Monday, November 4, 2019
PERSPECTIVE
Faithful readers know how proud I am of the 110 thousand views my first Kant YouTube lecture has garnered. For idle amusement, I just watched an SNL clip of Melissa McCarthy doing a Shawn Spicer press briefing. It has had a tad fewer than 35 million views. I think we can agree that Americans have their priorities right.
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9 comments:
Have you searched other scholars posting Kant lectures? That would be the better comparison, right priorities not withstanding.
First of all, probably many viewers of your Kant lectures do not come from the U.S. Academics: graduate students worldwide now learn some English, so I'm sure that your Kant lectures have been viewed by people from many different societies, including many in which English is not the spoken language.
Second, I'm not at all sure that laughing at assholes like Shawn Spicer is a more pressing priority than learning about Kant. I believe that most of us spend way too much time laughing at and mocking our political adversaries and way too little time studying them and analyzing them closely, a bad habit which leads us to underestimate them again and again.
I realize that Kant is not political analyst, but studying Kant could be a first step towards getting interested in philosophers such as Marx or even Nietzsche who do help us to understand politics and society in general.
I read the Spicer comment as sarcasm.
Sorta apropos of this thread, the Philosophy Talk episode broadcast this past weekend was all about Hobbes, featuring Stanford Political Science professor Alison McQueen. Here's the show's blog post: https://www.philosophytalk.org/blog/hobbes-and-absolute-state Wish I could find the full show...
Way off topic, but this isn't good news:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/upshot/trump-biden-warren-polls.html
Spicer being a complete idiot didn't stop the Harvard Kennedy School from having him in residence as some kind of expert with something to share. From a couple of newspaper articles I read the grad students savaged him on a regular basis. Just goes to show the grad students were more astute than the people who invited him.
I'm just repeating what I just said in your previous post sorry but your Kant lectures were brilliant! I faithfully read the text along with lectures and found it so fun. Thanks to you I feel I have a undertaking of the text. Forever grateful and hoping to see more!
Also you said Wittgenstein would be pretty heavy for most people but if you could do anything concerning him, I'd be amazingly happy lol.
Thank you
NP
Here's another wish for a lecture series on Hume!
I have been catching up on a backlog of web surfing, and just came across this plug HERE (at the very bottom)*
*All the emphasis is because links don't seem to show up as such too well.
Greetings professor, I'm a philosophy reader from Egypt and I bought the Critique right after watching the first lecture, too bad that amazon delivered me the first edition which you didn't recommend, also when I checked the second edition online ( I'm currently at the beginning of the transcendental logic) I noticed that sometimes in the first edition the word soul is used instead of mind in the second edition and I'm not comfortable enough with my reasoning when it comes to anticipating Kant's intentions so I thought I'd leave that question here. Another thing, I was amazed when Stephen hawking commented on Kant's critique as "A very controversial book" alongside with mentioning his contribution to Physics in his book "A brief history of time". Lastly, I think the lectures were awesome and I'd love to attend a real lecture with you professor one time in the future!
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