Lecture Downloads
Here you can get a sense of the substance and tenor of the material contained in the entire spectrum of the audio material from the following introductory lectures:
A Brief History of Western Philosophy - From Socrates to Hegel outlines the key assumptions of the
theoretical approach of "MediAnalysis"
in the context of the fundamental divide in the Western tradition between "idealism" and "materialism."
This lecture will be useful to those who know nothing of the Western tradition,
while its innovative approach - especially its clear explanation of the often mysterious Hegel -
will be challenging and provocative to those already familiar with that tradition.
The Introduction to Political Economy lays out the multi-faceted understandings of politics and economics that inform and underlie the comprehensive theoretical and historical lectures in World Economy series.
These later topics include:
Neo-Classical / Monetarist / Keynesian / and Long-Wave theories;
and Liberalism / Socialism / and Nationalism as ideological frameworks of political economic interpretation and action.
We then shift to a historical review of the Great Powers and the World Economy,
beginning with the Ancient Greeks, moving through the 19th century and the British Empire and its conflicts with Germany,
before then analyzing in depth the US-centered world economy of the post-WWII era -
including a structural analysis of the role of oil - and concluding with today's Age of the Internet.
In the Introduction to Western Cultural History, we examine the substantive and methodological differences between that subject and both Political Economy and Theory,
while making clear how those two frameworks comprise an indispensable context for making sense of the lectures in the Western Culture series that follow.
Those lectures will begin with the Italian Renaissance and move systematically through the Northern Renaissance and Baroque to the age of Louis XIV,
examining then the rise and dynamics of liberalism in England, France, America and Germany in Part I.
In Part II of the Western Culture series , we examine the 19th century cultural movements of Realism / French Impressionism and Existentialism,
before systematically tracing the pre-WWII 20th century movements of European Modernism / Dada & Surrealism / and Nazism.
We then analyze the dynamics of post-WWII Global Modernism and the still-resonant 60s Cultural Revolution,
which was succeeded by the confusion of the post-1973 oil-crisis - and rise of cable tv - that together ushered in the different stages and varieties of Post-Modernism.
Finally, in early 2007, David was asked to give the Annual Lecture to the Board of Trustees of the Gleason Library of the University of San Francisco.
He traced in detail the disturbing dynamics of The Millennium Crisis - a concept he developed in the fall of 2001 -
when he argued in an 18 CD lecture series that September 11 was, in fact, the third stage in a multi-dimensional structural predicament confronting both the US and the rest of the world -
one that began with the crash in tech stocks in early 2000, and continues until the current day.
Here he briefly re-caps the main contours of the Millennium Crisis lecture series,
and argues that the main thesis propounded in the fall of 2001 -
that the key problem is the low level of public discourse everywhere in the world -
has been sadly vindicated in the years following,
and that this negative situation has only worsened, especially, although not exclusively, in the United States.
The material in these lectures are for the private use of anyone who downloads them, and are not to be re-distributed without acknowledgement of the source. Any academic or intellectual use of the concepts contained within must be properly acknowledged and footnoted
|
