Eleven More Podcast Episodes on Rene Descartes' Meditations

Last week, I provided links to eleven podcast episodes focused upon Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, covering the first three of his meditations.  Here are the remaining eleven podcast episodes, covering meditations four through six.  They run about another 2 1/2 hours of listening time.  Here they are:

Meditation 4

• Human Being, Supreme Being, and Non-Being
• Is God Responsible for Human Error
• Error, The Understanding, and the Will
• The Freedom and Power of the Will

Meditation 5

• True and Immutable Natures
• An Ontological Argument for God's Existence
• Previous Judgements About Clear and Distinct Ideas

Meditation 6

• Imagination and Intellection or Conception
• Faculties of the Human Mind and Body
• Sense-Perception and External Things
• What Nature Teaches Us

Eleven Podcast Episodes on Descartes' Meditations

I have been converting my core concept lecture videos into podcast episodes in the Sadler's Lectures series.  So far, I've created series on Plato's works - the Apology, Crito, Euthyphro - and on other works by Aristotle, Cicero, Epictetus, Kierkegaard, Rilke, and Sartre.  Recently, I created my longest series yet, going through the entirety of Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. 

Here below is the first half of that series.  The thirteen episodes in this set cover the key ideas and arguments from the first three meditations, and run about 2 1/2 hours total.  You can download any or all of them, and listen to them anywhere you'd like to.

Rene Descartes, Meditation 1

• The Senses, Dreams, and Doubt
• Geometry, Mathematics, and Doubt
• God, Causes, and Certainty
• The Evil Demon Hypothesis

Rene Descartes, Meditation 2

• The Cogito and Thinking Being
• The Piece of Wax Example
• What Is Known Clearly and Distinctly

Rene Descartes, Meditation 3

• Where Does Falsity Reside?
• Innate, Adventitious, and Produced Ideas
• Objective and Formal Reality
• The Argument for God's Existence

Seven Videos on Rene Descartes' Meditations 5 and 6

This Fall, I was able to fill in a gap in coverage of videos I originally created for students enrolled in the classes (Intro to Philosophy, Foundations in Philosophy) in which we focus on Rene Descartes' massively influential work, the Meditations on First Philosophy.

The previous semester, I managed to find the time to produce core concept videos covering the first three meditations, but wasn't able to get to the fourth, fifth, and sixth.  That was remedied a few weeks ago, as I finished up the set, now covering the entirety of the Meditations.  There are 22 videos total in that series.

Just earlier this week, I released the last of these videos to the general public.  I've since moved on to creating new content bearing upon other texts and thinkers we're studying in my classes this Fall - David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic, and William James' Pragmatism, among others.

For those who would like to work their way through the last of Descartes' Meditations, here are those seven new videos:

Meditation 5

• True and Immutable Natures
• An Ontological Argument for God's Existence
• Previous Judgements About Clear and Distinct Ideas

Meditation 6

• Imagination and Intellection or Conception
• Sense-Perception and External Things
• Faculties of the Human Mind and Body
• What Nature Teaches Us

If you're looking for more content on Rene Descartes's works, or just trying to find the full series of 22 videos on this work in particular, you should check out my Descartes playlist (with 42 videos, and about 18 hours of content)

Eight Videos on Rene Descartes' Meditations 3 and 4

Most semesters - since I tend to teach Introduction to Philosophy (sometimes called by a different title) - I cover the entirety of Rene Descartes' work, the Meditations on First Philosophy.  Whether you love him or hate him (and I love Descartes), think he's got things right or wrong (and I think he got a lot wrong), you've got to admit that he's a centrally important figure in Philosophy's living history and traditions.

I was very surprised to learn - through Twitter conversations - that many students never encounter more than the First and Second Meditations in their classes!  Not only did a lot of students report that, but also quite a few instructors admitted that they taught the first third of the work, and then either skipped the rest entirely, or jumped way ahead into a few bits of the Sixth Meditation.  Later on, when I've got some time on my hands, I'll write up a piece about why this is such a bad pedagogical strategy, what mistaken ideas about Descartes it implants, and what interesting features of Descartes' thought it deprives students from engaging.

We cover the entire work, and this semester, I've remedied the previous lack of core concept videos covering the main ideas of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Meditations.  I provide these as resources for my students in both my online and my face-to-face classes. As I've been releasing them to the much more general public worldwide, it's clear from the video comments that teachers, students, and lifelong learners have been finding them useful as well.

Here are those eight videos:

Third Meditation:

• Where Does Falsity Reside?
• Innate, Adventitous, and Produced Ideas
• Objective and Formal Reality
• The Argument for God's Existence

Fourth Meditation:

• Human Being, Supreme Being, and Non-Being
• Is God Responsible for Human Error
• Error, The Understanding, and the Will
• The Freedom and Power of the Will

Ten Videos on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Earlier this spring, as the semester was coming to a close, and I was getting ready for my online 6-week Existentialist Philosophy and Literature class (developed and taught for the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, now in its 5th week), I shot a sequence of new lecture videos on a classic and extremely influential Existentialist work.

It's one that my subscribers, viewers, followers, and other fans have been asking me to produce videos about for years - Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra!  I decided to make part one of that book a required reading for the online class (with the Genealogy of Morals a supplemental text)

I've just finished releasing all of those videos, so I thought I'd set links to them all in one place. Here are those videos:

• The Superman and Man as a Bridge
• The Last Man
• The Three Metamorphoses
• Suffering and the Afterworld
• The Virtues and One's Own Virtue
• The Body and the Spirit
• War and Warriors
• The Solitary Person
• Values and Valuation
• The State and Superfluous People

Seven Videos on Descartes' Meditations 1 and 2

This semester, I am teaching Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy in my Foundations in Philosophy classes at Marquette University and in my Introduction to Philosophy class at Milwaukee Area Technical College.  Although I am by no means a Cartesian, Descartes is among thinkers I consider a philosopher of the first order of importance.  His works are also quite enjoyable to read - at least for me! - both in their original Latin and French and in English translations.

When I have the opportunity to teach a thinker and text upon whom I have yet to create core concept videos, I typically try to shoot at least a few as resources for my students.  They end up getting viewed and used by others as well - the general public interested in philosophy, students at other institutions, and even some professors and institutions who incorporate them as resources for their own students.

I managed to shoot a sequence of videos getting through the first half of the Meditations (I'm hoping to get to the other half either later this month or during the summer).  I've released all of the videos covering key ideas, distinctions, or arguments in the first two Meditations, and am in process of gradually rolling out those on Meditation 3.

So if you'd like to work your way through those first two Meditations, with the help of an expert who has been studying and teaching Descartes for decades, here you go!  These comprise about an hour and a half of focused lectures that will help you better understand - and get the most out of studying - this challenging  but rewarding text.

• The Senses, Dreams, and Doubt
• Geometry, Mathematics, and Doubt
• God, Causes, and Certainty
• The Evil Demon Hypothesis
• The Cogito and Thinking Being
• The Piece of Wax Example
• What Is Known Clearly and Distinctly

If you find the philosophy resources I develop interesting, enjoyable, or useful, by all means share them with others.  And if you'd like to support the work that I do, making philosophy publicly accessible, you can become a monthly supporter on my Patreon page, or if you prefer a one-time donation, you can Buy Me A Coffee!

Thinkers and Texts I'm Teaching This Spring

This Spring, I'm returning to Marquette University, where I'll be teaching two sections of their new core class, Foundations in Philosophy.  Like many Catholic schools, their core curriculum has gone through recent changes that have reduced the number of required Philosophy courses (and Theology, and other courses in the humanities as well).  Having replaced both their Philosophy of Human Nature and their Ethics courses, this new Foundations course has to do quite a lot in one semester.

This is my second time around teaching Foundations, and in this interim between semesters, I've put quite a bit of thought into redesigning the course.  In a later blog post, I'll discuss what sorts of activities and assignments I've got lined up for my students.  But in this one - since I now my readers, viewers, and subscribers are always interested to know what the required readings are for the course, I thought I'd set them out here, adding a few reflections about why I made those selections.

So with no further ado, here's the list of thinkers and texts, indexed to the weeks and days of the term: