Philosophize This!

Think Thomas More's Utopia in the 16th century.

Everywhere it is machines, real ones, not figurative ones, machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines. With all the necessary couplings and connections. We are all handyman each with his little machines.

Bergson was highly influential on the thought of Deleuze and I guess the fact he writes a book about him should be an indicator of that.

And maybe the best place to begin answering this question, how might one live lies in looking at Deleuze and Guattari's 1991 book titled What is Philosophy?

And a significant portion of their book, What is Philosophy is dedicated to showing how these three practices are distinct from each other.

He talks in chapter one of what is philosophy about the relationship between the philosopher and the concept.

Just to recap, we have the concepts themselves existing on this metaphorical plane of eminence delivered by the conceptual personae that gives the work context.

This will probably be a recurring theme in this series on Deleuze, the resolution of old arguments in philosophy.

The more people cared the less people cured. The more they intervened the more they oppressed.

political, economic and technical incitement to talk about sex

the exercise of power over living beings no longer carries the threat of death, but instead takes charge of people's lives.

The same way Plato and the Republic spends a considerable amount of time trying to come up with the ideal structure of government, Jeremy Bentham spends a bunch of time in his work trying to come up with the ideal structure of a prison.

He writes about it in his book, Civilization and Its Discontents.

Freud thinks that what it is at its very foundation is a group of human beings coming together, a group that's obviously aware of all the benefits that come along with working in coalition with other people, but they also understand how fragile something like that can be.

The larger point Freud wants to make here is that this is not just some coincidence. This is what a civilization is.

The very concept of civilization requires the repression of unregulated human behavior.

Theodore Dorno and Max Horkheimer, two members of the Frankfurt School who co-wrote the book The Dialectic of Enlightenment, would no doubt agree that capitalism is responsible for all these changes and what's possible for the average person.

Theodore Adorno says quote, that in an age of spiritual disenchantment the individual experiences the need for substitute images of the divine.

It obtains these through pseudo-culture.

Hollywood idols, soaps, novels, pop tunes, lyrics, and film genres such as the Wild West or the Mafia movie fashion substitute mythologies for the masses.

End quote.

So I want to tell you about a book today called The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by the philosopher Paulo Freire.

This book we're talking about, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is by one measurement that was taken, the third most cited book in all of the humanities and social sciences.

Meaning that when people in academia give citations for what works they took ideas from that inspired their new ideas and they cite it in the bibliography, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire comes in number three of all time.

Meaning at the very least this book that was written in 1968 in Brazil has gone on to change the way that people think about education across the entire world.

And here's where this is headed as we get deeper into the book of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, to Paulo Freire.

I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

When Richard Dawkins writes the God delusion or when Sam Harris writes The End of Faith. Neither of these guys would say that these are new ideas that they're presenting.

a girl who rejects the proposal of a wealthy man and not an old man against her parents' convenience, according to her instinctive inclination, sacrifices her individual welfare to that of the species. But on this very account, we cannot withhold a certain approbation for she has preferred what is more important and has acted in the spirit of nature. Whereas the parents advised her in the spirit of individual egoism. In consequence of all this, it seems as if in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly. Often this must be the case for that convenience and passionate love should go hand in hand is the rarest stroke of good fortune.

His books, Animal Liberation Now, Ethics in the Real World, and The Life You Can Save are all examples of him trying to accomplish this.

His books, Animal Liberation Now, Ethics in the Real World, and The Life You Can Save are all examples of him trying to accomplish this.

His books, Animal Liberation Now, Ethics in the Real World, and The Life You Can Save are all examples of him trying to accomplish this.

But the important thing for you to know right now though is that the arguments in that book popularized by Peter Singer went on to spark an entire movement around charitable giving and online philosophical discussion called the effective altruist movement.

Kasia just had a book come out called The Philosophy of Pleasure. It's got an ice cream on the front of it.

The book is called On What Matters, published in 2011.

And as Peter Singer reads the arguments presented in the book, he finds himself being more and more convinced of them than more that he reads of it.