While exercising this morning listened to a lovely lecture by Darren Staloff on Mandeville's Fable of the Bees on my Teaching Company course on The Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition. This has to rank as one of the great turning-conventional-wisdom-on-its-head stories of all time in which Mandeville argues against conventional wisdom and over two thousand years of philosophical thought that public virtue (the common good) emerges through the interaction of private vice (self interest).
I've blogged frequently about the Teaching Company. Currently I'm doing The Great Minds on video DVD in the mornings when I exercise, and I'm doing Introduction to Greek Philosophy (Roochnik) in my car on audio while I drive around town. I've got to do the Greek Philosophy course, because my older son Max is taking a Greek philosophy class at Northwestern and he was asking me questions about Platonic dialogs I hadn't read.
No comments:
Post a Comment