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Workout Reload
I keep an iPod that I use for my morning workouts. While sometimes I listen to music, a lot of times I enjoy listening to college lectures.
My wife has tried this and doesn't enjoy it -- she says she has a hard time concentrating on the lecture while exercising.
From my standpoint, I never listened to teachers much anyway, and it takes telling me about ten times for something to sink in, so it's no harm, no foul. Might as well have people trying to raise my awareness while I'm exercising. It certainly beats staring at television or the wall.
And the new material promises to be very interesting!
First we have "Herodotus: The Father of History". I didn't know much about Herodotus before a few years ago, and when Professor Elizabet Vandiver of the University of Maryland introduced me to him as part of another lecture series, I was fascinated. Here was the first guy that we know of who had the idea: why not start writing some of this stuff down? He's the father of history, of the newspaper, of blogs -- you name it.
Why did he do this? And more importantly, why did it take so long for somebody to come up with the idea of having a written history? How did this idea go down in the ancient world? And really interesting: what idea did Herodotus have of how to write history? Today we have historical fiction, historical drama, historical revision -- all sorts of styles of writing about history. Some authors focus on nations. Some on personalities. Some authors view all of history as part of some greater philosophical struggle. How did Herodotus view this? How did historical writing start?
Secondly we have "Great Philosophical Debates: Free Will and Determinism" by Professor Shaun Nichols from the University of Arizona.
I've been interested in determinism versus free will for some time. I think there are major problems with a deterministic world, yet we seem to be inexorably moving towards one. Can there be a reconciliation between determinism and free will? I think so, but I'm not sure. It should be an interesting listen.
It should be fun! And I'll report back here for all of you guys that don't have to time to go through it on your own.
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