What do you mean by “we”? Do you have a mouse in your pocket? Speak for yourself.

I agree.

@@jimlaguardia8185No need for your rudeness, mate. I'll use occam's razor here and infer that he meant "we" in the sense of most people these days. In which case he is correct. If I'm wrong then he can correct me.

And he cited Henry Miller's Air Conditioned Nightmare. Check out some of Miller's interviews on here for an amazing Brooklyn accent. Lol

I was lucky to be growing up in a period when TV understood its responsibility to educate. It no longer does.

@@jose123001 Nonsense. The capitalists just got better at using tv as a means to generate wealth, at the expense of educating and informing people. As our society became more about work and creating wealth, it became less about education and expanding our minds. People nowadays just want entertainment as a means to distract themselves from the grim reality of their corporate treadmill existences. No-one wants to be grappling with existentialism after a hard day serving coffees at Starbucks.

I guess im asking randomly but does any of you know of a method to log back into an instagram account? I stupidly forgot my password. I love any tricks you can give me!

@Brentley Toby instablaster =)

@Kenzo Markus thanks for your reply. I found the site thru google and I'm waiting for the hacking stuff atm. Looks like it's gonna take a while so I will get back to you later when my account password hopefully is recovered.

Lucky lady!

That’s absolutely amazing! He sounds like a wonderful teacher! In The Heideggerian sense I’m devastated about the facticity of my thrownness into being as I’ll never get to meet or talk with these two wonderful gentlemen! 😔

I envy you; but I could not be in his class.

Was he any good?

I found out about William Barret through a book of D.T. Suzuki's, called "Zen Buddhism". He had done the editorial work for that book and in the end pages, there's a mentioning of one of his work "Irrational Man". So, could you tell me what it is about? Like is it a good introductory book on Existentialism or the subject matter is of another kind?

@@101...... Thank you for this question. Yes, it is a clear explanation of existentialism and of how we are, not as rational as we think. It examines Nietzsche, Kiekregaard,Heidigger,and Sartre. There is a kind of epilogue that looks at The Furies. There is no philosophical mumbo jumbo. Everything is relevant to our daily lives. An excellent read. I am glad I stumbled upon it.

@@Operafreak9 O, got it, thanks for your reply. I'll give it a read soon.

…Some people inhabit their skins as strangers…. Well said Professor!

You can’t expect clarity from his interlocutor when his aim is to explain Heidegger’s philosophy, It’s just impossible to understand it.

That's good for you, living in a privileged western society. Had you been born stricken with disease, poverty, and pain like you couldn't believe is real, I think you would have a different answer.

There are some for which life is plain suffering and I would not think lesser of them for thinking about oblivion as a path to endless peace and an absence of further pain.

@@danieljliverslxxxix1164 I understand what you are saying, and it sounds very realistic. Nonetheless, I think that one can still make a good case for being alive. For example, I know some folks would rather feel pain than feel nothing. When you are dead or not born, you cannot be stricken with disease. You would at least need to first be born, be stricken with disease, poverty and pain and see the contrast of plenty in a privileged western society to then decide that it is better to die. And even then, you would have lived to enjoy the pleasure or power of choosing to die. You can have the opinion that you have now, because you are alive to have it. Everything that will ever exist - pain, pleasure, all - exists in life. Outside of life there is nothing - not even the absence of pain, just nothing.

I fucking know dude

I have so much to learn before I die! Thank you UKposts...Every night I share with my 10 year old grandson what I found on UKposts. We've been researching Quantum Computers.. It scared him. Tonight, we will talk about Philosophers - being, what is truth, love, a spiritual connection with a higher power. I need all the help I can get...so little time. Thank you UKposts.

Yeah, it baffles me that if you put the newest crappy movie up on youtube it would be taken down with repercussions to the poster but the wisdom of the ages....free for all (as it should be) but ignored by almost all. I've been working my through the sum of human knowledge and call it a huge win over watching some horrible tv rerun. FWIW.

"The tree exists because we are here to call it a tree" - Bishop Berkeley.

Heidegger would have hated Berkeley's observation though! He emphasises over and over again that we are 'always-already' here. That's what his 'thrown-ness' concept is. Only a Cartesian would imagine that our experience of a tree has any causal relation to its existence. Since it was also thrown into the world, it has always-already existed. He might well have added that it needs no-one's awareness, since it has its own - that of the world and its being in the world. The real mystery, in a sense, is that neither beginnings nor endings are accessible to us: we do not recall our conception, and will not experience our death. A common way of dealing with this notion of 'endings'/death is to say that since we do not experience it, we need not be anxious about an experience we will in fact never have. The reason this is inadequate is that we are aware of such possibilities which will, so to speak, 'occur - although not to us'. Anxiety is the paradoxical experience of knowing what will not be (all that we are), and is therefore part of the absolute ground of our being - hence our 'ownmost possibility' in his slightly quirky terminology. Therefore, we overcome this precisely by accepting it - in some way, and what is significant is not how we accept this possibility of 'un-being' but *that* we accept it. If we had no such awareness of death, then philosophy would be an easier and 'brighter' proposition, but it would not be our philosophy. Therefore, we can only pursue philosophy as it *is to us*, with anxiety running through it like the stitching in a sock. I suspect that he's right (although I may be expanding on what he said explicitly here) that our refusal to allow nature its own being, which is also the ground of our being - this denial of the nature *of* being (including anxiety), in which technology is rooted - leads towards what it attempts to vanquish, i.e. death. This is perhaps a grim thought, but our refusal to think of it is the cause of the accelerating failures of 'technological man': in constant flight from a single thought, he loses touch with *all* thought. Technology is the denial of nature, and the embrace of cowardice. And what characterises the twenty-first century more than denial and cowardice? I suspect that he never hoped to be *quite* as correct as the last few decades have proven him (!) (Hope I didn't veer too much into rhetoric at the end there... Just trying to tease out the implications for us today...)

@@Microtherion But in a way, this still matches up with what I'm saying because, as you describe it, the fear of death leads to the non-philosophical busyness of technology. Philosophy has to take that on, which is how death shapes our philosophy, but it's not the only thing that shapes it. We could still be subject the existential predicament of thrownness, for example, without it being finite.

@@JohnMoseley I think it mostly matches up, yes. (Mostly, Moseley. Lol). Neither death nor anxiety define our experience - they are *part of* the basic ground or 'scheme'... 'A given', as they say. There are other givens - most of which I like better, of course. I'm not sure I understood your last bit there. (Whether Thrown-ness is or isn't 'finite'?) It isn't really 'finite' or 'infinite' - it just *is*... (Or so it seems. That was precisely Heidegger's point, I think. 'Is' and 'seems' are different - but not always obviously different). :)

@@Microtherion The last bit is about whether all the other givens are going to be ended (for us subjectively) by death, hence 'finite.' I meant that even in a world where people were immortal, philosophers would still have lots of concerns in common with us mortals when we philosophise: the nature of time and space, epistemology, lots of binaries like the one vs. the many etc. etc.

In this series of interviews, Magee often articulates the philosopher under discussion with greater clarity than the supposed specialist. This is the case, again, here. Magee never fails to (i) situate the philosopher in the history of ideas; and (ii) unify the unruly thoughts of the professors being interviewed into a cohesive chain of ideas. Magee’s writings were superlative. This series of TV interviews is a monument to a great thinker and a world of public intellectuals that has vanished.

Really good question.

The programme was made for the BBC in the '80s, Wikipedia tells me. The BBC's old mandate, dating from around the end of WWII, was 'to educate, inform and entertain,' and based on that they produced, for decades, some of the most remarkable television in the world, from groundbreaking comedy like Monty Python to serious programmes on ideas, such as Monitor to extraordinary films and plays directed by now internationally renowned directors such as Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. But the BBC is always somewhat embattled because they're a state broadcaster with no advertising and depend on the paying of a TV license fee by the general population to function. Any UK owner of a TV is required to pay this fee (or anyone accessing BBC programmes online too now) and many object, especially if they feel the corporation's programming fails to serve their interests. Commercial television providers such as Sky, part owned by Rupert Murdoch, also object strongly that the BBC unfairly dominates the market. All this, plus the need to make content that can be sold at a profit abroad, means the BBC now puts more and more of its resources into populist programming. It retains an outlet for more intellectual fair, BBC4, but even this is deeply insipid compared to what it used to do. It's mainly just arts and history programmes with attractive presenters skimming the surface of their subjects while walking around attractive settings. It's very sad.

It always had a big state, nanny-knows-best, Leftist-Liberal slant, even from the start. Conservative, reactionary views and values were always questioned, critiqued or outright mocked, such as in comedies like Monty Python or kitchen sink dramas. Still, they did at least back then feel somewhat "British", and so even for a rightist/nationalist like me there was some appeal in their often creative and talent-packed programming. Since the Blair years, however, they have become total shills for "Globalhomo Inc.", a no-borders, morally-relativist clown-world that keeps the plebs in their place by pushing vapid, deracinated consumerism and hedonism. There is absolutely nothing "British" about the BBC anymore, they are just cheerleaders now for globalist values that I find fundamentally abhorrent, and so I, and many others, will no longer watch their propaganda and pay their tithe. It's very sad, as you say.

Ержан Насанов, There you go, Thad tuiol's comment is a paradigm example of the standard hostility to the BBC, though with a large dollop of extra crazy.

The standard snarky leftist ad hominem. Go fuck yourself.

At least BBC Radio still has some decent broadcasts.

Yes he's a bit long winded.

Barrett does go for a bit of a ramble on this one; doesn't really find anything to relate. Great writer though.

And what about his work?

@@Mtmonaghan both his work and his character are legitimate topics of debate. One does not invalidate the other.

how so

Cioran had put his ideas of philosophical pessimism to an extreme that he has had jettisoned the value existentialism...

He doesn't have metaphysics. If anything he should be the easiest to understand.

It makes perfect sense, but his vocabulary makes it near unreadable.

@@nowhereman6019 rubbish, you are trying to understand his work by applying a metaphysical approach. Understanding words by being clear about their definition, or a concept that fully delineates them, is as far away from his views as you could possibly get.

He's got competition from William Barrett

Some people do find these things early on in life. To me, it started in my early teens. It might have been the same for them. Perhaps anyone can feel like this early in life, if they are paying attention and the setting is right.

@Sean The problem is that all of this is now well understood to be meaningless. Such discussions might have made some kind of sense back then, but someone with a proper scientific education, i.e. a person that understands the evolved biological nature of human beings, all answers regarding existence and "being" are well known - human beings are a bag of carbon atoms that exists for the sole reason ("reason", not "purpose") of maximizing the inclusive fitness of its genes - and the likes of Heidegger appear to just spew meaningless gibberish. I just spent 40 minutes of my life listening to this video, and did not hear one meaningful thing that Heidegger said. Nor did I find anything meaningful when I have tried to read his writings. There is just nothing of substance or relevance to the real world there. And yet, an extremely elaborate elaborate edifice has been built on that non-existent foundation over the last 80-90 years...

@@GM53946 -- Check out the book by Moreland and Craig called Naturalism: a Critical Analysis and Morelands book Scientism and Secularism. Also The Rationality of Theism by Copan and Moser.

@@GM53946 I disagree. The scientific explanations are explanations of processes of nature. You can memorize the infinitely many steps and natural laws that led to your birth, but reducing your existence to only a handful of propositions is ignoring the immensely complex subjective reality within your mind. No equation or model can describe your subjective experience. That's beyond the realm of the scientific method because it is not reproducible, cannot me measured quantitatively and, worst of all, can be experienced only by you. Therefore, the questions about our subjective existence (which leads to the acceptance of death, anxiety, freedom, etc.) cannot be answered by other people, let alone science, unless you willingly choose to give up the choices of your life and bow to the rules and methods developed by other men and women (as it has been done over and over by other people in other times).

I think it's the gym.

@@Sanelicv Spot on friend