Cornel West - Folly Presto (Part 3 of 6)

This third lecture presents Prof. West’s consideration of early modern philosophy, focusing on Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly (1511), as a response to an era that saw devastating religious warfare, plagues, and famines, and the onset of European imperial conquests. The great public intellectual, Erasmus of Rotterdam, directed his classic work to the sheer absurdity, indeterminacy and frailty of human societies. Also discussed is Montaigne, whose self-explorations, including his essays “Of Cannibals” (1580) and “Of Coaches” (1588), were among the first philosophic reflections on the barbaric European colonization of the New World. As Prof. West argues, Erasmus and Montaigne were both path-blazing exemplars of blues, swing and improvisation in philosophy, facing dark folly with a free-style soul-craft.

The original video can be found here, and the description given above was written by the producers of the lecture series at the University of Edinburgh and provided in the video description.

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