[HN Gopher] A Philosophy Professor's Final Class (2023)
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       A Philosophy Professor's Final Class (2023)
        
       Author : dotcoma
       Score  : 26 points
       Date   : 2024-07-13 20:22 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
        
       | voisin wrote:
       | http://archive.today/KSoMH
        
       | voisin wrote:
       | (2023)
        
       | throw0101d wrote:
       | Discussion at the time:
       | 
       | * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34270650
        
       | erulabs wrote:
       | Somewhat related, I fell in love with a pretty obscure philosophy
       | lecturer who uploaded his old Princeton lecture series to
       | YouTube, dr Micheal Segrue. Genuinely the best overview of
       | various philosophers I've ever seen. Highly recommended. I left a
       | comment on a video with 4K views and he liked it.
       | 
       | Two weeks later a message was posted on his channel by his
       | daughter that he had passed away.
       | 
       | We need to listen to old folks a bit more than we do. The latest
       | isn't always the greatest.
        
         | ImPleadThe5th wrote:
         | Do you have a link per chance?
        
           | erulabs wrote:
           | https://youtu.be/Rc0K4WhNOvY
           | 
           | Enjoy!
        
         | theF00l wrote:
         | Michael Sugrue was exceptional and I am grateful to have
         | watched his lectures.
         | 
         | His lecture on Marcus Aurelius has the most views on YT. I also
         | recommend his lectures on Nietzsche and Sartre/Heidegger.
        
       | ViktorRay wrote:
       | I feel like philosophers were better before social media and the
       | internet.
       | 
       | Nowadays people like this philosopher would have gotten sucked
       | into the time vortex of Twitter, Mastadon, Reddit, etc and wasted
       | their lives away.
       | 
       | But back then they spent all their time in libraries actually
       | reading important stuff. Much better for the brain and
       | intellectual development. Not just the brain development of
       | children but adults too
        
         | theF00l wrote:
         | I completely understand your point but would like to point out
         | that quite a few philosophers were peculiar characters that did
         | spent a lot of time outside the library too. Sometimes debating
         | (eg Athenians), sometimes political activities (eg Sartre),
         | some spending time on theology too (Kierkegaard, Aquinas).
         | 
         | I think for many philosophy was a way to understand life and
         | the world around them.
        
       | twoslide wrote:
       | In addition to a touching personal tribute, this article also
       | illustrates the jobs crisis for PhD graduates. Someone who
       | started his career in the 1950s works into his eighties, teaching
       | from hospital, and dies less than a week after retiring. This is
       | not a good model, and a good argument for mandatory retirement
       | ages.
        
         | erulabs wrote:
         | It's only a bad model if he didn't love what he did for a
         | living. Otherwise I find it quite inspiring.
        
       | twoWhlsGud wrote:
       | Thanks for posting that - great read. And reading it took me back
       | when I was lucky enough to take Richard Rorty's class (entitled
       | something like Philosopy from Kant to 1900) my freshman year at
       | Princeton. I remember the impact of his lectures about James and
       | pragmaticism - I was a bit of a smart alek - convinced that there
       | was only one right way of looking at the world and I (of course!
       | :) knew what it was. James' Pragmatism and his concept of the
       | cash value of ideas - the idea that you could ask how thinking
       | and believing about the world in some particular way might be
       | valuable to someone (in particular) as a part of measuring its
       | "objective" value (it was a long time ago and I may be not giving
       | a fully accurate report here of what James/Rorty actually said)
       | had a big impact on me.
       | 
       | Rorty left the Philosophy department (for Virginia, I think)
       | pretty soon after that class - due to the kind of disagreement
       | between the analytical philosophers and him rumored to be at the
       | root of the Bernstein/Yale break (Rorty didn't believe that logic
       | was the core of philosophy).
       | 
       | And Rorty was a gifted lecturer with an extremely dry sense of
       | humor. I think I laughed more often in that class than in any
       | other that was to follow.
        
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