logo
episode-header-image
Feb 2024
52m 26s

Class 14: The Frankfurt School

Marci Shore
About this episode
“Enlightenment is totalitarian.”—Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. HIST 271/HUMS 339: European Intellectual History since Nietzsche is a survey course designed to introduce students to the dominant trends in modern European intellectual history. The class aims to sketch a narrative arc from the late 18th century transition to mod ... Show More
Up next
Feb 2024
Class 15: Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism and the Nature of Evil
“. . .totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. In this sense it eliminates the distance between the rulers and the ruled. . .” –Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism. HIST 271/HUMS 339: European Intellectual History since ... Show More
50m 28s
Feb 2024
Class 16: The Second Sex
“We conceive her as hesitating between the role of object, of Other that is proposed to her and her claim for freedom.”—Simone de Beauvoir. HIST 271/HUMS 339: European Intellectual History since Nietzsche is a survey course designed to introduce students to the dominant trends in ... Show More
50m 17s
Feb 2024
Class 17: Husserl’s Children, Searching for the Other
“The Other wrenches me from my hypostatise, from the here, at the heart of being or the center of the world where, privileged, and in this sense primordial, I posit myself.”—Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and Awakening.” HIST 271/HUMS 339: European Intellectual History since Nietz ... Show More
47m 50s
Recommended Episodes
Jun 2022
Hegel's Philosophy of History
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831) on history. Hegel, one of the most influential of the modern philosophers, described history as the progress in the consciousness of freedom, asking whether we enjoy more freedom now than those w ... Show More
52m 25s
Jun 2022
Hegel's Philosophy of History
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831) on history. Hegel, one of the most influential of the modern philosophers, described history as the progress in the consciousness of freedom, asking whether we enjoy more freedom now than those w ... Show More
52m 25s
Nov 2000
Nihilism
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of Nihilism. The nineteenth-century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote, “There can be no doubt that morality will gradually perish: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe”. And, ... Show More
28m 16s
Feb 2022
Dialectics: From Hegel To Marx
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was one of the greatest minds that humanity has ever known. His development of the dialectic, placed on a materialist basis by Marx, provides key insights into the logic of all change, development and transformation in nature, society and the human m ... Show More
38m 22s
Jan 2015
Phenomenology
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss phenomenology, a style of philosophy developed by the German thinker Edmund Husserl in the first decades of the 20th century. Husserl's initial insights underwent a radical transformation in the work of his student Martin Heidegger, and played a ke ... Show More
46m 33s
Nov 2022
463 Friedrich Nietzsche (with Ritchie Robertson)
Sigmund Freud once said of the philosopher and cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) that "he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live.” Well known for his iconoclastic views and intoxicating prose style, Nietzsche we ... Show More
57m 20s
Apr 2023
Lukács, Irrationalism and Marxist Reason
<p>In this episode, I expound on Lukács's later work and the meaning of irrationalism. I analyze Marxist reason in contradistinction to neo-Kantian thought and touch on what is most distinctive about philosophy for Marx and Engels and how Marx breaks with both Kant and Hegel. Fro ... Show More
50m 41s
Apr 2024
Untimely Reflections #28: Stephen Hicks - Is Nietzsche a Postmodernist?
Stephen Hicks is a Canadian-American philosopher, and the author of numerous books, including Understanding Postmodernism, and Nietzsche & the Nazis. As Professor Hicks is a critic of postmodernism, I decided to ask him about Nietzsche's connection to postmodern thought. Is Nietz ... Show More
1 h
Oct 2009
Schopenhauer
Melvyn Bragg and guests AC Grayling, Beatrice Han-Pile and Christopher Janaway discuss the dark, pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.As a radical young thinker in Germany in the early 19th century, Schopenhauer railed against the dominant ideas of the day. He dismissed ... Show More
42m 18s
Jun 2001
Existentialism
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss existentialism. Imagine being back inside the bustling cafes on the Left Bank of Paris in the 1930s, cigarette smoke, strong coffee and the buzz of continental voices philosophising about human responsibility and freedom. This kind of talk gave utt ... Show More
27m 56s