The New York Sophist

Still struggling through the question of whether or not YouTube is a good place to host lecture videos for American students who often have to pay thousands of dollars anyway to take a course. I am sure I would resent having to watch advertisements before or during a video that provided important discussion of concepts for a course I had to take.

Vimeo is a much better option but Vimeo is expensive – at least the way I’d like to use it. I have the plan that I’m willing to pay for, which limits your uploads to about 5GB a week. I always run out of space right before I get the last video up for the week so that’s not really a problem. It’s just a really, really annoying thing that regularly happens.

Here are the new videos:

A discussion of Boudry, Paglieri, and Pigliucci, “The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life” Argumentation 29, 4 (November 2015)

A discussion of Kenneth Burke, “The Virtues and Limitations of Debunking” from The Southern Review, v. 3, issue 4 (Spring 1938).

There are a few other ones on my YouTube channel. I’ll be posting more every week as I find and/or make ones that I think are more relevant to the general audience here.

By now regular visitors to the blog should be aware of my twice a year sojourn to Cornell University to introduce a fairly good number of Cornell students to the art of rhetoric. Of course since they are alive human beings in their 20s who are in college they have been practicing rhetoric for quite some time and quite successfully. But naming a thing is often a transformative moment.

It’s become a pretty fun and cool ceremony for me of all people to return to the site of Herb Wicheln’s career and introduce a bunch of people to the formal theory and study of rhetoric. It’s odd that nothing of his legacy survives there outside of some archive which I suspect doesn’t get called on much. One day I’ll have to go take a look.

I always try to account for and capture these talks as I’m interested in how they vary. YouTube has a good number of the one’s I’ve recorded. Here’s the most recent one, delivered February 15th, and it’s not really edited that much. I took out some of the sidebars and other random conversation during the class break and stuff like that. I tried to preserve the conversation as it was, both the mistakes I make in the talk and the discussion afterwards. It’s audio only, but everything is here. I wonder if people prefer the audio to the video. It seems an audio lecture is easier to take in than a video one sometimes (plus we are all burned out on video chats).

Thoughts and comments welcome!