Summary: Dr. Peter Singer has been called the most influential living philosopher. He has also been called a monster. In this thought-provoking program, he faces his critics and discusses his ideas on euthanasia, abortion, and infanticide. The program follows his worldwide tour of lectures and encounters, including case conferences and a trip to Austria, where most of his family was killed in the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: In this program with world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee, the late philosopher and radical political theorist Herbert Marcuse explains how the so-called Frankfurt School reevaluated Marxism when world economic crisis failed to destroy capitalism as predicted by Marx. He also analyzes the philosophical roots of the student rebellions of the sixties.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: Since their appearance in Europe some 300 years ago, the stories of The Thousand and One Nights have entranced Western readers with visions of an exotic, magical Middle East. In this program, actor and director Richard E. Grant revisits the book he loved as a child and seeks to understand its persistent hold on the collective imagination. Grant travels to Paris to discover how the Arabist...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: Thomas More's Utopia, one of the most significant texts of English humanism, has become the ideal for a society based on fundamental human principles of fairness and justice. This program follows the progress of More's intellectual development, from his early friendship with the influential humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, to his rise to power as a member of Parliament and later Chancellor of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: This program chronicles the life and work of John Locke, the 17th-century English philosopher and political theorist considered by many to be the first notable thinker of the Enlightenment. Without a doubt, Locke's legacy is vast: his articulation of empiricism laid the intellectual groundwork for an explosion of scientific activity that continues to this day, and his political philosophy is...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: For centuries, Western society drew sustenance from Newtonian physics, classical economics, and other orderly systems of thought. But today's intellectual climate offers no such comforts, focusing instead on concepts like tipping points and global volatility. What created such a stark transformation? This program explores the history of chaos theory, shedding light on mathematical,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: The areas in which philosophy and literature overlap are examined in this program by world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee and Oxford novelist Iris Murdoch. Style and structure in philosophical writing are compared and contrasted with those in literature. The narrative abilities of Plato, Schopenhauer, and Kant are examined. Philosophy's predilection for accepting only literature that...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: 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?
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: The life, personality, and thought of the 18th-century political philosopher and essayist are examined in this outstanding program. Emphasis is on Rousseau's critique of the inequities and shallowness of French society, and the new values system he developed which promoted individual rights and a return to nature. Rousseau's masterwork, The Social Contract, defined this philosophy and served as...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: This program examines the ideas of the medieval philosophic theologians, particularly St. Thomas Aquinas. World-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee and Oxford medieval philosopher Anthony Kenny discuss Aristotelian logic as the basis of Aquinas' thought, and dispute charges that medieval philosophy merely reinforced extant Christian views. Logical methods employed by Aquinas are discussed...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology transformed the nature of linguistics before he was 40. In this program with world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee, the outspoken Chomsky challenges accepted notions of the way in which language is learned, examines the relationship of language to experience, and discusses the philosophical...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: Jean-Paul Sartre's abstract ideas, grounded in everyday life, crystallized the mood of the times and became both a rallying point for youth and a touchstone for reaction to world events. This program uses archival footage; accounts by some of Sartre's close friends, including Olivier Todd, Jean Pouillon, and Michelle Vian; and interviews with Jonathan Ree, Baroness Mary Warnock, Patrick Vaudey,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: Vehement repudiation of Christian and liberal ethics; the detestation of democratic ideals; the celebration of the "superman"; the death of God; and a life-affirming "will to power" are the philosophical legacies of Friedrich Nietzsche. In this program, world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee and Nietzsche philosopher J. P. Stern discuss these concepts as the genesis of existentialism,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: With a novelist's attention to psychological detail, a diarist's love of personal history, and a moralist's penchant for spinning parables, the Roman writer Plutarch created an altogether new kind of biographical history with his Parallel Lives, a series of paired portraits of major figures from classical Greece and Rome. In this program, Plutarch himself is held up for scrutiny, and he gives...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: The ideas of rationalist philosophers Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz are examined in this program by world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee and philosopher Anthony Quinton. Spinoza favors a pantheistic God who has matter and mind as two attributes, and who is the ultimate substance and explanation of the world. Leibniz sees the real world as consisting of an infinity of things...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: This program presents the biography of Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset. A wealth of photos and archival footage help illustrate the extraordinary times in which Ortega lived, while Professor Jose Luis Molinuevo, director of the Centro de Estudios Orteguianos, discusses his important contributions to the realms of social and political philosophy. Particular attention is given to...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: This overview of the biography and writing of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe from the Famous Authors series depicts Goethe as an avid student of arts and literature but less passionate about his formal studies of law. Love affairs caught him passionately and often triggered heartbreak and literary productivity, particularly his first great success The Sorrows of Young Werther, which established him...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: I think, therefore I am. Rationalist philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, considered the father of modern philosophy, held this as self-evidently true. In this program, world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee and Bernard Williams of Kings College examine Descartes's theory of knowledge and his use of skeptical inquiry to affirm reality, including the existence of God....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Sifting through questions surrounding oppression and terrorism, Spanish essayist and philosopher Fernando Savater has often analyzed religious dogma-studying those who promote it and those who oppose it. This program documents Savater's views on the social and intellectual wellsprings of terrorism and militant fundamentalism, as well as the eternal conflict between science and religion. The...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: Russia had its intelligentsia, the U.S. its cultural elite (a pejorative term), but "intellectuals" emerged in France with the Dreyfus affair. When 30,000 people reverently accompanied Jean-Paul Sartre's funeral cortege in 1980, the event marked the demise of the breed of intellectuals. This documentary series by Bernard-Henri Levy retraces the concepts and ideals that motivated France's...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: The prescient seeds of thought disseminated by Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century prefigured the pivotal 20th-century concepts of existentialism and psychoanalysis. In this program, interviews with Nietzsche biographers Ronald Hayman and Leslie Chamberlain, archivist Dr. Andrea Bollinger, translator Reg Hollingdale, writer Will Self, and philosopher Keith Ansell Pearson probe Nietzsche's...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: Few literary works have inspired as diverse and impassioned opinions as Machiavelli's The Prince. While some have denounced it as epitomizing the immorality and cynicism of despotic political rulers, others have considered it a paragon of pragmatism and lucidity in political affairs-including Napoleon Bonaparte, who deemed The Prince the only book that deserved to be read. In this program, the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: In this program, world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee and Hilary Putnam of Harvard examine current philosophical thought that dismisses the primacy and infallibility of mathematical logic and the scientific method. Modern thinkers, such as Einstein, are credited with introducing interpretive logic into their scientific theories.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: In 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a treatise that would forever change our understanding of how work, value, and money are interrelated. This program details Smith's life and traces the impact of his work as Europe began the arduous transition from mercantilism to the laissez-faire philosophy of the Physiocrats. After Smith, labor was seen as the source of a country's wealth,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005