Philosophy
Episode 1. I don't know if you've ever taken an Ethics class --and I admit I may be biased both because I had great professors and because now I teach the stuff-- but an ethics course is one of the greatest and most deeply formative experiences of one's intellectual life.
All philosophy can shake you to your core, and subjects like metaphysics, epistemology or philosophy of mind do so primarily through their novelty and weirdness, since they are not the kind of stuff that lay people tend to think much about in their quotidian musings. Have you ever asked yourself what the meaning of meaning is, or whether you can think beyond the limits of thought? See?
Ethics, on the other hand, can shake you to your core precisely because it takes what you think you already know, pushes it to its logical limits, and then presents you with a world so strange and alien you barely recognize it as your own creation.
The following video, which gives you a great sense of what I've just argued, presents two short introductory lectures on justice and ethics delivered by Professor Michael Sandel, from one of the most popular courses taught in Harvard University. That's right, you can now get a Harvard education for free on this blog :)
Learn more about what the fascinating trolley thought experiment tells us about how the mind works (in this RadioLab episode).
Professor Sandel recently delivered the BBC Reith Lectures, focusing on the concept of citizenship and a politics of the common good. Follow the link to listen to them.
Episode list: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
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- Michael Sandel On The Colbert Report
Questions of right and wrong confront us all the time and from all directions. Unfortunately, most of us are not equipped with the necessary philosophical background to think about them consistently, systematically and with a view to their logical implications....
- Justice - What Is The Right Thing To Do?
Episode 12. When we, post-colonial citizens of liberal democracies in the 21st century, deliberate about principles of justice and the distribution of rights, we tend to think that respect for the plurality of competing conceptions of the good requires...
- Justice - What Is The Right Thing To Do?
Episode 6. No ethics course can be complete without an exploration of one of the strangest and most important moral theories out there: Immanuel Kant's deontology (or duty-based morality). Kant argues that morality is not simply a matter of social...
- Justice - What Is The Right Thing To Do?
Episode 2. It seems Harvard University is making Michael Sandel's popular course on justice publicly available in its entirety, so I will continue to post episodes on a regular basic (most likely weekly). The first of today's lectures presents...
- Dissent From A Philosophy Department About Online Courses
"Professors at San Jose State Criticize Online Courses" by Tamar Lewin May 2nd, 2013 The New York Times San Jose State University has publicly committed to using online courses to bring in more students — and bring down costs — but its philosophy...
Philosophy
Justice - What Is the Right Thing To Do?
Episode 1. I don't know if you've ever taken an Ethics class --and I admit I may be biased both because I had great professors and because now I teach the stuff-- but an ethics course is one of the greatest and most deeply formative experiences of one's intellectual life.All philosophy can shake you to your core, and subjects like metaphysics, epistemology or philosophy of mind do so primarily through their novelty and weirdness, since they are not the kind of stuff that lay people tend to think much about in their quotidian musings. Have you ever asked yourself what the meaning of meaning is, or whether you can think beyond the limits of thought? See?
Ethics, on the other hand, can shake you to your core precisely because it takes what you think you already know, pushes it to its logical limits, and then presents you with a world so strange and alien you barely recognize it as your own creation.
The following video, which gives you a great sense of what I've just argued, presents two short introductory lectures on justice and ethics delivered by Professor Michael Sandel, from one of the most popular courses taught in Harvard University. That's right, you can now get a Harvard education for free on this blog :)
Learn more about what the fascinating trolley thought experiment tells us about how the mind works (in this RadioLab episode).
Professor Sandel recently delivered the BBC Reith Lectures, focusing on the concept of citizenship and a politics of the common good. Follow the link to listen to them.
Episode list: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
.
- Michael Sandel On The Colbert Report
Questions of right and wrong confront us all the time and from all directions. Unfortunately, most of us are not equipped with the necessary philosophical background to think about them consistently, systematically and with a view to their logical implications....
- Justice - What Is The Right Thing To Do?
Episode 12. When we, post-colonial citizens of liberal democracies in the 21st century, deliberate about principles of justice and the distribution of rights, we tend to think that respect for the plurality of competing conceptions of the good requires...
- Justice - What Is The Right Thing To Do?
Episode 6. No ethics course can be complete without an exploration of one of the strangest and most important moral theories out there: Immanuel Kant's deontology (or duty-based morality). Kant argues that morality is not simply a matter of social...
- Justice - What Is The Right Thing To Do?
Episode 2. It seems Harvard University is making Michael Sandel's popular course on justice publicly available in its entirety, so I will continue to post episodes on a regular basic (most likely weekly). The first of today's lectures presents...
- Dissent From A Philosophy Department About Online Courses
"Professors at San Jose State Criticize Online Courses" by Tamar Lewin May 2nd, 2013 The New York Times San Jose State University has publicly committed to using online courses to bring in more students — and bring down costs — but its philosophy...