first! Thanks professor i'm Venezuelan and a really poor 17 years old guy. i only have internet to learn and your channel is a gold mine! so thanks!! a question: is there a place where you have published a recommended book list? because i already watched almost all your videos
Most likely the best internet resource for learning philosophy is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). It is like a Wikipedia, but specialized on philosophy articles, and operated purely by recognized academic experts. Even as a college student, my professors recommended several times SEP's articles on the authors, concepts and movements we were studying as a great and reliable guide. Additionally, you should be able to find free PDFs of Oxford's VSI series - Very Short introductions to various authors, schools of thoughs, and whole areas of philosophy (many of them are 100-200 pages long). If you prefer video lectures, though, Michael Sugrue is another youtube channel that you might enjoy (though I favor the older videos by the actual Sugrue, rather than the still-good-but-not-as-great recent videos by his colleague)
Re-reading your comment, as it seems you want primary texts, Plato, Aristotle, and Kant are always ranked as the 3 most influential philosophers of all time, so it's not the worst place to start. You should be able to start with Plato pretty easily, and then move to his student, Aristotle. However, for Kant, especially because he's hard to understand sometimes, it might be better to have a basic background of the state of modern philosophy to which he's reacting, so reading Descarte's Meditations and Locke's Essay should be easy introductions to the Rationalism and Empiricism Kant later synthesises. After clearing the big 3, you can choose your next point of interest: - More early moderns? Then Spinoza and Leibniz for rationalism, and Berkeley and Hume for Empiricism. - Developments of Kant? Then Fichte, Schelling, and the towering figure that is Hegel. - Something different? Well, St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are the two defining figures of medieval Christian philosophy. - Something more recent? Russell and (early + late) Wittgenstein are the two biggest names in the analytic tradition, and for continental philosophy you can't go wrong with Husserl and Heidegger. - or maybe you want edgy/angsty truths about the human condition from some of the most well-regarded philosophers of all time? Then Nietzsche and Kierkegaard have what you want. I hope this helps!!
I haven't, but it's a good idea. The Stanford Encyclopedia is great, but it's often quite detailed-much of the time I suspect it's better for graduate students than beginners. I usually recommend starting with Descartes's Meditations. Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a good follow-up, for a completely contrary view. Plato's dialogues are approachable but sometimes hard to follow; most people start with the Apology or the Euthyphro, but I think the Laches is a better illustration of Socratic method, so I start my students there. Confucius's Analects and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics are also good. Email me and I can send you what I assign to my Intro Philosophy students.
@@tomasroque3338Man that is a great list and I couldn't have said it better myself. My list would be identical yet also some eastern philosophy added (Upanishads, Zhuang Zhi, Lao Tzu, Buddha) but these are not respected in the western canon
Suggest conquering the pre socratics first and the very origins of ‘western philosophy’ as questioning phenomena as something other than the acts of capricious gods, in other words naturals causes @@PhiloofAlexandria
Excellent mini lecture. Dasein is a nice tool to balance out Plato's forms. Too often in philosophy and modern life we get lost in words and concepts and forget the very real but often forgotten reality of ourselves / our bodies / our subjective consciousness / our being in time and space / Dasein. We can dehumanize others and ourselves if we think only of abstract individuals rather than of actual people we care about and who care about us.
I know this video is a few months old at this point, and I have only just started the series on Heidegger's thought, but his thoughts on ethics being based on pragmatic caring based on our immediate relation to the world sounds a lot like Aristotle's or Aquinas' thoughts regarding virtue ethics.
Hi Prof, Hi from India. I have watched dozens of your videos (the classroom ones) and have one unsolicited suggestion - if possible you should upgrade your audio recording equipment. Some of the newer videos have a crystal clear audio and the expectations have been upped in general. Thanks a lot for being a source of free teaching for years!!
I started reading Heidegger and it turns out it reminds me of Gibson's affordances which I love, so Gibson was probably inspired by him. Now I have to actually finish the book haha 😅
Hi professor I hope you are well If I study Hegel first and then heidenger, would I grasp heidenger's concepts better. If so, what secondary lit do you recommend to understand hegel, and then what secondary lit do you recommend for me to understand heidenger. I'm a Law student in the UK, not a philosophy student, but I'm familiar with philosophy, but only limited to CZcams philosophy, like this video. But im really really craving to understand heidenger and hegel, they seem like great mystical sages, as opposed to just regular philosophers. I'd appreciate any advice you can give me, if there's any advice you can give me on how to skip kant and move straight on to hegel I would appreciate that also.
This may be a bit related: as far as reflecting on being goes, when I was much younger, I was concerned with a similar question - to explain the existence of the self, but the question seemed immediately malformed, and I figured that it was coextensive with an explanation of the existence of the universe (apparently Steven Wolfram begs to differ). Though, like Heidegger's particularisation, I thought of a transformation of the question such that it was of the form of a counterfactual: "why is the self so embodied?", "could _I_ have been something else, or someone else?", etc. which I thought was odd, since it being a counterfactual, it should have been answerable, but I wasn't able to do it. The problem word seems to be 'self', but there are innumerable approaches to deal with it, but none which can satisfy the question (or it may be the case I'm mistaking a relation for a predicate). Do you know if Heiddeger made a similar attempt here, or does he write it off as intractible? Thanks for the upload!
@@PhiloofAlexandria Chance in the movie seems not to care about his own "being". At least not in a way that is critical of himself or that is confrontational with the world or in any way self-conscious. Chance does not react like a reactionary: his being is never challenged so that he must defend his own thoughts. Instead he is merely responsive: he relies on what he knows about gardening and television to get by. He uses the two like a computer uses programming to relay output. In the movie most of the other characters seem too "self absorbed" to really examine Chance. Their self absorption allows him to get away with his non sequitur responses. In the modern world we understand Siri is an "A.I." We don't expect insight when she responds. In the movie the characters aren't conscious enough to recognize Chance for what he "is". In physics light is the source of a type of consciousness. It is the source of our experience of time and space. As the organ of time, the brain organizes this type of consciousness. There are other types of consciousness that are more essential or personal, less visual. The types concerned with eating, drinking and other body functions. When there is no light we are still conscious. The source of this consciousness is what? Not time or space. This type of Being requires discomfort, the discomfort that gives homeostasis an evolutionary root. Consciousness is a fight between the brain, the linguistic mind, the body and Nature. Science has revealed that Nature is more than the electromagnetic force that governs light, there are other forces at play. Forces we are, for the most part, ignorant of. Our presence in Nature, our doings in Nature, and our ignorance of Nature gives us our sense of being. The brain organizes what exists in time and space, our fragile bodies restrict what we can and can't do, and our desires reveal our ignorance. Chance's fragile existence is propped up by the sturdy architecture that the self absorbed people have built for themselves. It was meant for others like themselves. Does Chance really belong "there"? No, but for a time he is there. What does that mean about our being?
Heidegger was Husserl's assistant early in his career. So, there's certainly some influence. But I don't see much in Heidegger that requires an understanding of Husserl first. I see many more parallels with Hegel.
Same time, then you'll just get everything one day. Husserl is way more abstract. Put it into architecture on the categories try to work something out. It's just too good. Oh yeah and the city police they don't get paid for it.
You keep saying “being in a place at a certain time” but I can be in a place at a certain time but I have never being in a place at a certain time. Those two uses are semantically and syntactically different. So, your explanation quickly devolves into a word salad that I cannot understand. Perhaps holding a conversation with someone using the word “being” in a way your intending to help us all understand your point, so we can learn from your wisdom instead of being confused.
Obviously. Reducing pain and increasing pleasure IS pragmatism itself. Now if you want to get into a debate about exactly how to do that.... whewww mayybe not so obvious that's often hard to figure out sometimes so much it seems impossible to find a "best path" ... whether or not you are successful at reducing pain and increasing pleasure that is another thing all together, but the pursuit of such a goal is certainly pragmatic. Pragmatism is all about engaging with the world in a way that is realistic and non-theoretical... the better you truly understand what IS is and what it means to BE in the first place... the less theoretical your emotions, the less theoretical your emotions, the more practical you can deal with them.
Pretty rich that Dasein takes caring as fundamental given Heidegger's Nazi collaborationism. I think I'll stick with the analytic philosophers ignoring him.
@@PhiloofAlexandria Agreed. My comments were not meant with any disrespect to you. I stumbled on your channel and it has been a great joy to listen to -- especially, your great analytical series. All the best. PS: I may even dip again into your current series on Heidegger to see if I can understand why Rorty valued him so highly.
Also, I believe "care" in the context of Heidegger doesn't necessarily mean the compassionate sense in which we care about other people. I think it means a broader sense in which caring about things means having them matter to us. As Daniel relates it, caring is about the way we relate to things as tools or as things that we make use of. I don't know enough about Heidegger to guess whether how he sees our "Being towards others" as similar to how we relate to the world in general, or as a different sort of relation. Described in the next video perhaps? (I haven't listened to it yet.)
Thats not why his work is appreciated. It would be silly to do that anyway since the majority of influential people that valued and incorporated his thought were Jewish. Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Jean Paul Sartre, Derrida, and more.
@@PhiloofAlexandria Not really. He was organic to nazi 'ideology' in addition to acting like a true scumbag with his mentor. Husserl aside, there are quite a few testimonies from people who knew Heidegger well, like Löwith or Arendt, plus the unedited version of some of his prewar and wartime lectures (in which he vehemently attacks democracy). Nicolas Tertullian worked on this, look him up. This said, Heidegger could have been a nazi "on the side" and still could have had important insights into the nature of reality. But I am suspicious of his twisting of the German language and of his ostensibly intentional opacity. I have spent way too many hours over Die Zeit der Weltbildung and have come to realize that I'd rather battle with Giordano Bruno's baroque prose -- at least he died for his ideas.
first! Thanks professor i'm Venezuelan and a really poor 17 years old guy. i only have internet to learn and your channel is a gold mine! so thanks!! a question: is there a place where you have published a recommended book list? because i already watched almost all your videos
Most likely the best internet resource for learning philosophy is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). It is like a Wikipedia, but specialized on philosophy articles, and operated purely by recognized academic experts.
Even as a college student, my professors recommended several times SEP's articles on the authors, concepts and movements we were studying as a great and reliable guide.
Additionally, you should be able to find free PDFs of Oxford's VSI series - Very Short introductions to various authors, schools of thoughs, and whole areas of philosophy (many of them are 100-200 pages long).
If you prefer video lectures, though, Michael Sugrue is another youtube channel that you might enjoy (though I favor the older videos by the actual Sugrue, rather than the still-good-but-not-as-great recent videos by his colleague)
Re-reading your comment, as it seems you want primary texts, Plato, Aristotle, and Kant are always ranked as the 3 most influential philosophers of all time, so it's not the worst place to start.
You should be able to start with Plato pretty easily, and then move to his student, Aristotle. However, for Kant, especially because he's hard to understand sometimes, it might be better to have a basic background of the state of modern philosophy to which he's reacting, so reading Descarte's Meditations and Locke's Essay should be easy introductions to the Rationalism and Empiricism Kant later synthesises.
After clearing the big 3, you can choose your next point of interest:
- More early moderns? Then Spinoza and Leibniz for rationalism, and Berkeley and Hume for Empiricism.
- Developments of Kant? Then Fichte, Schelling, and the towering figure that is Hegel.
- Something different? Well, St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are the two defining figures of medieval Christian philosophy.
- Something more recent? Russell and (early + late) Wittgenstein are the two biggest names in the analytic tradition, and for continental philosophy you can't go wrong with Husserl and Heidegger.
- or maybe you want edgy/angsty truths about the human condition from some of the most well-regarded philosophers of all time? Then Nietzsche and Kierkegaard have what you want.
I hope this helps!!
I haven't, but it's a good idea. The Stanford Encyclopedia is great, but it's often quite detailed-much of the time I suspect it's better for graduate students than beginners. I usually recommend starting with Descartes's Meditations. Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a good follow-up, for a completely contrary view. Plato's dialogues are approachable but sometimes hard to follow; most people start with the Apology or the Euthyphro, but I think the Laches is a better illustration of Socratic method, so I start my students there. Confucius's Analects and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics are also good. Email me and I can send you what I assign to my Intro Philosophy students.
@@tomasroque3338Man that is a great list and I couldn't have said it better myself. My list would be identical yet also some eastern philosophy added (Upanishads, Zhuang Zhi, Lao Tzu, Buddha) but these are not respected in the western canon
Suggest conquering the pre socratics first and the very origins of ‘western philosophy’ as questioning phenomena as something other than the acts of capricious gods, in other words naturals causes @@PhiloofAlexandria
The only video I was able to understand on being and time. Thank you so much
Glad it helped!
Amazing explanation as always! Thanks for ‘being there’ !🤔🤓😉
Excellent mini lecture. Dasein is a nice tool to balance out Plato's forms. Too often in philosophy and modern life we get lost in words and concepts and forget the very real but often forgotten reality of ourselves / our bodies / our subjective consciousness / our being in time and space / Dasein. We can dehumanize others and ourselves if we think only of abstract individuals rather than of actual people we care about and who care about us.
Awesome!
I know this video is a few months old at this point, and I have only just started the series on Heidegger's thought, but his thoughts on ethics being based on pragmatic caring based on our immediate relation to the world sounds a lot like Aristotle's or Aquinas' thoughts regarding virtue ethics.
Thanks. Great commentary!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Hi Prof,
Hi from India. I have watched dozens of your videos (the classroom ones) and have one unsolicited suggestion - if possible you should upgrade your audio recording equipment. Some of the newer videos have a crystal clear audio and the expectations have been upped in general.
Thanks a lot for being a source of free teaching for years!!
I started reading Heidegger and it turns out it reminds me of Gibson's affordances which I love, so Gibson was probably inspired by him. Now I have to actually finish the book haha 😅
Hi professor
I hope you are well
If I study Hegel first and then heidenger, would I grasp heidenger's concepts better. If so, what secondary lit do you recommend to understand hegel, and then what secondary lit do you recommend for me to understand heidenger. I'm a Law student in the UK, not a philosophy student, but I'm familiar with philosophy, but only limited to CZcams philosophy, like this video. But im really really craving to understand heidenger and hegel, they seem like great mystical sages, as opposed to just regular philosophers. I'd appreciate any advice you can give me, if there's any advice you can give me on how to skip kant and move straight on to hegel I would appreciate that also.
This may be a bit related: as far as reflecting on being goes, when I was much younger, I was concerned with a similar question - to explain the existence of the self, but the question seemed immediately malformed, and I figured that it was coextensive with an explanation of the existence of the universe (apparently Steven Wolfram begs to differ). Though, like Heidegger's particularisation, I thought of a transformation of the question such that it was of the form of a counterfactual: "why is the self so embodied?", "could _I_ have been something else, or someone else?", etc. which I thought was odd, since it being a counterfactual, it should have been answerable, but I wasn't able to do it. The problem word seems to be 'self', but there are innumerable approaches to deal with it, but none which can satisfy the question (or it may be the case I'm mistaking a relation for a predicate). Do you know if Heiddeger made a similar attempt here, or does he write it off as intractible? Thanks for the upload!
I think he made a series of such attempts throughout his career. I'll be talking about some of them in the next four videos.
@@PhiloofAlexandria Cheers! I'll pay close attention.
But where do we draw the line on what we are?
Is "Being There" by Jerzy Kosinski an example of Dasein? Please refer to the movie with Peter Sellers.
I've always taken it that way!
@@PhiloofAlexandria Chance in the movie seems not to care about his own "being". At least not in a way that is critical of himself or that is confrontational with the world or in any way self-conscious.
Chance does not react like a reactionary: his being is never challenged so that he must defend his own thoughts. Instead he is merely responsive: he relies on what he knows about gardening and television to get by. He uses the two like a computer uses programming to relay output.
In the movie most of the other characters seem too "self absorbed" to really examine Chance. Their self absorption allows him to get away with his non sequitur responses. In the modern world we understand Siri is an "A.I." We don't expect insight when she responds. In the movie the characters aren't conscious enough to recognize Chance for what he "is".
In physics light is the source of a type of consciousness. It is the source of our experience of time and space. As the organ of time, the brain organizes this type of consciousness. There are other types of consciousness that are more essential or personal, less visual. The types concerned with eating, drinking and other body functions.
When there is no light we are still conscious. The source of this consciousness is what? Not time or space. This type of Being requires discomfort, the discomfort that gives homeostasis an evolutionary root.
Consciousness is a fight between the brain, the linguistic mind, the body and Nature. Science has revealed that Nature is more than the electromagnetic force that governs light, there are other forces at play. Forces we are, for the most part, ignorant of.
Our presence in Nature, our doings in Nature, and our ignorance of Nature gives us our sense of being. The brain organizes what exists in time and space, our fragile bodies restrict what we can and can't do, and our desires reveal our ignorance.
Chance's fragile existence is propped up by the sturdy architecture that the self absorbed people have built for themselves. It was meant for others like themselves. Does Chance really belong "there"? No, but for a time he is there. What does that mean about our being?
Is it necessary to read Husserl before Heidegger? Or atleast recommended?
Heidegger was Husserl's assistant early in his career. So, there's certainly some influence. But I don't see much in Heidegger that requires an understanding of Husserl first. I see many more parallels with Hegel.
@@PhiloofAlexandriaI feel the same. I can definitely see lots of similarities between Hegel and what I’ve heard about Heidegger. Thank you
Same time, then you'll just get everything one day. Husserl is way more abstract. Put it into architecture on the categories try to work something out. It's just too good. Oh yeah and the city police they don't get paid for it.
All the best from Germany 🇩🇪🇪🇺
that's a loud bird
You got it all wrong, your lecture is a good example of the simplistic American way of understanding philosophy.
You keep saying “being in a place at a certain time” but I can be in a place at a certain time but I have never being in a place at a certain time. Those two uses are semantically and syntactically different. So, your explanation quickly devolves into a word salad that I cannot understand. Perhaps holding a conversation with someone using the word “being” in a way your intending to help us all understand your point, so we can learn from your wisdom instead of being confused.
Can you be pragmatic when there is only pain and pleasure? LOL
Obviously. Reducing pain and increasing pleasure IS pragmatism itself. Now if you want to get into a debate about exactly how to do that.... whewww mayybe not so obvious that's often hard to figure out sometimes so much it seems impossible to find a "best path" ... whether or not you are successful at reducing pain and increasing pleasure that is another thing all together, but the pursuit of such a goal is certainly pragmatic. Pragmatism is all about engaging with the world in a way that is realistic and non-theoretical... the better you truly understand what IS is and what it means to BE in the first place... the less theoretical your emotions, the less theoretical your emotions, the more practical you can deal with them.
@@robnobert I think it is subliminal and not pragmatic...
@@andreyrussian2480 I think it would be pragmatic for you to have a good non-subliminal glance at a dictionary.
Pretty rich that Dasein takes caring as fundamental given Heidegger's Nazi collaborationism. I think I'll stick with the analytic philosophers ignoring him.
Fair enough, though his views changed a LOT, for the worse, in my view, between 1927 and 1933.
@@PhiloofAlexandria Agreed. My comments were not meant with any disrespect to you. I stumbled on your channel and it has been a great joy to listen to -- especially, your great analytical series. All the best. PS: I may even dip again into your current series on Heidegger to see if I can understand why Rorty valued him so highly.
Also, I believe "care" in the context of Heidegger doesn't necessarily mean the compassionate sense in which we care about other people. I think it means a broader sense in which caring about things means having them matter to us. As Daniel relates it, caring is about the way we relate to things as tools or as things that we make use of.
I don't know enough about Heidegger to guess whether how he sees our "Being towards others" as similar to how we relate to the world in general, or as a different sort of relation. Described in the next video perhaps? (I haven't listened to it yet.)
Thats not why his work is appreciated. It would be silly to do that anyway since the majority of influential people that valued and incorporated his thought were Jewish. Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Jean Paul Sartre, Derrida, and more.
@@PhiloofAlexandria Not really. He was organic to nazi 'ideology' in addition to acting like a true scumbag with his mentor. Husserl aside, there are quite a few testimonies from people who knew Heidegger well, like Löwith or Arendt, plus the unedited version of some of his prewar and wartime lectures (in which he vehemently attacks democracy). Nicolas Tertullian worked on this, look him up.
This said, Heidegger could have been a nazi "on the side" and still could have had important insights into the nature of reality. But I am suspicious of his twisting of the German language and of his ostensibly intentional opacity. I have spent way too many hours over Die Zeit der Weltbildung and have come to realize that I'd rather battle with Giordano Bruno's baroque prose -- at least he died for his ideas.