This series is a great example of why Roderick is one of the great American explicators of modernist/post-modernist philosophy. For everyone complaining that this initial lecture is too relaxed in its pace and doesn't cut to the point; give him time. By the time he gets to his perspectives on Derrida and Baudrillard, you'll wish he had 8 hours per lecture. One of the great teachers of the 20th century, R.I.Power Rick.
🌵LOST🤮CAUSE🌵 I’ve been watching and rewatching these lectures for years now. I’m so glad he left these as a legacy. What a great human being “and a real character.” RIP
@Qimodis A pure negation that attaches we know not where. An 'impolite particle' with a negative valence, the shortest sentence a man can write and still convey meaning, however little. You have achieved quite a lot less than 'Qimodis wuz 'ere.' You make no point, no pun intended.
Hi. Here's one for you: if you want hope, you have to be prepared to die for it. If you place your hope in the hopeless, you will be wasting your life. So, it pays to study the world, ideology, science and culture as deeply as you can. Don't get derailed by the immediate. Understand how capitalist, class society is in a state of inner contradiction and can't last for ever.
He's like what I want Texas Rangers to be like. "Listen here slick. You'd better show some respect to the working Proletariat or else you've got a goddamned problem on your hands."
I'm so glad I found this man's lectures. I can tell right away he's one of the greats. I take it he's gone now. Boy wouldn't it be amazing to have had a prof like this in school. I would have followed him home every night or bought him dinner so we could talk.
Thanks for making the video material accessible. The man had a great sense of humor, both feet on the ground and a gift for separating the wheat from the chaff. Above all, he was a great teacher!
I have no idea where my comments are going Keith and I can't quite recall what they were. More sententious prate, is my best guess. I apologise for being so self-indulgent. Sarcasm is not the lowest form of wit; laughing when someone bumps their head is, and that is ancient and ancestral and doesn't count. I was not careful enough and that equates to not respectful. Seems to me we're very similar in our outlook, seems like we've no real argument. Here's to you
I am re-watching this series once a year at minimum. Always with a new thought. Now I see how Neuromancer is a delicious paradox. Poet wrote about the highly instrumental future. This is why Neuromancer will always be a special book. There is no school to teach you how to write Gibson :)
i would love to hear what rick has to say about our lives now considering the internet and social media have increased our information-overload tenfold.
It's double edged. I've learned a huge amount from the Internet. But it saps real world action. It is now full of material stemming from the establishment designed to divide us into increasingly smaller and more manageable alienated groups.
What an awesome man- how he disseminates ideas are so awesome. I started with Baudrillard and now I am binge watching and will continue to rewatch these lectures... Thank you so much for the upload!!
This guy is like Zizek only in that he's a philosopher that makes philosophy seem less pretentious and he's a Marxist. The way the two guys look at the world is very different, not in an opposing way, but quite different. I just felt I should say this because I love both philosophers and I think it trivialises their work by saying they're similar.
@Qimodis Of course it can seem pretentious, maybe a phrasing that wouldn't irritate you is saying that they have made it more accessible to people with no philosophy background or ones that come from a lower class with less time to fully delve into these topics. For a lower middle class factory worker, philosophy could totally be pretentious no?
I'd say Rodgers is closer to Marxism than Zisek. Rodgers appears to have been pole axed by the bringing down of the Soviet Union, like many left intellectuals. But a genuine guy.
To anyone reading the comments: The big difference between Rick Roderick and Slavoj Zizek as PUBLIC SPEAKERS is that Rick's intention is to inform people about ideas whereas Zizek is more interested in entertain the crowd and/or moving them into action. Philosophically, Zizek is at pains to open up philosophical discussion back to historical development but also to intervene in the problems of today. Rick Roderick seems to share the same concerns but compared to Zizek's work his approach lacks psychoanalytic and structuralist element to it. Also less sex jokes and discussions about Christianity.
I see what you're saying, but you might consider Rick's first Teaching Company lecture series: Philosophy and Human Values, in which Rick gets deliciously political and discusses Christianity at length--even going so far as to devote an entire lecture to Kierkegaard.
Keith Pieterse Anyone who reaches the status of a celebrity should be considered, by definition, overrated. But Zizek is a legitimately insightful philosopher and social critic. Just read his more philosophical works, like Sublime Object.
Right! Can I please get Southern effeminate male voice for my Google maps voiceover. Like a Todd Chrisley, "Danggit, now ya gotta make a u-turn cause ya don't listen...I swear y'all don't know whether to scratch your watch or wind your ass"
What if Roderick’s distaste with communism is just a cultural symptom as well. And if we’re being meta what if my pointing that out is a symptom of something else within me.
To Rick and many others from the south of the US I must offer my humble apologies. From here in Australia it is easy to surmise that that part of the US is a wasteland populated by historical sins that stubbornly resist modernity and devoid of intellectual inquiry. So sorry. What a great stimulating mind. I will sure be revisiting these lectures.
He was born & raised in West Texas. Unfortunately, he never received tenure at the Carolina institute he taught for so long, very hurtful. But his students & The Teaching Company, knew differently.
it's really weird how this lecture isn't on audible despite it being part of the great courses series which audible has... maybe because he's talking about post-modernism and thats a touchy subject these days?
Does anyone know what Rick did in the years 1993-2002? He was apparently fired from Duke in 1993, and then nothing is known about him except that he died in 2002...
He taught at minor schools, mostly. He split with his wife, though they never actually divorced, and eventually began work on an autobiography that was left very incomplete. The information isn't out there because there really isn't much to know.
i believe his contract was up fter 8 years and was denied tenure for various reasons as many don't get tenure and move on. he simply fulfilled his contract and moved on to other places. please correct me if i am wrong. also he was involved in some student protests which may have ticked off the admins. of course i have just read some of this stuff scattered online. i don't know for sure any specifics.
RR offers a coherent thesis which he conveys well, to see his understanding accessible. What he there understands and conveys, works for me. I think we then need to distinguish between religion and god. Religion is subject to the suspicion he speaks to. However, just as the masters of suspicion have come to their respective theses as Foucault might describe, or Neitzche or Heidegger might exemplify; just so have earlier thinkers and workers of language won through to theses fulcrumming in the won to idea of god. In the movement from that latter creation of theses, to the exploitation of such theses to mediate religion and all attaching to religion, the integrity of original creation is distorted and ultimately lost. That underlying truth is found again in people of faith that RR can praise. MLK rather exemplifying how subscription to a god-centred frame of reference, can see the contemporary grappled with, where the individual of faith (if akin to MLK) ontologically works through what the inventors of the god-thesis worked through to create that thesis origonally. I see RR as likely to not reject this distinction.
This is more referring to the last video in the series on Baudrillard and postmodernism but I wonder what Rick would have thought about Occulus Rift if he was still around or even a tv show like True Life: I am Amish or something like that. Regrding the latter, would the people living an amish life be equally as immersed in the hyper-real as urban dwelling young adults like myself/ ourselves?
With Facebook (oculus) and Microsoft (and probably many more corporations in the coming years) meshing into ‘Meta’’s metaverse, we’re right on track towards this virtual hyper-reality. I’m young and will probably see the 22nd century.. but I’m not so sure I’d even want to :/
@@hunter-pq1de yep i feel exactly the same, however I am likely older than you. I have a 14 year old, so I am concerned for his (and your) futures. It's getting closer to a version of the matrix.
I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated
Nothing can keep up with Rick Roderick, but if you also like Podcasts I can recommend “Very Bad Wizards”, which is actually by a philosopher and a psychologist.
40:12 Dante passed through the gate to hell and came upon (and did NOT write) the phrase, "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate", most frequently translated as "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here".
Lol just because an author wrote doesn't mean they think it. The opposite may eu just as true. What is written above the door of Plato's academy? Plato used Socrates as a mouth piece as did Shakespeare the fool. Esoteric reading is a hermeneutic contrary to this video.
So how can one understand the self with the complexities of society in some ways dictating the meaning of self??? Or is it that we find meaning in self through the complexities of society? If I make sense at all
@@408sophon i'd never heard of Mark Fisher (not a huge You Tuber, but just listened to his video, ''The Slow Cancellation of the Future'' and found he's a man after my own heart. Thanks for the intro. I think Rick would not disagree with him either.
it's two completely different approaches. You must consider Zizek has the psychoanalytic insight far more developed than that of Rick. Also, Zizek is still alive and has witnessed lots of changes.
When Rick talks about why people hated Clinton I finally understood what happend to me when Obama became president in 2008 for the first time. I was full of hope that something would change in the world, for the world, for me, but nothing has changed, and I was pissed. I never understood really that I was pissed for the lack of change because the hope portrayed by his “Yes we can” catchphrase turned out to be nothing more than a catchphrase. And I never blamed him for it because I already understood back then what it was and how it worked.
@4:29 Rick misrepresents Tarski here. Tarski was really concerned with mathematical truth (formal languages more generally), not metaphysical truth. All Tarski was saying is that in mathematics truth is always relative to axioms. This has nothing to do with real world facts and metaphysical notions of truth. It is only to the extent Tarski was implying all is mathematics that Tarski was wrong.
Re: William Ellis post. The Charles Anderson course is available from the University of Wisconsin section of iTunes U: deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/wisc-public.1994055437
The modern suspicion levied at religious or spiritual rhetoric gains a lot of steam, in the mind of the accuser, from the projection of the repressed junk of the accuser himself.
Mr. Roderick seems to warm to his subject in a very leisurely manner. Listened to the first 15 minutes of this, and felt that he had shared virtually nothing to shed light on his topic of "The Self Under Siege." I think it's really the LISTENER/VIEWER under siege, in a kind of boredom game--who can hold out the longest to engage with the elusive subject?
+Seneca Just wait til you get to the part he says "There's just too much information. Too much of it." Still trying to polish this stone in the rough. At Marcuse so far.
You really have to be into what he has to say about the subject rather than him actually presenting the subject in any holistic way. I noticed it too but since I'm on the same page he is I enjoy these lectures immensely. He really is kind of a West Texas hick and an outsider who embraced many of the postmodern thinkers. Maybe the only one in West Texas to do this. lol RIP Rick.
@19:00 this is a terrible framing. Workers in the global south do not _necessarily_ need to sell US consumers anything, that's the myth or mercantilism or "export led growth". Whatever goods people in the global south can produce they can better use for themselves, the only reason they need to export is to pay for critical imports, so they only "need" to sell their domestic surplus. And even then, that is only to keep their FOREX rate stable, if they cannot export enough then they can tolerate pass-through inflation indefinitely, it is disruptive, but need not degrade their standard of living, and can over time increase their output so they later do have sufficient surplus to export to pay for their imports, now without the pass-through inflation. Also, finally, the developed nations can always _choose_ to provide free aid, so the critical imports needed are not being held to ransom against that poorer nation's lower domestic output rate. That's called treating people in other countries like our global brothers and sisters. Why would you not want to help them?
Pat Buchanan wants to return to slavery? I like listening to this guy but he's turning me off with some of his ridiculous statements. And in an earlier lecture he thought Jessie Jackson was a great guy. Maybe Jessie is an OK guy personally, but what's his philosophy? : use his connection to an historic figure to shake down corporations and profit from racial tensions.
Rick is fos in many ways. He's a real human being with all the failings of real humans. There used to be a fair number of real humans at one time believe it or not. (Don't believe it)
I am sure that is a joke. We all know Buchanan tells the truth about race and this is forbidden, so we joke about him. He was virtue signaling with Jesse Jackson. Nobody intelligent takes Jesse seriously.
“Self” has devolved into individualistic narcissism. Maybe people need to know more about their ancestry and their collective destiny and thus duty to their descendants.
Damn. Your comments are the textbook examples of never getting out of middle school. God, you’re dumb. With each comment, you get even dumber. And arrogant. Lol.
![Rick Roderick on The Masters of Suspicion [full length]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
