philosophy – Page 9

LibriVox: Pygmalion’s Spectacles by Stanley G. Weinbaum

SFFaudio Online Audio

Pygmalion’s Spectacles was first published in 1935 in the aptly named Wonder Stories magazine. Four years after it’s first publication it was reprinted in Startling Stories as a “classic” and it was placed in their “Scientifiction Hall Of Fame.” It was reprinted again in Fantastic Story magazine in the Spring 1955 issue. Three magazine publications is a rare occurrence for any SF story. So, what makes this story special?

Well, this tale of utopia, immortality, and romance, is also, most probably, the very first story to feature the concept of virtual reality.

Here’s the description from the Wikipedia entry:

A comprehensive and specific fictional model for virtual reality was published in 1935 in the short story Pygmalion’s Spectacles by Stanley G. Weinbaum. In the story, the main character, Dan Burke, meets an elfin professor, Albert Ludwig, who has invented a pair of goggles which enable “a movie that gives one sight and sound […] taste, smell, and touch. […] You are in the story, you speak to the shadows (characters) and they reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it.”

And though the ideas may be pioneering, the plot of Pygmalion’s Spectacles is very similar to Fitz-James O’Brien’s The Diamond Lens, itself an excellent SF tale. The tone of their respective endings differs, but their plot, in which a man falls in love with an intangible woman, is straight out of the Greek mythology that Weinbaum alludes to. And they both use science, rather than magic to get to their respective endings.

There is, I should also point out, a LibriVox |MP3| recording of the Metamorphoses by Ovid, a 2,000 year old poem featuring the myth of Pygmalion.

Pygmalion's Spectacles by Stanley G. Weinbaum

Here is a |PDF| made from the Pygmalion’s Spectacles publication in Fantastic Story. And here are two LibriVox versions (my advice, go for the first one):

Pygmalion’s Spectacles
By Stanley G. Weinbaum; Read by Gregg Margarite
1 |MP3| – Approx. 43 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: January 13,2009
He put on the glasses and fell in love with a dream… First published in Wonder Stories, June 1935.

Pygmalion’s Spectacles
By Stanley G. Weinbaum; Read by Chrystal Layton
1 |MP3| – Approx. 45 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: November 17, 2007
He put on the glasses and fell in love with a dream… First published in Wonder Stories, June 1935.

Pygmalion’s Spectacles illustration by Lumen Winter (from Wonder Stories, June 1935):
Pygmalion's Spectacles - illustration by Lumen Winter

Pygmalion’s Spectacles illustration by Virgil Finlay (from Fantastic Story Magazine, Spring 1955):
Pygmalion's Spectacles - illustration by Virgil Finlay

Painting of Pygmalion and the statue by Jean-Baptiste Regnault:
Jean-Baptiste Regnault - Pygmalion

[Thanks to Tim at The Drama Pod for the reminder]

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Partially Examined Life: Candide by Voltaire and No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by “some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it.” I started following it after SFFaudio Podcast #115 when Anne, from the Anne Is A Man blog, suggested I try it. Since then I’ve been listening to it pretty steadily. Their most recent two podcasts are a great jumping on point for those only casually interested in philosophy as they are both discussions of philosophical novels.

Episode 62 is a discussion of Candide by Voltaire and Episode 63 is a discussion of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men. I’ve read the first book, and now I want to read the second. Indeed, there are very few podcasts that give me the same kind of pleasure, an intellectual pleasure, as recording our own READALONGs. These last two podcasts are such.

Here are the specifics:

Episode 62: Voltaire’s Novel “Candide” |MP3|
On Candide: or, Optimism, the novel by Voltaire (1759). Is life good? Popular Enlightenment philosopher Leibniz argued that it’s good by definition. God is perfectly good and all-powerful, so whatever he created must have been as good as it can be; we live in the best of all possible worlds.

Episode 63: Existentialist Heroes in Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men” |MP3|
On philosophical issues in McCarthy’s 2005 novel about guys running around with drug money and shooting each other, and about fiction as a form for exploring philosophical ideas.

Podcast feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThePartiallyExaminedLife

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Dog And The Horse by Voltaire

Aural Noir: Online Audio

One of the earliest detectives in history, or at least the history of literature, is Zadig. Zadig is the main character of Voltaire’s philosophical novel Zadig; Or The Book Of Fate – An Oriental History. I stumbled across it’s existence while reading an old issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in which one chapter was featured under the title The Dog And The Horse. The brief editorial introduction, and some further researches on my own, assert that Zadig in this chapter may have been the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s C. August Dupin!

I can sort of see it too, for The Dog And The Horse shows a kind of giant first step in an evolutionary process of the detective – seeing his marriage turn sour Zadig turns to the study of nature for his joy. A kind of passionate interest in the world is necessary for both the scientific detective and the more Sherlockian sort of detective.

The story is damn funny too.

The Dog And The Horse
By Voltaire; Read by Lucy Burgoyne
1 |MP3| – Approx. 13 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: January 31, 2008
First published in 1747.

|ETEXT|
|PDF|

Posted by Jesse Willis

Lit2Go: The Philosophy Of Composition by Edgar Allan Poe

SFFaudio Online Audio

I’ve been looking for an audio copy of this wonderful 5,000 word essay, and I’ve just found it. In this 27 minute long reading of The Philosophy Of Composition Edgar Allan Poe explains the creation of The Raven – showing the necessity of all of the components of the poem – and in the process, explaining what’s wrong with most fiction – Poe argues that most composition (poetry and prose) is typically aiming at the sufficient and not the necessary.

|MP3|

The full text is also HERE.

Posted by Jesse Willis

CBC: Ideas: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, and its author Stephen Greenblatt, are the subject of the latest CBC Ideas podcast. The Swerve is the story of the recovery of a lost epic Roman poem, by Titus Lucretius Carus, titled On The Nature Of Things – Greenblat makes the case for it being a work that changed the world, made it modern, by bringing ancient philosophy into an age ready for enlightenment. It’s an absolutely fascinating discussion. Host Paul Kennedy, as usual, shows that Canadian tax dollars can be used incredibly well when put in the right hands.

The poem in question is available as a LibriVox audiobook HERE.

And The Swerve: How the World Became Modern is available from Recorded Books (narrated by Edoardo Ballerini).

Here’s the book’s description:

Renowned historian Stephen Greenblatt’s works shoot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. With The Swerve, Greenblatt transports listeners to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature Of Things from certain oblivion.

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic by Lucretius – a beautiful poem containing the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

The copying and translation of this ancient book – the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age – fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare, and even Thomas Jefferson.

Here’s the |MP3|

Podcast feed: http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/ideas.xml

Posted by Jesse Willis

Beyond Lies The Wub by Philip K. Dick

SFFaudio Online Audio

There’s probably always going to be a place in my heart for Philip K. Dick’s Beyond Lies The Wub. It was my first PKD short story. It’s very short and usually runs just over fifteen minutes read aloud – which I frequently do. And even though Dick claimed only to have been paid $15 for it*, I find it absolutely invaluable.

I’ve felt that way from the very first time I heard it, back in 2006. The narrator, Mac Kelly, delivered the story at a measured pace that really sang the story to me.

Since then I’ve become even more enamored with Gregg Margarite’s rendition, recorded for LibriVox in 2009.

And that’s the one I’d like to share with you. I share it with you now, but you can share it with your friends too because, not only is the story public domain, the audiobook itself is too!

Beyond Lies The Wub
By Philip K. Dick; Read by Gregg Margarite
1 |MP3| – Approx. 16 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: May 4, 2009
|ETEXT|
The slovenly wub might well have said: Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools. First published in Planet Stories, July 1952.