In this 1995 interview with Harry Kreisler, acclaimed U.C. Berkeley philosophy professor Dreyfus discusses the importance of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1908-1961) views in terms of computers, artificial intelligence, and the Internet ... Merleau-Ponty's primary focus on the "body" and "intercorporeality" is the key "coping" mechanism that allows us to "get a grip on reality," in a way that Dreyfus labels "normativity" ... though Dreyfus feels that Heidegger was more concerned with an existential critique of Cartesian "mental representations" in "Being and Time," Merleau-Ponty's focus was always the "body with its skills that allows us to relate to things and others" ... bodiless cyberspace cannot, for Dreyfus, eliminate this basic phenomenological premise ...

Tags: Dreyfus Heidegger Merleau-Ponty Internet Phenomenology

In this 1995 interview with Harry Kreisler, acclaimed U.C. Berkeley philosophy professor Dreyfus discusses the importance of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1908-1961) views in terms of computers, artificial intelligence, and the Internet ... Merleau-Ponty's primary focus on the "body" and "intercorporeality" is the key "coping" mechanism that allows us to "get a grip on reality," in a way that Dreyfus labels "normativity" ... though Dreyfus feels that Heidegger was more concerned with an existential critique of Cartesian "mental representations" in "Being and Time," Merleau-Ponty's focus was always the "body with its skills that allows us to relate to things and others" ... bodiless cyberspace cannot, for Dreyfus, eliminate this basic phenomenological premise ...

Tags: Dreyfus Heidegger Merleau-Ponty Internet Phenomenology

Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, feminist, and psychoanalyst Kristeva (b. 1941) offers overviews of her linguistic work in this revealing interview ... she describes a 'pre-linguistic poetic language' that precedes the Cartesian 'epistemological' approach, which assumes a stable subject as well as the basic subject-object dichotomy ... rather, she emphasizes the dynamism of 'echolalia' (infant vocalizing prior to 'sign and syntax') and the 'symbolic' - both of which make up a rhythmic, musical language that she feels Joyce and Balzac employed well ... this language is considered 'feminine' and occurs in the pre-Oedipal phase of development where maternal dependence is operative ... 'change and evolution,' she feels, assumes this dynamism...

Tags: Kristeva linguistics structuralism post-modernism French philosophy

Laurence Olivier's direction/starring role in Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' (1948) set the mid-century standard for properly filming Shakespearean drama ... Here, in the chaotic, violent finale, Prince Hamlet learns from Laertes (Polonius' son) that both he and Hamlet have been mortally wounded with poisoned swords during a fencing match concocted by Claudius, the present King, the aim of which was to kill Hamlet ... Hamlet's mother Gertrude, the Queen, has accidentally consumed poisoned wine that was also intended for Hamlet should he not have fatally injured in the match ... Laetres, while dying, tells Hamlet that it was Claudius (who had killed Hamlet's father) that is behind all the royal upheaval and brutality ... Though dying, Hamlet's vengeance is finally realized ... Horatio, Hamlet's good friend, says this following the Prince's death: And let me speak to the yet unknowing world/ How these things came about: so shall you hear/ Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,/ Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,/ Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,/ And, in this upshot, purposes mistook/ Fall'n on the inventors' reads: all this can I/ Truly deliver.

Tags: Hamlet Shakespeare Olivier Elizabethan Drama

Sir Laurence Olivier's 1983 performance of Shakespeare's 'Lear' could be the high-point of his legendary, iconic career ... an extremely taxing role, Olivier, who was 75 at the time, plays Lear so convincingly that the viewer experiences each great emotion with him - here, the indescribable grief at the play's end when Cordelia, his most beloved daughter, was wrongly executed ... his own death becomes inevitable... Albany (Goneril's good-hearted husband) ends the drama with these powerful lines regarding age: The weight of this sad time we must obey;/ Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say./ The oldest hath borne most: we that are young/ Shall never see so much, nor live so long. The cast included Dorothy Tutin as Goneril, Diana Rigg as Regan, Anna Calder-Marshall as Cordelia, John Hurt as the Fool, Colin Blakely as Kent, Leo McKern as Gloucester, and Robert Lindsay as Edmund. Olivier won the Emmy Award for his transcendent performance ...

Tags: Olivier King Lear Shakespeare Cordelia Elizabethan Drama

Danish philosopher and proto-existentialist, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), has his life put to animation in this quirky little piece! Watch for his father Michael speaking from the grave and his anti-Hegelianism! ¡Este es grande!

Tags: Kierkegaard Existentialism Nineteenth Century Philosophy Denmark Copenhagen

A controversial, highly political and erotic film, Marco Bellocchio's 'Il Diavolo in corpo' (1986; in English, 'Devil in the Flesh') contains many classic literary themes well realized in a modern context ... Dutch actress Maruschka Detmers offers a tour de force performance as Giulia, a passionate, frequently on-the-edge woman caught between her jailed revolutionary fiancé and a handsome young man (Andrea, a student) ... in this scene, the film's last, Giulia is listening to Andrea's final examination on the ancient Greek drama 'Antigone'... with escalating emotion she realizes the tragic last words of Creon: "Oh lead me away, poor madman that I am - I who have killed you my son without intending to and have also killed you who lie before me, my wife." The contrast between the divine laws of the Gods (here, tradition) and the rebellious, often destructive passions of the human heart effects emotional dissolution ...

Tags: Il Diavolo in corpo Bellocchio Detmers Italian film Antigone

Claude Berri's simmering 1993 adaptation of Émile Zola's 1885 novel 'Germinal' reaches a crescendo with this confrontation between striking miners and government troops ... time seems to momentarily halt with the fatal shooting of strike leader Maheu played by the incomparable Gérard Depardieu ... the shocked grief of Maheu's wife Catherine (brilliantly portrayed by Judith Henry) seems to envelop the whole scene, soldiers included ... the cast also included Miou-Miou and Renaud ...

Tags: Zola Germinal Berri Depardieu French Film Miners Strike

Alain Resnais's 1959 landmark New Wave film, 'Hiroshima Mon Amour,' deals with the role of memory/oblivion against the historical backdrop of Hiroshima's immediate aftermath - one of the most unforgettable tragedies of human history ... graphic footage coupled with a mostly restrained narrative makes for a jarring, memorable experience, which seems to be a key point of the film...

Tags: Resnais Hiroshima Japan World War Two New Wave French Film Atomic Weapons

Acclaimed Brazilian educator/theorist Freire (1921-1997) comments upon the importance of Marx in his intellectual development ... it was the experience of extreme Brazilian poverty in Recife that moved him toward Marx - he felt that the impoverished experienced a 'negation of their being as a person' under such conditions ... thus, there was a great need for an education which was new and modern (not traditional) and anti-colonial - not just an extension of the culture of the colonizer ...

Tags: Paulo Freire Karl Marx Brazil Poverty Educational Theory

F. W. Murnau's darkly evocative (silent) rendering of the Faust myth found remarkable expression in this scene where Faust (Gösta Ekman) signs his soul over to Mephistopheles (played chillingly by Emil Jannings) for great personal power...

Tags: Mephistopheles Faust German Film

In this intriguing overview of his famous notion of the 'trace,' Derrida critiques the long-standing philosophical 'authority of the question' by examining the conditions for questioning itself ... he argues that presence always presupposes 'Otherness' (a 'primary affirmation') which embodies a 'return'...to a 'different temporality older than the past and beyond the future' - a different 'past,' 'present,' or 'future' ... Derrida seeks a 'rapport' with this Otherness that allows for any conventional understanding of presence or the present ... such rapport, he feels, would promote a different experience with the past or future ...

Tags: Derrida Deconstruction Heidegger Presence Being Trace Other

Here, on German television, Heidegger repeats the importance of his long-standing concern with the forgetting of the question of Being, but then offers an interesting analogy between the (few) physicists who understand how a radio or television works and equally scarce 'thinkers' who have a proper understanding of the question of Being ... In his 'Introduction to Metaphysics' (1935), Heidegger remarks: "... philosophy is always the concern of the few. Which few? The creators, those who initiate profound transformations. It spreads only indirectly, by devious paths that can never be laid out in advance, until at last, at some future date, it sinks to the level of a common-place; but by then it has long been forgotten as original philosophy."

Tags: Heidegger Being Post Modernism German Philosophy Thinking Denken Aufgabe

Federico Fellini's 1969 classic 'Satyricon' is loosely based upon the fragmentary work of the same name by first-century author Petronius ... the over-the-top decadence of Rome under Nero is magnificently depicted in this compelling, visually arresting, surreal adaptation which culminates in a very moving image: the frescoed images of many of the main characters ... at least one theme of Petronius was the brevity of human life - Fellini realizes this in the finale almost perfectly ... (British actor Martin Potter plays the hero Encolpio)...

Tags: Fellini Satyricon Petronius Rome Nero

Nietzsche's final years (1897-1900) were spent in this Weimar home under the care of his sister Elizabeth ... in the clip, archivist Andrea Bollinger questions the usual syphillis diagnosis, remarking that the philosopher's 11-year vegetative state was not typical of the disease ... also mentioned is Elizabeth's role in editing Nietzsche's last work (left unfinished), "The Will to Power," the famous 'transvaluation of highest values'...

Tags: Nietzsche Weimar Elisabeth Will To Power

This is from the 'Nietzsche Haus' web site: "At the beginning of July 1881, Friedrich Nietzsche visited Sils for the first time, staying at the home of the Durisch family (today's Nietzsche Haus), where he rented a room on the first floor. From 1883 to 1888, he returned here every summer. He had found a place that gave him peace and enabled him to concentrate, a landscape which - as he said himself - was "blutsverwandt" (related by blood). Here, he worked on a number of books during his 7 summer stays (1881, 1883-88), e.g. Part 2 of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", whose key idea of eternal recurrence came to him in a moment of inspiration on the shore of the Lake of Silvaplana." In 'Ecce Homo,' Nietzsche wrote: "... "this highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned on a sheet with the notation underneath, '6000 feet beyond man and time.' That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped. It was then that this idea came to me." Nietzsche biographer Leslie Chamberlain offers commentary...

Tags: Friedrich Nietzsche Sils Maria Switzerland Zarathustra Ecce Homo

Heidegger's famous Black Forest cabin at Todtnauberg (where he wrote many of his key works, including 'Being and Time') is shown here by his son Hermann, commented upon by literary critic George Steiner in terms of its influence, and remembered by acclaimed German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer... Gadamer, recalling visits to the cabin, felt that Heidegger looked like a rural Black Forest resident, dressed as a 'handyman,' but that Heidegger's 'eyes' showed great 'imagination' - undoubtedly underscoring Heidegger's unique, philosophical mission...

Tags: Heidegger Gadamer Steiner Todtnauberg cabin

Here, literary critic Steiner comments upon the influence of Heidegger's unique view of language - i.e., that "language speaks us"... Derrida, Foucault, post-modernist views in general, are heavily indebted to Heidegger's rather unconventional perspective...

Tags: Heidegger Language Poetry Post Modernism

Heidegger's influence on French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is well-chronicled - as the clip states, Sartre's main work 'Being and Nothingness' (1943) was conceived as a companion piece to Heidegger's 'Being and Time' (though Heidegger would later repudiate Sartre's view, labeling it 'metaphysics'). Sartre, seen here with long-time companion Simone de Beauvoir, was a key figure in reviving Heidegger following World War II... Heidegger biographer Hugo Ott also comments upon this post War influence...

Tags: Heidegger Sartre Existentialism 20th Century Continental Philosophy

Martin Heidegger's 1927 magnum opus 'Being and Time' ('Sein und Zeit') is regarded as a twentieth-century philosophical classic... such notions as temporality, angst, authenticity, resolve, The One, The Other, being-toward-death, everydayness, etc., became standard verbiage in later Existentialism... here, philosopher Andrew Benjamin, literary critic George Steiner, and Hannah Arendt biographer Elizabeth Young-Bruel discuss the impact of this monumental work...

Tags: Heidegger Being Time Existentialism Post Modernism Arendt