Skip to main content

Cornel West Teaches You How to Think Like a Philosopher

Cornel West has never shied away from disagreement, which is one of the qualities that has kept him prominent as a public intellectual for decades. Another is his intense, even lyrical style of expressing those disagreements — and everything else he has to say besides. In his academic career he’s built a reputation as not exactly the average professor, as his former students at Harvard, Yale, Princeton University, the University of Paris, and other schools have experienced first-hand. Now, online education platform Masterclass has made his distinctive pedagogy available to anyone willing to pay USD $20-per-month membership price with its brand new course “Cornel West Teaches Philosophy.”

“This class revolves around three fundamental questions,” West says in the trailer above. First, “What does it mean to be human?” Second, “What are the forms of love that constitute the best of our humanity: love of truth, love of goodness, love of beauty?” Third, “How does community, tradition, heritage shape and mold our conceptions of who we are as human beings?”

This material, one senses, will be less straightforwardly practical than in some other Masterclasses; but then, is there any viewer to whom it could be irrelevant? Whatever our particular field of endeavor, each of us is, as West puts it, “a featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creature, born between urine and feces, whose body will soon be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.”

Yet in West’s view, we can also reach toward higher things. This requires the proper attitude toward wisdom, the love of which is at the root of the very term philosophy: hence the lessons in West’s Masterclass dedicated to “How to Think Like a Philosopher” and “How Philosophy Serves Humanity.” Later he goes deeper, and at one point even “unsettles the mind and empowers the soul by illuminating the delicate interplay between hope, optimism, and despair.” Carrying on the expansive tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, West has created a role for himself that encompasses the work of academic, activist, public intellectual, and even music-lover. For his dedicated listeners and readers, his lesson on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and the “jazz-like conception of philosophy” it encourages will surely be worth Masterclass’ price of admission alone. Explore the course here.

Note: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.

Related Content:

Watch Cornel West’s Free Online Course on W.E.B. Du Bois, the Great 20th Century Public Intellectual

Daniel Dennett and Cornel West Decode the Philosophy of The Matrix

Neil deGrasse Tyson Teaches Scientific Thinking and Communication in a New Online Course

Philosophy for Beginners: A Free Introductory Course from Oxford University

How to Teach and Learn Philosophy During the Pandemic: A Collection of 450+ Philosophy Videos Free Online

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Cornel West Teaches You How to Think Like a Philosopher is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/30EJOgw
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more