I host a philosophy discussion group on Saturday mornings as part of the NYC Philosophy and Psychology Readers Community. Below I list books I have read with this group as well as video discussions from my YouTube channel the Hungry Math Professor. We also held our first philosophy conference on Saturday, September 28th at Pier 57 in Chelsea which was a great success! The first video is a recording of the lecture I gave at this conference.
The dream of absolute certainty, of truth with a capital T, has tantalized humanity for millennia. Some find it through dogmatic declaration, but a stubborn few have searched for it in its purest form by attempting to establish a solid philosophical foundation on which to rest certainty on. Perhaps no one is more famous for this attempt as Bertrand Russell in the 19th to 20th centuries. In the Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead, he attempted to establish all of mathematics as an outpouring from pure logic. In logical Atomism, he attempted to give an ontology which is linked to logic as a universal language capable of providing a ground for truth. During this time, Russell's doctoral student, Ludwig Wittgenstein, as part of his dissertation, gave his own attempt of establishing truth via a different version of Logical Atomism. Later in Wittgenstein's life, we see a complete rejection of this original dream with a philosophy which declares truth to be relative due to the limitations of language. Reflecting on this shift in thinking gives us clear insights into the progression from modern to postmodern thought in the history of western philosophy. In this lecture we will explore the history of analytic philosophy, focusing specifically on Russell and Wittgenstein, as we reflect on the role of language as a tool for establishing truth.
Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (video)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (video)
Against Method by Paul Feyerabend (video)
Web of Belief by W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian (video)
Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (video)
Psychologism and Behaviorism by Ned Block (video)
Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing (video)
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences by Eugene Wigner (video)
A Mathematicians Apology by G. H. Hardy (video)
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay (video)