December Philosophy Reading Recommendations! 

I love these reading list segments. It's like getting a a course syllabus to a class you actually care to learn about. Many thanks, Olly!

awesome i am a professor of philosophy and use your site in my classes. good stuff. appreciate it chris

Thanks for the recommendations! :) We're about to start a new year... are there any philosophers who discuss the importance of the artificial / imaginary boundaries we create (new years, state/country lines, birthdays, etc)?

wow haha. Writing my dissertation on Prisons, currently reading Discipline and Punish. Very interesting views.

Love the smooth jazz at the end :P

Props for 100 000 subs my man :D, and yes! New book to acquire for Christmas :D

Really waiting for the foucault video :)

thank you man, awesome channel.

Way to go Ollie! You passed 100k subscribers!

These seem like a great bundle of readings to get to after reading Capital Vol. 1! Marx talks about all of these concepts: the disciplinary apparatus, protestant values (e.g. "abstinence") contributing to the hegemonization of capitalist ideology, and of course the transition from slavery and feudalism to capitalism vis-a-vis so-called primitive accumulation. In particular, I'm definitely going to pick up Foucault's book ASAP. Thanks for the suggestions :)

I was led to PhilosophyTube (and am trying not to watch it all at once) via PBS Idea Channel, and appreciated not only the thoughtful and honest literary critiques, but also the inclusion of the phrase "links in the doobley-do." Now to go pledge to your Patreon to feed my knowledge addiction....

I am still reading Jared Diamond`s "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and I`m halfway through. Its difficult for me to read the book in english because its my first non-fictional book I read in a foreign language. But maybe "How the west came to rule" would be good too. I should write it on my list.

it's been several years since I've read Weber but I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'd recommend anyone at uni who can take a sociology course on Weber it's great for what it does cover and the criticism of Weber.

Please talk about philosophical poetry. I've been reading a collection of Percy Shelly's works and it's surprising just how dense it is with revolutionary imagery.

Hi Olly, can you please recommend books for an absolute beginner of philosophy? I want to start from the basics. Should I start with Camus, Nietzsche and the like? I do have a couple of philosophy books but I dont want to dive into the middle of the concepts because it might be hard to get a good foundation. Thankyou in advance!

Hey Ollie, I know you didn't focus as much on Foucault in this video, but have you come across The New Jim Crow? It's a more contemporary look at (U.S.) mass incarceration and how it's become racialized. It seems to tie the two threads of this video together nicely, that of state power and capitalism/slavery. I'm curious how you would see this kind of research interact with Foucault and biopower. Great video, looking forward to seeing more!

Do a video on the groundhog day!

i was reading '' reading foucault with marx''

the dictators handbook is a great read.

In analogy to Weber you should read 'The New Spirit of of Capitalism` by Chiapello and Boltanski

Have you read Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals?

please do a video on justice vs peace.....

It's nice to see you getting around to Weber! An interesting thing about the origins of capitalism and slavery, is IRRC he argues in the last section his "The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations" that one of the prime reasons capitalism failed to develop in the Roman republic/empire was largely *because* of their reliance on slave labor. Being able to sell back the products you have your workers produce to the workers themselves is key to an expansionist economy? A least that's how I understand his argument.

This was a good video

I feel like you would look a bit like a younger Michael Fassbender if you had a beard or something, haha! Anyway thanks for the great videos! :)

"You know what else is down the bottom of the screen? The s̶u̶b̶s̶c̶r̶i̶b̶e̶ unsubscribe button." Fixed that for you, I've already subscribed thank you very much! I love your work Olly, keep it up. =]

'both Luther and Calvin attacked profit-making and deplored the "materialism of the age."' From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun

On capitalism, read Ellen Meiksins Wood: The Origin of Capitalism. It's excellent.

YES Foucault is A GENIUS

Why do you need a Parker inkwell?

If you're looking at books covering the emergence of Capitalism you might be interested in Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. She examines how the conflation of Modernity and Capitalism in the West led to the development of markets and demands for surplus value. It's top shelf stuff.

Im 12 and want to be a philosopher when I'm older, what kind of stuff should I do?

Olly, are you familiar with either 'Racecraft', by Barbara and Karen Fields, or 'The Invention of the White Race', by Theodore Allen? The first is short and the second is long (two volumes, actually), but both argue for an interesting thesis: contrary to our usual way of understanding things, according to which racism came about due to humans recognizing and discriminating based on race, in fact it was (and is) the practice of racism that initially created and sustains the social illusion of race. I don't know if you'll ever want to do an episode on racism and race, but if you do they'd make fine texts to look into. (My apologies if you've already made such an episode, I'm fairly new to the channel.)

is it pronounced "vay-ber," "vaver," or just plain "weber." I've heard so many people pronounce it in so many different ways. Which one is correct? and does it even matter? Let me know in the comments below! Like and subscribe, thanks for reading

Re: slavery and capitalism, I'd say that religious doctrines (to the extent that Weber's thesis is sound) were more particular to the development of capitalism than slavery per se, since lots of societies practiced slavery but capitalism arose in just a subset of those societies (and those societies had certain religious beliefs). Although (1) I'd be interested to know whether the nature of slavery in pre-capitalist societies was different in a relevant way; and (2) how the development of capitalism changed the nature of slavery compared to another society that didn't become capitalistic but still practiced slavery.

Thumbs up for the Doobly-Doo!

*Psst* (Read Graeber [Please])

💖

Do you have any original work, or do you strictly pursuit truth by reading what others have said?

Weber was saying that AMERICAN capitalism, in particular, had influence and roots in Calvinism, not capitalism as a whole. (I think) but organized religion certainly has always been immensely influential in practice for all capitalism.

I am soo atractted to your knowledge lol

I love when people who speak english say bourgeois ^^

VAY-ber.

i hope i can be successful like you instead of gnawing my parents life from the inside out.

I giggled every time you said 'Webber'. I think Weber's deal was not wanting rich white guy guilt after Marx and Engel's going on about exploitation. so of course he's not gonna mention slavery!

Is it me or is sound a little low on this one?

Not to be an asshole, but the first "e" in Weber is pronounced as a long e vowel. It's funny you're speaking of Weber and Foucault out of all people this week. I literally took an exam on them just today...

Your contention, at least with respect to your critique of Weber, that conflates capitalism and slavery as integral demonstrates that your position is at best skewed and at worst specious. A position that may be rooted in the regressive and revisionist liberalism that infects our universities and not your own short career in independent individual academic reading and research. Simplistically, capitalism may be viewed as both a historical evolutionary and revolutionary economic system that shifted the paradigm of state controlled and state owned means of production and their operation for profit to the privet sector (public). In the context and perspective of Weber, capitalism was an economic system that reached a maturation point in the factories and mills of England and its fruition in the European market system under the post enlightenment protestant aesthetic and the precepts of common law. As your academic career continues to mature and you engage in historiography with primary sources outside and beyond the current tide of regressive and revisionist "research" products of this generation - you may realize that slavery and resource exploitation are integral to imperialism and present in every culture in human history and not simply a manifestation of Anglo European/western culture. I enjoy your video posts. It gives me hope that the uncomplimentary stereotypes that paint your generation are unjustified. However this video post gave me pause as I caught a whiff of an undercurrent that seems to be the product of university and your generation. Please prove me wrong. As an academic or an actor please don't be YALWA (yet another liberal white apologist).

nişancıoğlu, it was even funnier then weber imho! but it's totally cool, it's not like you speak these languages after all. why do yall judge him guys, no judge be understanding please

Genocided? Is that a verb now? I thought genocide was committed against them and they were massacred...

It's pronounced "Veyber" b/c he's German :)

funny thing, none of these books on capitalism seem to be economics books. There seems to be an implication that capitalism came after Protestantism. I am not sure why would anyone assume that. There was money, property rights, trade, etc, for millennia before Christianity came along.

"i just probably butchered that last name" Well i don't know if you did, but you should probably take the time out and check the pronounciation before you record the video. It's just that a lot of people write off non-aglo last names and frankly it comes across as lazy and also a tad ignorant. I know you mean the best, so that's why i thought you'd appreciate this comment.

Not sure what's changed since you began but recently you've less been 'giving away your degree' and more just spouting generic left-wing opinions. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not entirely honest with your initial mission statement if all the education you provide is incredibly biased.

Sorry, seriously have to disagree with you there about slavery and capitalism. While they certainly have much connectivity, and influenced each other, slavery is considered a separate institution within historical contexts, and to mix the two "institutions" (a historical concept) would be a grieve mistake. Capitalism can exist without slavery, therefore slavery is irrelevant to a discussion of the origins and nature of capitalism (maybe not to how it IMPACTED society, or it's implementation, but throwing slavery into the mix is like looking at communism's origins and then using the soviet union, that's dumb. Communism is Marx, Russia is irrelevant to that.