An introduction to John Stuart Mill's important and influential, On Liberty.

John Stuart Mill: On Liberty

An introduction to John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism

John Stuart Mill: Utilitarianism

In this video, I take an introductory look at the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction. I look at the basic tenets of Derrida's thought, and his relationship with Ferdinand de Saussure and Jean-Jacques Rosseau in Of Grammatology.

Introduction to Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction

In this introduction to Foucault I look at the poststructuralist philosopher’s influences and context (Nietzsche, Levi-Strauss & Sartre, among others), and summarise his position through his three most influential works, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. Foucault’s thought takes two approaches that are loosely related – the archaeological and the genealogical. The most important concept is that power and knowledge are intimately linked.

For Foucault, different time periods – what he calls epistemes – have different underlying assumptions, codes, and rules, mostly unconscious or at least structural, about how to think about things in the world.

Foucault analyses the way we're discipline by power in the same way. In her introduction to Discipline and Punish, Lisa Downing puts like this: Foucault analyses the ‘means by which the body is made to conform to the utilitarian ends of social regimes thanks to the operations of disciplinary power.’

Finally, the central question outlined in vol. 1 is that of the ‘repressive hypothesis'. The narrative dominant in the 70s argued that where Westerners were once sexually oppressed, we have become slowly more liberated, more liberal. Is it really that simple? Like the rest of his work, Foucault questions this progressive, teleological narrative.

Introduction to Foucault

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker argues that human violence has declined across history. One part of this argument is that life in a state of nature – before civilization – was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Amongst other things, Pinker argues that hunter-gatherers, tribal societies, were – and are - much more violent than later more civilized societies. Both Pinker and Thomas Hobbes argue that the state and its monopolisation on force and authority have pacified our darker human nature.

This is a common trope:

In the 1996 book War Before Civilization, for example, archaeologist Lawrence Keeley argues that prehistoric violent deaths probably ranged from around 7-40% of all deaths. He says: ‘there is nothing inherently peaceful about hunting-gathering or band society’.

In 2003, Steve LeBlanc and Katherine Register claimed in their book Constant Battles that ‘everyone had warfare in all time periods’
Biologist Edward Wilson ‘Are human beings innately aggressive?’ Yes. Coalitional warfare is ‘pervasive across cultures worldwide’

John Tooby and Leda Cosmides declare that ‘Wherever in the archaeological record there is sufficient evidence to make a judgment, there traces of war are to be found. It is found across all forms of social organization—in bands, chiefdoms, and states.’

The book Demonic Males argues that ‘"neither in history nor around the globe today is there evidence of a truly peaceful society’.

Pinker has written that ‘Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong.’

Are – and were – hunter-gatherers really that violent? Brian Ferguson and Douglas Fry argue no. Looking at chimpanzees, bonobos, Otzi – the iceman – and a range of much more insightful ethnographical and archaeological evidence is the best way to find out.

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Steven Pinker & Human Nature: Nasty or Nice?

The Then & Now podcast: audio versions of the Youtube videos on philosophy, history, and politics.

Steven Pinker & Human Nature: Nasty or Nice?

Then & Now

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