General philosophy thread

I'd thought I'd create this thread so that forumites can deposit articles, audios, videos, etc, relating to philosophy topics.

BBC 4 Radio - In Our Time: The Frankfurt School:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml

Quote :

This group of influential left-wing German thinkers set out, in the wake of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, to investigate why their country had not had a Revolution - despite the apparently revolutionary conditions that spread through Germany in the wake of the 1918 Armistice.

To find out why the German workers had not flocked to the Red Flag, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and others came together around an Institute set up at Frankfurt University, and began to focus their critical attention not on the economy, but on culture, asking how it affected people's political outlook and activities.

But then, with the rise of the Nazis, they found themselves fleeing to 1940s California. And their disenchantment with American popular culture combined with their experiences of the turmoil of the interwar years to produce their distinctive, pessimistic worldview. With the defeat of Nazism, they returned to Germany to try to make sense of the route their native country had taken into darkness.

In the 1960s, the Frankfurt School's argument - that most of culture helps to keep its audience compliant with capitalism - had an explosive impact. Arguably, it remains influential today.

Extant wrote:

I'd thought I'd create this thread so that forumites can deposit articles, audios, videos, etc, relating to philosophy topics.

Oh, this looks good. Thanks for posting

Now why in the world is the BBC doing a shin dig on the Frankfurter Frankensteins?

BBC Radio 4 is regular broadcast that addresses the history of ideas. They do all sorts of subjects. Very good stuff whilst tainted oft-times by mainstream academic bias.

A very nice idea. Thanks Extant!

Wired.com: Atemporality for the creative artist

Link to video of the above presentation: http://www.transmediale.de/en/keynote-bruce-sterling-us-atemporality

oooh, this looks interesting. Just started listening to video.

Yeah, it's an interesting idea, atemporality. Seems to me to perhaps be a good fit for the current times we live in.

David Eagleman: 'We won't die – our consciousness will live forever on the internet' - Seeing God as a microbe is just one way the neuroscientist's debut novel gets to grips with the afterlife

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/apr/04/david-eagleman-40-afterlives

Quote :

In one of the stories in David Eagleman's first work of fiction, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Canongate), God consoles himself for the mess that is humankind by reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In another, people pay vast sums to ensure the glamorous afterlife they desire, only to find themselves marooned in the most cliched version of heaven, where they sit on white clouds, clad in ill-fitting white robes, strumming harps.

By day, Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where he specialises in the study of time perception and synesthesia. He also directs the college's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. Sum is his first foray into fiction – but it has become a word-of-mouth bestseller and earned him plaudits from Stephen Fry and Brian Eno, who called it "as surprising a book as I've read in years".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/07/sum-forty-tales-afterlives-david-eagleman



The following video interview with Eagleman is the epitome of balanced thought, the true scientific method, and the spirit of enquiry, sans polarised ideological positions:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2010/apr/04/david-eagleman-neuroscience