Philosophy Resource Guide

This series investigates core questions in philosophy, such as: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is right action? And what do we mean when we talk about the “mind”? Some of the world’s foremost contemporary philosophers.Richard Sorabji, Colin McGinn, Hilary Putnam, Frances Kamm, Alexander Nehamas, and Arthur Danto, to name only six—enlighten and enliven with their knowledge on these and other topics

Bryan Magee—world-renowned author and professor—and Sir Isaiah Berlin, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and biographer of Karl Marx, answer fundamental questions such as "What is philosophy?" "Why does it matter?" and "Why should anybody be interested in it today?" A BBC Production. (46 minutes)

During the 16th century, a new breed of thinker arose, equal parts philosopher and scientist, that threw off the received wisdom of the past and started afresh. In this program, Paul Guyer, of the University of Pennsylvania; Rutgers University’s Colin McGinn; and Princeton University’s Kwame Anthony Appiah and Daniel Garber address the major philosophical currents of that era—and the explosive controversies surrounding them. Bacon’s Novum Organum, Descartes’s “Discourse on the Method,” Hobbes’s Leviathan, Spinoza’s Ethics, and other germane works are cited.

century after its inception, analytic philosophy continues to clarify issues through argumentation, analysis, and logical rigor—and to parse out the phenomenon of language. This program scrutinizes the founding of analytic philosophy, the rise of logical positivism, the rejection of metaphysics, and the advent of linguistic philosophy through Russell’s Principia Mathematica, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Willard Van Orman Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” the Vienna Circle’s manifesto, and other seminal works. Penetrating commentary is provided by Harvard University’s Hilary Putnam, Rutgers University’s Colin McGinn, and USC’s Scott Soames