Friday, May 9, 2008

Life Lessons from the Book of Bart


This unconventional and lighthearted introduction to the ideas of the major Western philosophers examines The Simpsons — TV's favorite animated family. The authors look beyond the jokes, the crudeness, the attacks on society — and see a clever display of irony, social criticism, and philosophical thought. The writers begin with an examination of the characters. Does Homer actually display Aristotle's virtues of character? In what way does Bart exemplify American pragmatism? The book also examines the ethics and themes of the show, and concludes with discussions of how the series reflects the work of Aristotle, Marx, Camus, Sartre, and other thinkers.


Related;
William Irwin

Morris Institute for Human Values

Podcasts;
Doing without a ruler: in defence of anarchism
the word derives from the Greek—it means 'without a ruler'—and the idea is that all forms of government are oppressive and undesirable and should be abolished.

Morality and political violence

Time for philosophers
Time, as we all know, is money, but what else is it? Would it exist if nothing were changing or moving? Does it really have a direction? Are the future and the past real? Will the future be infinite? Was (or is) the past infinite?

Steam-age philosophy

The Urge for Revenge

Stone Age brains in 21st century skulls
Front up to your shrink, and you bring a menagerie of hunter gatherers, anteaters and reptiles from your ancestral past with you. Or so Professor Daniel Wilson and Dr Gary Galambos believe. Both clinical psychiatrists, they provocatively challenge their profession to look to the Darwinian roots of human neuroses, and the evolutionary battleground that is our stone-age brain.


A day in the life of...Meet the Ingersons
Four-year-old Tara has a very special brain. Like Rain Man, she was born without a Corpus Callosum. It's the head's superhighway -- a thick band of nerve fibres connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. Join Natasha Mitchell as she experiences a day in the life of the Ingerson family, with rare insights into one of the most complicated neurological birth defects.


Scientology, Hollywood and the path to Washington

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