Robbins Library Notes

Good morning readers! A Happy St. Patrick’s Day to you!

There are two new podcasts on Philosophy Bites:

• Julian Savulescu on the ‘Yuk’ Factor
• Sebastian Gardner on Jean-Paul Sartre on Bad Faith

Enjoy!

Good morning, readers!

Here are the latest podcasts from Philosophy Bites:

• David Papineau on Scientific Realism
• Keith Ward on Idealism in Eastern and Western Philosophy

Enjoy!

Good morning, readers!

Here are the latest podcasts from Philosophy Bites:

• Raymond Tallis on Parmenides
• M.M. McCabe on the Paradox of Inquiry
• Chandran Kukathas on Genocide
• Kate Soper on Alternative Hedonism

Enjoy!

Good morning, readers, and happy Friday to you!

Here are the latest podcasts from Philosophy Bites, from late October 2008 to November 2008 — the titles are taken directly from the site:

• Raymond Geuss on Real Politics
• Alexander Nehamas on Friendship
• Christopher Shields on Personal Identity
• A.C. Grayling on Bombing Civilians in Wartime
• Anne Phillips on Political Representation
• Wendy Brown on Tolerance
• Don Cupitt on Non-Realism About God

Enjoy!

Good morning, readers!

Here are the latest podcasts from Philosophy Bites.  These podcasts were recorded from mid-August 2008 to mid-October 2008:

• Aaron Ridley on Nietzsche on Art and Truth
• M. M. McCabe on Socratic Method
• Ray Monk on Philosophy and Biography
• Barry C. Smith on Neuroscience
• Adrian Moore on Kant’s Metaphysics
• Peter Cave on Paradoxes
• Christopher Janaway on Nietzsche on Morality
• Anthony Appiah on Experiments in Ethics
• Roger Crisp on Virtue

Just a reminder that I will be out tomorrow.  See you on Monday!

Mulder: Mr. Simpson, we want you to recreate your every move the night you saw the alien.
Homer: The evening began at the gentlemen’s club, where we were discussing Wittgenstein over a game of backgammon.
Scully: Mr. Simpson, it’s a felony to lie to the FBI.
Homer: We were sitting in Barney’s car eating packets of mustard. Happy?

The Simpsons, “The Springfield Files” (1997)

Good morning, readers!

Via Bookforum.com: a podcast of an interview of Cass Sunstein by Christopher Lydon on behavioral economics. Here’s the overview:

Cass Sunstein gives us the half-hour short course here on “the most exciting intellectual movement of the last thirty years” — behavioral economics, that is, of which we had a taste recently with George Lakoff and Dan Ariely.

Behavioral economics is the demonstration (by clinical psychology, affirmed by neuroscience) that the “rational man” of neo-classical economics is in fact, in Dan Ariely’s book title, Predictably Irrational — that we are eternally kidding ourselves in our choice of credit cards, or of diets and desserts; that we tend to lurch without much reflection from over-optimism to over-anxiety about terrorist threats, war risks, and environmental melt-downs. Cass Sunstein is himself a demonstration of the spread of the new thinking from psychology and economics to law and politics. From the University of Chicago Law School, where he taught alongside Barack Obama for a dozen years, he has just moved permanently to Harvard, where he and Obama seem still to be channeling each other. Sunstein’s new book Nudge, with the economist Richard Thaler, is an introduction to a variety of not-quite-coercive strategies for helping people get what they really want: 401k savings plans, for example, that would be automatic for all workers who didn’t choose to set some of their wages aside. The general trick, Sunstein says, is recognizing that there’s less Immanuel Kant, more Homer Simpson, in each and all us than we’ve been taught.

Thoughts on this?  I know that there has been some criticism of “neuro-[insert discipline of choice]” and related studies, and one of the comments to the podcast description is along these lines.

Good morning, readers!

I realized yesterday that I haven’t posted any new podcasts from Philosophy Bites since late May. Here’s a list of the podcasts added since then:

Enjoy!

Good afternoon, readers! It’s time for the latest posting of podcasts from Philosophy Bites:

• “Jonathan Wolff on Marx on Alienation“
• “Peter Singer on Using Animals“
• “Chandran Kukathas on Hayek’s Liberalism“
• “Richard Reeves on Mill’s On Liberty“
• “David Miller on National Responsibility“

Enjoy!

Good morning, readers!

New podcasts from Philosophy Bites are now available for your listening pleasure:

• Peter Millican (Hertford College, Oxford) talks about the significance of Hume.
• Janet Radcliffe Richards (University College London) explores human nature, and the nature of women and men in particular.
• Raimond Gaita (King’s College London) examines arguments about the use of torture.
• Derek Matravers (The Open University) speaks on the definition of art.

At Philosophy Bites, new podcasts have been posted:

• Thomas Pink (King’s College, London) discusses free will
• Michael Sandel (Harvard University) talks about genetic enhancement in sports
• Melissa Lane (King’s College, University of Cambridge) speaks about Karl Popper’s critique of Plato’s Republic
• Richard Norman (University of Kent) examines the morality of killing in war
  

If you have been enjoying the Philosophy Bites podcasts, you may want to listen to some of the earlier podcasts — you can link to the first forty-four episodes by clicking on the link at left.