my mind on books

In France they watch philosophers talk on TV – as discussed in a recent book called Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television by Tamara Chaplin (found through this blog post, see also publishers’ website)

By the end of the twentieth century, more than 3,500 programs dealing with philosophy and its practitioners—including Bachelard, Badiou, Foucault, Lyotard, and Lévy—had aired on French television. According to Tamara Chaplin, this enduring commitment to bringing the most abstract and least visual of disciplines to the French public challenges our very assumptions about the incompatibility of elite culture and mass media. Indeed, it belies the conviction that television is inevitably anti-intellectual and the quintessential archenemy of the book.

Meanwhile in the US we take the opposite approach, issuing a spate of pop-culture-related “…and philosophy” books (such as The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer), as recently discussed in Philosophy Now.