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"The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God."
A video on Euclid's Elements, which is one of the most important mathematical works of all time:
Primary Source: Euclid's Elements by Euclid of Alexandria
Secondary Source: Here's Looking at Euclid: A Surprising Excursion Through the Astonishing World of Math by Alex Bellos
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"All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume."
Noam Chomsky discusses the topic: "Is Capitalism Making Life Better?"
Primary Source: Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky by Noam Chomsky
Secondary Source: Chomsky For Beginners by David Cogswell and Paul Gordon
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"Man can certainly flee from God... but he cannot escape him. He can certainly hate God and be hateful to God, but he cannot change into its opposite the eternal love of God which triumphs even in his hate."
Professor David Clough from the University of Chester speaks about the development of Karl Barth's theology:
Primary Source: Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth
Secondary Source: The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge Companions to Religion) edited by John Webster
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“The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.”
A 2001 lecture given at Cambridge by Dr. Alan Macfarlane on Max Weber:
Primary Source: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: and Other Writings (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) by Max Weber and contributions from/translation by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells
Secondary Source: The Cambridge Companion to Weber (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) by Stephen Turner
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"Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men."
In a video made by the University of Richmond, biographer Richard Reeves discusses John Stuart Mill and his views on the individual, society, and the common good at the Jepson Leadership Forum:
Primary Source: John Stuart Mill: On Liberty (Longman Library of Primary Sources in Philosophy) by John Stuart Mill with contributions made by Michael B. Mathias and Daniel Kolak
Secondary Source: John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand by Richard Reeves
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"By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher."
Allan Bloom, a renowned scholar for his translation of and work on Plato and Socrates, gives a lectures on the Apology of Socrates:
Plato's Account: The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues by Plato
Secondary Source: Philosophy 101 by Socrates: An Introduction to Philosophy Via Plato's Apology by Peter Kreeft
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"Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?"
Primary Source: An Introduction to Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte
Secondary Source: Auguste Comte (Key Sociologists) by Mike Gane
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"For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For I believe this: unless I believe, I will not understand."
A short biography on Saint Anselm of Canterbury:
Primary Source: Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics) by Saint Anselm of Canterbury and edited by Brian Davies and G.R. Evans
Secondary Source: Anselm Of Canterbury: The Beauty Of Theology (Great Theologians Series) by David S. Hogg
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"Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have."
A BBC video special "Human, All Too Human" on Jean-Paul Sartre:
Primary Source: Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings by Jean-Paul Sartre and edited by Stephen Priest
Secondary Source: Jean-Paul Sartre (Routledge Critical Thinkers) by Christine Daigle
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| Empedocles of Agrigentum was a Greek philosopher who lived from approximately 490 to 430 B.C.E. As with many of the pre-socratic thinkers, his work only survives in fragments, the bulk of which derive from Aristotle and Plutarch. The three texts we know Empedocles wrote are entitled On Nature and Purifications. As for interpretive issues, some scholars maintain that Empedocles studied under the famous Parmenides. However, some debate exist as to the validity of this claim, but he was certainly familiar with Parmenides' work and attempted to correct and build on his "teacher's" work. Empedocles disagreed with Parmenides on the nature of change, as Parmenides saw change as a mere illusion, and nature as a unified unchanging substance. To support his argument, Parmenides' thought rests very heavily on a simple premise: something cannot come from nothing. He develops this premise to later conclude that the world was one single, unified substance. Empedocles did not wholly disagree with this, but he suggested that conversely, we must also accept with this premise that something cannot turn into nothing either. If we buy into this as well, then we deny the possibility of seemingly true concepts such as change, demise, decay, destruction, and absence. Empedocles stated that we should rather say that the ever-changing phenomenal world must be supported by a unified, monistic metaphysics. He elaborated on this by positing that the world was made up of four elements, or "roots," which are earth, air, fire, and water. These four basic elements undergo a cosmic tension between two forces: Love and Strife. When Love completely dominates the world, the elements are fused into indistinguishable forms without being reduced to a single element. Without any difference or distinguishable forms, then life and matter cannot exist in the world. As Strife begins to act on this world, the elements are separated but can be so manipulated by Strife as to create a whirlwind of change that cannot support any stability or unified being. When this happens, love returns to rebalance the Cosmos, life and the phenomenal world are again brought back to life, and then Love seeks to dominate the cosmos again. Once it has, the process starts all over at the beginning. We do not know whether Empedocles saw these forces as merely mechanical or if they were acts of the gods, because Empedocles was a theologian and very ethical man as well. Despite this fact, many scholars contend that Empedocles was positing the existences of two separate worlds, or Spheres, one wrought with Strife and the other with Love. Empedocles suggested that the human race lives in the world increasingly dominated by Strife. In the Strife-ridden world, the violent force acts against Love, and constantly differentiates all things, and the elements exist in differing proportions in our world to give rise to ever-increasing difference and creativity. In fact, he described botany in terms of a painter, who starts with a set of a few colors and mixes them to create an infinite number of colors for his art. Our world, like botany and the painter's art, acts similarly as the four elements combine and separate to provide an existence of change and difference. Empedocles believed, for example, that fire was a dominant element in the nature of human beings. He applied this entire Cosmology to the rest of his thought as well, including biology and ethics. The journey of the soul is modeled, in fact, on the movement of the Cosmos. The soul undergoes these same changes and tensions between Love and Strife, and we can likely assume that he applied his Cosmology to physics and theology as well. As a poet, scientist, theologian, ethicist, prophet, and metaphysician, Empedocles is certainly an important thinker in the history of Western thought. At the very least, he played an important role in the heated debate that followed Parmenides. All the Philosophy Books you could want! If you get a chance, visit the Best Philosophy Books site. |
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"Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation."
Mark Levin compares and contrasts Thomas Paine and Sir Edmund Burke:
Primary Source: The Portable Edmund Burke by Sir Edmund Burke and edited by Isaac Kramnick
Secondary Source: Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered by Russell Kirk
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"So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it."
World History honors Nicolaus Copernicus:
Primary Source: On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres by Nicolaus Copernicus
Secondary Source: Nicolaus Copernicus: And the Founding of Modern Astronomy by Todd Goble
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“What in us really wills truth? In fact, we paused for a long time before the question of the cause of this will – until we finally came to a complete standstill in front of an even more fundamental question. We asked about the value of this will, Granted, we will truth: Why not untruth instead? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth came before us, - or was it we who came before the problem?”
Bryan Magee, yet again, with J.P. Stern on Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche:
Primary Source: Basic Writings of Nietzsche by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann, with introduction by Peter Gay
Secondary Source: Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter A. Kaufmann
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"We can speak and think only of what exists. And what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous..."
Three Minute Philosophy compares Parmenides and Heraclitus:
Primary Source: The Fragments of Parmenides: A Critical Text With Introduction and Translation, the Ancient Testimonia and a Commentary by Parmenides of Elea and A.H. Coxon
Secondary Source: Parmenides by Martin Heidegger, and translated by Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz
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"Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge."
Geoffrey Warnock discusses Immanuel Kant with Bryan Magee:
Primary Source: Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant
Secondary Source: The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) by Paul Guyer
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"In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth."
From his desk, Jacques Lacan gives a short presentation on the unconscious:
Primary Source: Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English by Jacques Lacan and translated by Bruce Fink
Secondary Source: Jacques Lacan (Routledge Critical Thinkers) by Sean Homer
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"The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that."
Richard Rorty in an interview where explains the concept of Truth and its misconception:
Primary Source: Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers by Richard Rorty
Secondary Source: The Philosophy of Richard Rorty by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn
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"Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification."
A video on Karl Popper and Justified True Belief:
Primary Source: The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper
Secondary Source: Philosophy and the Real World: An Introduction to Karl Popper by Bryan Magee
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"The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society."
Alan Macfarlane gives a lecture to his cambridge students on Karl Marx (2001):
Primary Source: Karl Marx: Selected Writings by Karl Marx and edited by Lawrence H. Simon
Secondary Source: A Companion to Marx's Capital by David Harvey
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"It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art."
Lawrence Cahoone discusses the impact of Ernst Cassirer, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Ferdinand de Saussure on twentieth-century philosophy.
Primary Source: Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer
Secondary Source: Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) edited by Jeff Malpas
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"Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame."
A performance or dramatization of a debate held between Clarence Darrow and G.K. Chesterton on January 18, 1931:
Primary Source: Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
Secondary Source: G.K. Chesterton: A Biography by Ian Ker
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"In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods."
Frederick Copleston on Arthur Schopenhauer:
Primary Source: The World as Will and Presentation by Arthur Schopenhauer
Secondary Source: The Philosophy of Schopenhauer by Bryan Magee
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"As fire when thrown into water is cooled down and put out, so also a false accusation when brought against a man of the purest and holiest character, boils over and is at once dissipated, and vanishes and threats of heaven and sea, himself standing unmoved."
Not many good videos out there on Cicero, so I found this video with a collection of his quotes:
Primary Source: Selected Works (Penguin Classics) by Marcus Tullius Cicero translated by Michael Grant
Secondary Source: Cicero and the Roman Republic (Greece and Rome: Texts and Contexts) by John Murrell
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"The propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions."
Sir A.J. Ayer on logical positivism:
Primary Source: Language, Truth and Logic by Sir A.J. Ayer
Secondary Source: The Philosophy of A. J. Ayer, Volume 21 (Library of Living Philosophers) by Lewis Edwin Hahn
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"Indeed, theological discourse offers its strange jubilation only to the strict extent that it permits and, dangerously, demands of it wokman that he speak beyond his means, precisely because he does not speak of himself. Hence the danger of a speech that, in a sense, speaks against the one who lends himself to it. One must obtain forgiveness for every essay in theology. In all senses."
-Jean-Luc MarionJean-Luc Marion and a sketch of phenomenological sacrifice:
Primary Source: God Without Being: Hors-Texte by Jean-Luc Marion and translated by Thomas A. Carlson
Secondary Source: Jean-Luc Marion: A Theo-Logical Introduction by Robyn Horner
