Well, two weeks in a row that I have been able to listen to what had been my regular podcasts. That is a good start for the new year that hopefully I can maintain. Lots of great things to listen to this week covering topics from historical novels, free speech, how we think to plays as great literature and more.

Peikoff.com Episode 355

Dr. Leonard Peikoff answers questions on:

• historical novels
• dealing with a friend who has been validly accused of pre-meditated murder
• which is most important, work or sex?
• confusion about love
• if rights are based on reason, if animals are shown to have reason, would they also have rights?

Philosophy in Action

Dr. Diana Hsieh and Greg Perkins answer questions applying rational principles to problems of everyday life. While they have not posted the podcast from Sunday yet, and I have not listened to it, the scheduled questions were:

• the importance of credibility
• third party payments in medicine (Diana talked about issues I raised in a post from a couple years ago.) This was a really excellent discussion on the effects of third-party payments (i.e. insurance whether private or government).
• insulting with racial epithets

As soon as the episode is published I will update the link.

The Yaron Brook Show

Last week Dr. Yaron Brook kicked off his new BlogTalkRadio show last Wednesday with a special 1 hour edition, What Happened to Freedom of Speech, in which he discussed the killings by Islamic jihadists of 12 people, 10 of whom worked for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, a magazine well known for publishing images critical of Islam and of Mohammed in particular.

His regular broadcasts will take place at 11:00am Eastern time, 8:00am Pacific time, on Mondays. This week’s episode is titled Free Speech Under Fire. While the 2 hour program focused quite a bit on the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the response to them, Dr. Brook also talked about other threats to free speech, primarily from government. He also discussed what would be the proper response to this sort of attack, the first part of which would be for governments to remove all restrictions on free speech including laws against such things as “hate speech.”

He ended on a positive note with two personal movie recommendations that emphasize the pursuit of values and the role of the individual in attaining them: Whiplash and The Imitation Game.

In addition to these podcasts, I have also been listening to some lectures as well.

• Harry Binswanger’s Psycho Epistemology II (or Applied Psyhco Epsitemology) – I am really enjoying this two part lecture on how the subconscious and conscious mind work together and things you can do to help them work better. Definitely worth the $2.50 to download it. (There is also a Psycho Epistemology I available on the estore.)
• Leonard Peikoff’s History of Philosophy – Based on his lecture series which is available from the Ayn Rand e-store in two parts,here and here, that include Q&A sessions), the Ayn Rand Campus has 22 multimedia lectures giving an overview of philosophy from Ancient Greece to Ayn Rand. This weekend I listened to lecture 13 which covered the philosophy of the Renaissance and the birth of modern science. Fascinating stuff especially when you can see the parallels between then and today, especially in regards to the view of morality and religion.
• Also from Leonard Peikoff is a lecture series titled Eight Great Plays where he discusses in depth 8 plays from the point of view of their being great literature. The first two lectures cover Antigone by Sophocles and Othello by William Shakespeare. I found both these lectures very intriguing, enough so that I have downloaded a couple versions of both plays to read as I don’t believe I have ever read either one.  This course appears differently than most of the other courses in that they are not multimedia presentations but rather are the audio recordings of the sessions along with the Q&A. Where the lecture material is found for most of the other courses there is only the quiz. (This course is also based on a series of lectures that is available from the Ayn Rand e-store.)