Searching for Meaning in a Secular Age / Meaning, Relevance, and the Limits of Technology

Posted on July 22, 2011 by RichardPrins

Another book discussion, this time in the UC Berkeley series Conversation with History:

Host Harry Kreisler welcomes philosophy professors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly to discuss their book, “All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.”

Drawing on their reading of Western classics, Dreyfus and Kelly analyze how different epochs offered unique answers to the question of what is sacred and what can provide meaning for human existence.

They explore the examples of Homer, Jesus, and Melville to highlight differing paradigms of culture practice. Dreyfus and Kelly then trace the transition to the secular age in which nihilism prevails.

They conclude by identifying how a sense of meaning emerges from heroism, athletics, and craftsmanship.

The above playlist (of two videos) also has an episode of the same programme from 2006 that features Hubert Dreyfus discussing “Meaning, Relevance, and the Limits of Technology”:

Host Harry Kreisler welcomes philosopher Hubert Dreyfus for a discussion of why machines cannot become human. In their discussion, they talk about the role of philosophy in clarifying what it means to be human.

Also see Sean Kelly’s contribution to The New York Times’ philosophy blog The Stone.

The Victorians: Empire and Race

Posted on June 30, 2011 by RichardPrins

Via Gresham College, a series of lectures on the Victorian era by Professor Richard J Evans FBA. Below is the episode on Empire and Race:

Science and religion came together to help shape the attitudes of the British and Europeans towards the rest of the world, whose inhabitants were increasingly regarded as socially inferior and spiritually ignorant. This lecture looks at how these ideas framed the growth of overseas Empire in the latter part of the nineteenth century, how Britain and those European states that possessed colonies governed them and what were the consequences for politics and ideology at home, above all in the growth of the Social Darwinism, racism and extreme nationalism that led to the end of the ‘Victorian’ era in the First World War.

Other lectures in this series, The Victorians: Culture and Experience in Britain, Europe and the World 1815-1914, include:
Time and Space
Art and Culture
Life and Death
Religion and Science
Gender and Sexuality

Niall Ferguson: Civilization: Is The West History?

Posted on June 22, 2011 by RichardPrins

A 6-part documentary series from the UK’s Channel Four in which Niall Ferguson asks why it was that Western civilization, from inauspicious roots in the 15th century, came to dominate the rest of the world; and if the West is about to be overtaken by the rest. It accompanies his book Civilization: The West and the Rest.

Ferguson reveals the killer apps of the West’s success – competition, science, the property owning democracy, modern medicine, the consumer society and the Protestant work ethic – the real explanation of how, for five centuries, a clear minority of mankind managed to secure the lion’s share of the earth’s resources.

Competition: The first programme in the series begins in 1420 when Ming China had a credible claim to be the most advanced civilization in the world: ‘All Under Heaven’. England on the eve of the Wars of the Roses would have seemed quite primitive by contrast.

Science: In 1683 the Ottoman army laid siege to Vienna, the capital of Europe’s most powerful empire. Domination of West by East was an alarmingly plausible scenario. But Islam was defeated: not so much by firepower as by science.

Property: Professor Ferguson asks why North America succeeded while South America for so many centuries lagged behind. The two had much in common (not least the subjugation of indigenous peoples and the use of slavery by European immigrants), but they differed profoundly on individual property rights, the rule of law and representative government.

Medicine: The French Empire consciously set out to civilize West Africa by improving public health as well as building a modern infrastructure. Yet in other European empires – notably Germany’s in southwest Africa – colonial rule led to genocide. What was the link from medical science to racial pseudo-science?

Consumerism: Today the world is becoming more homogenous and, with increasingly few exceptions, big-name brands dominate main streets, high streets and shopping malls all over the globe.

Work: The sixth element that enabled the West to dominate the rest was the work ethic. Max Weber famously linked it to Protestantism, but the reality is that any culture, regardless of religion, is capable of embracing the spirit of capitalism by working hard, saving, and accumulating capital.

You can also watch his lecture Empires on the Edge of Chaos on fora.tv (from ABC’s Big Ideas) or The Ascent of money: An evolutionary approach to financial history from Gresham College.

Another thematically related lecture: Ian Morris: Why the West Rules – For Now

Update: Does Islam Stand Against Science? (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

BBC: The Story of Science – Who Are We?

Posted on June 20, 2011 by RichardPrins

Who Are We? is the title of the final episode from the BBC series The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion.

Michael Mosley

Michael Mosley takes an informative and ambitious journey exploring how the evolution of scientific understanding is intimately interwoven with society’s historical path.

We now know that the brain – the organ that more than any other makes us human – is one of the wonders of the universe, and yet until the 17th century it was barely studied.

The twin sciences of brain anatomy and psychology have offered different visions of who we are. Now these sciences are coming together and in the process have revealed some surprising and uncomfortable truths about what really shapes our thoughts, feelings and desires.

And the search to understand how our brains work has also revealed that we are all – whether we realise it or not – carrying out science from the moment we are born.

Robert Sapolsky: Human Monkey Business

Posted on June 12, 2011 by RichardPrins

Via ABC’s Big Ideas, a lecture on where humans are the same as, and different from, other animals:

Dr Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University who has spent much of his working life studying chimpanzees in Kenya.

His enviable gift for storytelling led the New York Times to describe his latest book like this: “If you crossed Jane Goodall with a borscht-belt comedian, she might have written a book like ‘A Primate’s Memoir’.” Dr. Sapolsky’s account of his early years as a field biologist and his findings as a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research at the National Museum of Kenya. He is sure to dazzle and delight with tales of what it means to be human.

His Pritzer Lecture, “Are Humans Just Another Primate?“, was delivered to the California Academy of Sciences in February 2011.

Dr Robert Sapolsky is a professor of Biology and Neurology at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya. He is the author of several works of non-fiction, including “A Primate’s Memoir”, “The Trouble with Testosterone”, “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” and “Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals”.