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Video: Alain Badiou and Michel Foucault in conversation

Two giants of French philosophy discuss psychology, Western culture and the Kantian turn in the history of philosophy in this hidden gem of a video. Michel Foucault is interviewed by Alain Badiou, the acclaimed author of many books including Pocket Pantheon, and the forthcoming The Adventure of French Philosophy (2012), which both engage with Foucault's thought.

The interview was originally recorded in 1965, and is now accompanied by English subtitles. With thanks to @thewarmjets and @demoboroi.

Introduction to Psychology with Professor Paul Bloom - Open Yale Courses (20 free video online lectures + transcripts)

About the Course

What do your dreams mean? Do men and women differ in the nature and intensity of their sexual desires? Can apes learn sign language? Why can’t we tickle ourselves? This course tries to answer these questions and many others, providing a comprehensive overview of the scientific study of thought and behavior. It explores topics such as perception, communication, learning, memory, decision-making, religion, persuasion, love, lust, hunger, art, fiction, and dreams. We will look at how these aspects of the mind develop in children, how they differ across people, how they are wired-up in the brain, and how they break down due to illness and injury.

About Professor Paul Bloom

Paul Bloom is Professor of Psychology at Yale University. He was born in Montreal, Canada, was an undergraduate at McGill University, and did his doctoral work at MIT. He has published in scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and in popular outlets such as The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and the author of two books: How Children Learn the Meanings of Words and Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human. His research explores children's understanding of art, religion, and morality.

Watch free online lectures - Introduction to Psychology with Professor Paul Bloom:

Click session titles below to access audio, video, and course materials.

1. Introduction
2. Foundations: This Is Your Brain
3. Foundations: Freud
4. Foundations: Skinner
5. What Is It Like to Be a Baby: The Development of Thought
6. How Do We Communicate?: Language in the Brain, Mouth and the Hands
7. Conscious of the Present; Conscious of the Past: Language (cont.); Vision and Memory
8. Conscious of the Present; Conscious of the Past: Vision and Memory (cont.)
9. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Love (Guest Lecture by Professor Peter Salovey)
10. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Evolution and Rationality
11. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Emotions, Part I
12. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Emotions, Part II
13. Why Are People Different?: Differences
14. What Motivates Us: Sex
15. A Person in the World of People: Morality
16. A Person in the World of People: Self and Other, Part I
17. A Person in the World of People: Self and Other, Part II; Some Mysteries: Sleep, Dreams, and Laughter
18. What Happens When Things Go Wrong: Mental Illness, Part I (Guest Lecture by Professor Susan Nolen-Hoeksema)
19. What Happens When Things Go Wrong: Mental Illness, Part II
20. The Good Life: Happiness

The Meme Machine by Susan J. Blackmore

What is a meme? First coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 study The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation: stories, fashions, inventions, recipes, songs, and ways of plowing a field, throwing a baseball, or making a sculpture. It is also one of the most important--and controversial--concepts to emerge since Darwin's Origin of the Species.

Here, Blackmore boldly asserts: "Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection." Indeed, The Meme Machine shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began: a survival of the fittest among competing ideas and behaviors. Those that proved most adaptive--making tools, for example, or using language--survived and flourished, replicating themselves in as many minds as possible. These memes then passed themselves on from generation to generation by helping to ensure that the genes of those who acquired them also survived and reproduced. Applying this theory to many aspects of human life, Blackmore brilliantly explains why we live in cities, why we talk so much, why we can't stop thinking, why we behave altruistically, how we choose our mates, and much more. With controversial implications for our religious beliefs, our free will, and our very sense of "self", this provocative book will be must reading any general reader or student interested in psychology, biology, or anthropology.

Over a decade ago, Richard Dawkins, who contributes a foreword to this book, coined the term "meme" for a unit of culture that is transmitted via imitation and naturally "selected" by popularity or longevity. Dawkins used memes to show that the theory known as Universal Darwinism, according to which "all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities," applies to more than just genes. Now, building on his ideas, psychologist Blackmore contends that memes can account for many forms of human behavior that do not obviously serve the "selfish gene." For example, a possible gene-meme co-evolution among early humans could have selected for true altruism among humans: people who help others (whether or not they are related) can influence them and thus spread their memes. Meme transmission would also explain some thorny problems in sociobiology. From a gene's point of view, celibacy, birth control and adoption are horrible mistakes. From a meme's point of view, they are a gold mine. Few or no children free up the meme-carrier to devote more energy to horizontal transmission to non-relatives (monks and nuns the world over figured that out long ago), something the gene is incapable of. With adoption, memes can even co-opt vertical transmission between generations. Blackmore posits that, in modern culture, meme replication has almost completely overwhelmed the glacially slow gene replication. Well written and personable, this provocative book makes a cogentAif not wholly persuasiveAcase for the concept of memes and for the importance of their effects on human culture.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Richard Dawkins gave us ``memes,'' the cultural analogue of genes; Blackmore gives us memes in spadeshumans as meme machines. For Dawkins (who writes a foreword to this volume), the meme is a metaphor for the ideas, myths, customs, works of art and science that are passed along in human cultures as unitary and competing entities. In Blackmores formulation, they have become real and serve as an explanatory tool par excellence. Selfish memes, like selfish genes, are interested in their own perpetuation and so, in tail-wagging-the-dog fashion, have guided natural selection (via genes) to favor big brains, development of language, religion, sexual selection, altruism, urbanization, etc. The operation that makes all this memetic evolution possible is the human ability to imitate. In some ways, it's entertaining to follow Blackmore's train of thoughteven anticipating how she can shape memes to show why we like to gossip or why we love sex. She's a good writer, and her enthusiasm is infectious (like the memes themselves, which she and other memeticists liken to viruses). But in the end, one is left with reasonable questions: Is that all there is to life? Where is the proof? In many instances, the ``evidence'' is speculative or laid out as a predictive proposal. The author, a lecturer in the School of Psychiatry at the University of the West in England, even denies the existence of ``self''hence the title. But, clearly, not everything humans do or think comes by way of imitation. Humans are products of variation and chance, mutations, climate, disasters, and moments of opportunity. To counter all this by saying that there are more memes ``out there'' competing for a place in human brains borders on the magical or mystical. So, enjoy the imaginative leaps and some pithy summaries of current theories and controversies regarding human evolution, but don't substitute the meme bathwater for the gene baby just yet. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

A distinguished psychiatrist from Martinique who took part in the Algerian Nationalist Movement, Frantz Fanon was one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history. Fanon's masterwork is a classic alongside Edward Said's Orientalism or The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and it is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers. The Wretched of the Earth is a brilliant analysis of the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in effecting historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of post independence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other. Fanon's analysis, a veritable handbook of social reorganization for leaders of emerging nations, has been reflected all too clearly in the corruption and violence that has plagued present-day Africa. The Wretched of the Earth has had a major impact on civil rights, anticolonialism, and black consciousness movements around the world, and this bold new translation by Richard Philcox reaffirms it as a landmark.

Frantz Fanon (1925 -- 1961) was an author from Martinique, essayist, psychoanalyst, and revolutionary. He was perhaps the preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

“The writing of Malcolm X or Eldridge Cleaver or Amiri Baraka or the Black Panther leaders reveals how profoundly they have been moved by the thoughts of Frantz Fanon. —The Boston Globe

“Have the courage to read this book.”—Jean-Paul Sartre

“This century’s most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism.” –Angela Davis