This is a list of links that might be helpful.

Philosophy Bites Index

Philosophy Bites: Index

Here are links to brief audio presentations on Philosophy Bites. On the linked page, click on the POD icon to listen in your browser. To download the mp3 file to your computer, right-click on POD and Save.

For each assigned item, please write a brief summary of what you got from it in your course blog. Try to cover the main points raised in the interview. Also, be sure to list your interpretive and/or evaluative about the discussion.

I do not expect you to follow every bit of the conversation. These are abstruse topics discussed by highly educated experts. Your careful attention to these conversations will reward you greatly the more you persist in sitting in on such sessions. What I will look for in your blog is evidence of careful listening and active questioning.

1. Simon Blackburn on Plato's Cave

2. Mary Warnock on Philosophy in Public Life

3. Stephen Law on The Problem of Evil

4. John Cottingham on The Meaning of Life

5. Miranda Fricker on Epistemic Injustice

6. Barry Smith on Wine

7. Alain de Botton on The Aesthetics of Architecture

8. Anne Phillips on Multiculturalism

9. Edward Craig on What is Philosophy?

10. Roger Crisp on Mill's Utilitarianism

11. Adrian Moore on Infinity

12. Anthony Grayling on Atheism

13. David Papineau on Physicalism

14. Timothy Williamson on Vagueness

15. Jonathan Wolff on Disadvantage

16. Simon Blackburn on Moral Relativism

17. Brad Hooker on Consequentialism

18. Peter Adamson on Avicenna

19. Mary Warnock on Sartre's Existentialism

20. Jonathan Rée on Philosophy as an Art

21. Tim Crane on Mind and Body

22. Anthony Kenny on his History of Philosophy

23. Quentin Skinner on Hobbes on the State

24. Onora O'Neill on Medical Consent

25. Stewart Sutherland on Hume on Design

26. Angie Hobbs on Plato on Erotic Love

27. Alain de Botton on Philosophy Within and Outside the Academy

28. Myles Burnyeat on Aristotle on Happiness

29. Henry Hardy on Isaiah Berlin's Pluralism

30. Susan James on Spinoza on the Passions

31. Julian Baggini on Thought Experiments

32. Barry Stroud on Scepticism

33. G.A. Cohen on Inequality of Wealth

34. Mark Vernon on Friendship

35. Barry Smith on Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy

36. Angie Hobbs on Plato on War

37. Richard Bourke on Edmund Burke on Politics

38. Richard Norman on Humanism

39. Stephen Mulhall on Film as Philosophy

40. Richard Tuck on Free Riding

41. Hugh Mellor on Time

42. A.C.Grayling on Descartes' Cogito

43. Anthony Appiah on Cosmopolitanism

44. Thomas Pink on Free Will

45. Melissa Lane on Plato and Totalitarianism

46. Derek Matravers on the Definition of Art

47. Raimond Gaita on Torture

48. Janet Radcliffe Richards on Men and Women's Natures

49. Peter Millican on Hume's Significance

50. David Miller on National Responsibility

51. Richard Reeves on Mill's On Liberty

52. Chandran Kukathas on Hayek's Liberalism

53. Peter Singer on Using Animals (originally on Ethics Bites)

54. Jonathan Wolff on Marx on Alienation

55. Michael Sandel on Genetic Enhancement in Sport (originally on Ethics Bites)

56.  Anthony Kenny on Aquinas's Ethics

57. Mary Warnock on the Right to Have a Baby (originally on Ethics Bites)

58. Donna Dickenson on Body Shopping

59. Tim Scanlon on Free Speech (originally on Ethics Bites)

60. Jennifer Hornsby on Human Agency

61. Will Kymlicka on Minority Rights

62. John Dunn on Locke on Toleration

63. Robert Rowland Smith on Derrida on Forgiveness

64. John Broome on Weighing Lives

65.  Melissa Lane on Rousseau on Civilization 

66. Matthew Kramer on Legal Rights

67. Peter Adamson on Plotinus on Evil

68. Quentin Skinner on Machiavelli's The Prince

69. Alex Neill on the Paradox of Tragedy

70. Clare Carlisle on Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling

71. Aaron Ridley on Nietzsche on Art and Truth

72. MM McCabe on Socratic Method

73. Ray Monk on Philosophy and Biography

74. Barry C. Smith on Neuroscience

75. Adrian Moore on Kant's Metaphysics

76. Peter Cave on Paradoxes

77. Christopher Janaway on Nietzsche on Morality

78. Anthony Appiah on Experiments in Ethics

79. Roger Crisp on Virtue Ethics

80. Raymond Geuss on Real Politics

81. Alexander Nehamas on Friendship

82. Christopher Shields on Personal Identity

83. A.C. Grayling on Bombing Civilians in Wartime

84. Anne Phillips on Political Representation

85. Wendy Brown on Tolerance

86. Don Cupitt on Non-Realism About God

87. Raymond Tallis on Parmenides

88. M.M. McCabe on The Paradox of Inquiry

89. Chandran Kukathas on Genocide

90. Kate Soper on Alternative Hedonism

91. David Papineau on Scientific Realism

92. Keith Ward on Idealism in Eastern and Western Philosophy

These churches are across the street from each other. Go through the images in sequence for best effect. Who wins?

A student asked if Brando's Mark Antony was on YouTube after we watched the scene in class. Sure enough, I found this. Brando seems to want to command the audience of plebians from the start.

Hint for generating ideas for an essay.  Make notes as you perform these exercises.

1. Turn off the volume and watch only the body language.
2. Then listen with eyes closed and pay attention only to language and tones.
3. Then look again, but pay attention only to where the camera is placed and what is scene in the frame.
4. Pause and examine a frame as if it were a fine painting.

If you are of age, enjoy with a nice Merlot or Shiraz.

Recorded in 1925.  It appears that not all women or women of color suffered from low self-esteem in those long distant days.  Here's rock and roll for you. BTW, that's Louis Armstrong on the horn.

The ballroom dancing of the baroque era is restrained and rational.  It is as far remove as can be from the dancing that results from the injunction to "let it all hang out, baby" that insinuated itself in the sixties.  Here is a move from that dancing.  The move is called doing a reverence, or bowing.  Note that it is mutual: both partners must participate. And what they participate in is an art form where nature is constrained and restrained and forced by human will to conform to ideal patterns. A complicated reverence requires presence of mind and self-control.  It cannot be performed by, say, someone in the grip of road rage. 

In such a move we see tradition, order, rules, restraint and training at work.  Indeed, at the end of the video we hear the voice of the teacher, the dancing master of those days.  Dancing was something you learned how to do, not something that was inside you automatically and merely needed a steady rhythm and a few pops to come out. It was the epitome of being civilized.  The puritans could sniff at dancing but society, both high and low, enjoyed it in a good spirited way.  Whether in the manor house or in the barn, the dancers, the musicians, the dancing-masters, the onlookers knew good form when they saw it.

Romanticism smashed all that.

Which one is closer to your view?

Click me.