Dialectical Education

"One of the curious things about our educational system, I would note, is that the better trained you are in a discipline, the less used to dialectical method you're likely to be.  In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations.  We have to put an immense effort into training kids out of being good dialecticians."
--David Harvey

Time

Big thanks to Melissa Pincus who passed along this interesting clip on technology and present-/future-orientation.

Perspective

Thanks to Diana Hajjar for finding this memorable shot from Slumdog Millionaire.

Lacan in a Minute?

Many thanks to Andzhela Keshishyan for this fun and informative one-minute overview:

The Sublime According to Ashley Erikson

You may in fact find this clip sublime (if you watch all of it):

Miles Burnyeat on Plato

Alain Badiou

"Today's great question is not the critique of capitalism, on which more or less the whole world is in agreement with regard to the appalling material injustices, the thirty million dead in Africa because they do not receive medications, the atrocious disparities in the planet, and so on. All of this can be referred back to capitalism, in the wish for a capitalism that is better, a more moderate capitalism, and so on, without advancing an inch. Because the real question is not there, it does not lie in the negative and verbal critique of capitalism. The real question is that of an affirmative proposition regarding democracy, as something other than the consensus on the parliamentary form of politics. This is what the paradox that [Zizek] point[s] to tries to conceal, in other words, that the truly risky philosophical imperative, the one that really poses problems for thought, is the critique of the democratic form as we know it. That is the heart of the problem. And it is altogether more difficult than acknowledging along with everyone else the extent of capitalism's injustice."

Philosophy in the Present