Philosophy

Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School. 1978

Jul 30

In this rare televised broadcast from February 2, 1978, the philosopher and political theorist Herbert Marcuse explains how the Frankfurt School re-evaluated Marxism when world economic crisis failed to destroy capitalism as predicted by Marx. He also analyses the philosophical roots of the student rebellions of the sixties. Its intruiging to see Marcuse explain his philosophical and political positioning. (Split into five parts. Language is English.)

Jacques Derrida

Jun 21

Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.

Martin Heidegger – Thinking the Unthinkable

Jun 18

“We are attempting to learn thinking. The way is long. We dare take only a few steps. If all goes well they will take us to the foothills of thought. But they will take us to places which we must explore to reach the point where only the leap will help further. The leap alone takes us into the region where thinking resides. We shall therefore take a few practice leaps right at the start, though we won’t notice it at once, nor need to…In contrast to a steady progress, where we move unawares from one thing to the next and everything remains alike, the leap takes us abruptly to where everything is different, so different that it strikes us as strange. Abrupt means the sudden sheer descent or rise that marks the chasm’s edge. Though we may not founder in such a leap, what the leap takes us to will confound us.” – Martin Heidegger

Jean-Paul Sartre: The Road to Freedom

Jun 16

The late Jean-Paul Sartre is arguably one of the best known philosophers of the twentieth century. His indefatigable pursuit of philosophical reflection, literary creativity and, in the second half of his life, active political commitment, gained him worldwide renown, if not admiration. He is commonly considered as one of the leading figures of Existentialist philosophy, and whose writings set the tone for occidental intellectual life in the decade immediately following the Second World War. A student of Edmund Husserl and his phenomenology, Sartre brought a refreshingly startling philosophical perspective on contemporary life, society and being.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil

Jun 14

Friedrich Nietzsche‘s revitalizing philosophy of the late 19th century challenging the foundations of theological beliefs and practices, along with questioning traditional morality, remains influential to this day. His tendency to seek explanations for commonly-accepted values and outlooks in the less-elevated realms of sheer animal instinct was also crucial to Sigmund Freud’s development of psychoanalysis. Quoting Nietzsche: “What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” Watch.

Slavoj Žižek: The Sublime Object of Ideology

Jun 12

Slovene philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek became widely recognized as an important theorist of contemporary times with the publication of ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology‘, his first book to be written in English, in 1989. Since then, he has taken the contemporary philosophical world by storm, as one who is never afraid of confrontation. Žižek’s work, indeed, cannot be categorized easily. He calls for a return to the the Cartesian subject, the idea that there is a split between the mind and body, and that the human is a ‘liberal autonomous subject’. He also calls for a return to ‘The German Ideology’, in particular the works of Hegel, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schelling. His work draws much on the works of Jacques Lacan, all the while moving his theory towards modern political and philosophical issues, and miraculously, finding the potential for liberatory politics. Watch.