Based on a video lecture. Niccolò Machiavelli is perhaps one of the most controversial philosophers in history. And at the same time, as someone once accurately put it, he is almost unique among philosophers in needing no introduction: say the name and everyone immediately knows who you mean. A celebrated diplomat, military adviser, one of the founders of political philosophy in the modern sense of the word. He lived from 1469 to 1527. ...
Based on a video lecture. Video lecture: YouTube On April 24, 1929, Albert Einstein received a telegram from New York rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, and the question was direct: “Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. Fifty words.” Einstein used fewer than half his allotted words: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.” ...
Transcript of a public lecture delivered in St. Petersburg, 25 May. Video lecture: YouTube The goal of my lecture is to move through the main stages of the history of atheism from antiquity to the twenty-first century. A word on terminology first. What I do is secular, non-confessional religious studies. We present facts; we do not evaluate them from the position of personal belief or unbelief. A religious scholar can be a believer or not — what matters is that belief is left at the laboratory door. ...
Based on a video lecture. Video lecture: YouTube Friedrich Nietzsche. How much is contained in that name. He stood out sharply from other nineteenth-century thinkers: in the radicalism of his views and in his literary talent equally. He remains, to this day, a deeply contradictory figure. In the twentieth century everyone wrote about him. Some demonised him, others heroised him. Some considered him a prophet, a messiah, a genius who had revalued all values and opened the path to a great future. Others considered him simply a mentally ill person. As usual, the truth is somewhere in between: in a certain period of his life Nietzsche did become genuinely ill in psychological terms. ...
Based on a video lecture. Video lecture: YouTube This is the first lecture in a series on the history of atheism and freethought in world culture. The topic has interested me for several years, and I have the relevant background: an MA in the history of religion from St. Petersburg State University. The series will not follow a strict chronology — it is an account of what I have learned, in the order I find most compelling. ...