence to support the contention that Hume was an atheist rather than, as sometimes claimed, an agnostic (or even some kind of deist). His key point is that the famous phrase that Hume puts in the mouth of Philo:

"that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence"

is echoed by an earlier comment in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion:

"a certain degree of analogy among all the operations of nature ... the rotting of a turnip, the generation of an animal, and the structure of human thought [are] energies that probably bear some remote analogy to each other".

And this phrase 'remote analogy' occurs nowhere else in Hume's writings. If they were meant to be read together, as seems very likely, then it would be very hard to conclude that this is evidence for Hume being a theist!

Peter also gives a robust response to Vernon's other reservations about Hume. QED?

Read Peter Millican's comments on Hume's atheism here (the point about atheism is discussed in the second paragraph).

Confronting Prejudices: a taxi driver and The Daily Mail

When my train to London was late yesterday, unusually for me, I took a taxi to get to my appointment. Perhaps my mistake was asking to be taken to Westminster, but instantly the taxi driver began a rant that gradually descended into racism. At times I wondered if I was in an Ali G spin-off and being taken for a ride in both senses - that pendant hanging from the mirror - did it have a concealed TV camera?  Stephen Lawrence, he told me, must have said something to the people who killed him (though he agreed that wouldn't have justified murder) - his evidence: apparently Lawrence is giving the black power closed fist salute in all the photographs of him (this from someone who declared he doesn't read the newspapers or watch TV - so where does he see these photographs?) 'Why does one murder get all the attention' People are killed all the time.' (I tried rather feebly to point out that a racist murder has a symbolic value as well as the tragedy that it is for the individual and those he left behind).

In the course of a 15 minute ride he made comments about how he believed that black lesbians get preferential treatment when it comes to doing 'the knowledge', Eastern Europeans are the ones who rob cabbies at knife or gunpoint (no, it had never happened to him), and so on. He was a cheerful, friendly sort of man, and my attempts to stop the flow of racism by engaging him in a discussion of his prejudices were pathetic. I felt sullied by the whole experience, caught off-guard and weak at not confronting him more robustly...and possibly just getting him to stop the cab and get out. What really annoys me is that when I jumped out in heavy traffic I instinctively left a tip, despite my disgust at his views and disappointment about him matching up to the worst stereotypes of a London cabby - almost to the point of caricature (he even used the classic phrase 'what's it all about then?')...I'm still not absolutely sure I wasn't the victim of some kind of performance artist or reality TV stunt.

And then, again very unusually for me, I read Monday's The Daily Mail which was lying around at home (it was free at the gym) and while it's coverage of some topics fitted by stereotypical view of that newspaper, I was blown away by the leading letter to the editor: it was about Sartre's existentialism! Andew J. Smith from Roehampton University had written a clear response to a review of a prurient book about Sartre's and de Beauvoir's supposedly 'essential' relationship..He points out that, "far from being the 'bible or our licentious times'...existentialism is a philosophy which demands that all of us ask ourselves a very personal question: what gives my life meaning?" I don't  agree with this as an encapsulation of Sartre's existentialism (since he answers that question rather than invites us to ask it - Sartre's answer is  the choices I make, the sum of what I actually do). But how prejudiced of me not to expect to find existentialism being discussed in the letters page of the Daily Mail...

Suits vs Wittgenstein on Games - Norman Geras' response

Norman Geras of the excellent normblog is building a case against Bernard Suits (author of The Grasshopper a book which several of us think presents a serious challenge to Wittgenstein's analysis of games in Philosophical Investigations). It is great to see this book being discussed. He is presenting the essay in serialised form:

part one is here

part two is here

part three is here

Perhaps we had better wait for part four (coming soon) to see if he has pulled it off.

Read my review of The Grasshopper and a piece I did for normblog on the book, an interview with Thomas Hurka about Suits' The Grasshopper

Philosophy Bites Podcast - Half Century!

We have now posted 50 episodes of Philosophy Bites the series of podcast interviews with top philosophers (also available on iTunes)...if you include the interviews we've released on the Open University sponsored Ethics Bites, the total is 60.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed of Philosophy Bites here.

The 50th episode of Philosophy Bites, posted today, is David Miller on National Responsibility.

The total number of downloads to date is 1,192,071. Thank you to our subscribers and thank you for all the messages of support and encouragement. Thanks too to our excellent contributors.

The Way Academic Journals Should Go - Contemporary Aesthetics

Contemporary Aesthetics is an online blind-reviewed high-quality free journal. This is a sensible way forward for academic journals - in Philosophy at least.

For many years journal publishers have been convincing philosophers to provide camera-ready copy, editorial support and give up their copyright in journal articles for no payment...Then their institutions would have to pay a high subscription. Not a great deal, given the large sums of money the publishers were making from the procedure...It is gratifying to see some philosophers seizing the means of production and by-passing publishers using this new technology.

Publishers of philosophy journals will have to offer more than they have done if they are going to compete with this sort of set up.

Another episode of Philosophy: The Classics podcast - Mill's Utilitarianism

Listen to my podcast on John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism (12 mins 58 sec). This is part of my ongoing podcast of my book Philosophy: The Classics (3rd ed.).

Listen to Roger Crisp on Philosophy Bites on Mill's Utilitarianism

The best books on utilitarianism that I know are shown below:

Richard Posner on Plagiarism and Copyright

I interviewed Judge Richard Posner, author of an interesting book on Plagiarism (read my review here) for the Open University's Ethics Bites podcast. Unfortunately the ISDN line to Chicago was a bit crackly...There is also a transcript available.

Listen to Richard Posner on Plagiarism and Copyright

David Hume WAS an atheist

Hume specialist Peter Millican is the interviewee for the latest episode of Philosophy Bites on the topic of David Hume's Significance. In the course of the interview Peter explains why he believes that Hume died an atheist...

Listen to Peter Millcan on Hume's Significance

For textual evidence of Hume's Atheism, see this post (added April 27th)

Peter Millican has also provided a very detailed linked bibliography on David Hume:

Peter Millican's Bibliography on Hume

My thoughts on Alan Ramsay's portraits of Hume and Rousseau

Philosophy is the Hot Subject

Philosophy seems to be taking off as a subject to study at University...Read about it here.

Roger Scruton on Sexual Perversion - A Podcast

Listen to my interview with Roger Scruton on Ethics Bites.

New episode of Philosophy: The Classics podcast

I've been persuaded to continue podcasting chapters from my book Philosophy: The Classics. So you can now listen to my summary of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty here. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or here (these podcasts are free - but I of course hope some of you will buy the book!).

(If you are interested in Mill can also listen to Radio 4's In Our Time episode on Mill with contributions from Alan Ryan, Anthony Grayling and Janet Radcliffe Richards).

I'm thinking about starting a podcast based on selected sections of my book Philosophy: The Basics - shorter episodes of perhaps  5 - 10 minutes each. I'd be really interested to know if there is any demand for this.

Forthcoming course on Philosophy and Photographic Portraiture

I will be teaching a new course Appearances at Tate Modern on Monday evenings in June 2008. Further details of this are on my weblog Art and Allusion. This will coincide with Tate Modern's new photography exhibition Street and Studio. Booking will open on the Tate Modern website from early May.

Interview with Richard Reeves about uses of Mill

Richard Reeves, author of an interesting new biography of John Stuart Mill, has some interesting thoughts on what Mill might have made of uses of his Harm Principle today in an interview for Spiked. Thanks to the superb Arts and Letters Daily for the link!

I interviewed Richard Reeves recently on Mill's On Liberty  for a forthcoming episode of Philosophy Bites

Three recent podcast interviews

Raimond Gaita on Torture (Philosophy Bites)

Derek Matravers on the Definition of Art (Philosophy Bites)

Janet Radcliffe Richards on The Ethics of Selling Human Organs (Ethics Bites)

Should Philosophers Be Squashed? Or Would You Rather They Were Potted?

Should philosophers be squashed? Here's a website where you can see if they still make sense after squashing: Squashed Philosophers

Life is short and Philosophy is long, so perhaps it makes sense. My own approach has been to provide short critical summaries that might entice the reader to go back to the primary source in my book Philosophy: The Classics. I've podcast 15 chapters of this (you can listen to or download these 15 episodes here or get them from iTunes - both free)...but stopped short of releasing all 27 chapters in this form in case people stopped buying the book.

Bertrand Russell speaking about Clarity on You Tube

Russell speaks here about the risk of self-deception if we don't think clearly. The difficulty is surely knowing when we are thinking clearly and distinguishing this from when we are merely rationalizing our desires and cloaking our rationalizations in the language of clarity and of critical thinking...