Hi all
Here are all the suggestions that have been emailed to me over the last few days.
Cheers
Havi
Film clips for use in teaching first year logic / critical thinkingþ
This one is a bit untraditional, but sometimes I end my intro to philosophy class with a scene from Mel Brook's History of the World. the scene is from early on in the Roman Empire chapter - Mel Brooks as a "stand up philosopher," (to which Bea Arthur responds...). I screen the "stand-up philosopher" scene followed by the comedy routine Brooks later performs, as a way into the question of "what, exactly, is it that we do when we try to give philosophical expression to our ideas?"
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Have you considered looking for clips from the crime drama television
series 'Numb3rs'?
Google will tell you more about it than I could, but essentially a
Professor of Mathematics works with his FBI-agent brother to help solve
crimes.
Virtually every single episode has several short, highly stylised, clips of
the mathematician character, or sometimes some others, explaining either a
mathematical or philosophical concept as relevant to solving the crime
investigation, or presenting arguments why e.g. a counterintuitive method
or result is true/of use. This usually happens against a background of
sceptical listeners ('how can such abstract theorising help solve crime?')
- I thought it would be of use because some of your students may be a bit
sceptical to the import of e.g. classroom logic to 'real' arguments, and
also in this series they do present the ideas often as thought experiments,
analogies or counterexamples, which, as a philosopher, I always found
interesting and relevant.
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rozenkrantz and guidenstern have some nice examples - perhaps more science than logic.
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Fun popular films that come to mind that contain, as I recall, a fair
bit of moral argument include Hitchcock's "Rope", Zinnemann's "High Noon" and
Powell and Pressburger's "A Matter of Life and Death" (I'm thinking especially
about the courtroom scenes towards the end).
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Law Abiding Citizen. Do a search on its contents. It is very captivating; deals with morality, the use of logic and legal philosophy. Though language content can be intense, it does provide the key concepts for critical thought.
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Any episode from the TV series in the U.S. 'House!' They are absolutely brilliant and have philosophy writers as part of their overall team if you can get your hands on any of them.
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One thing that springs to mind (probably because I saw it yesterday) is the latest episode from the Big Bang Theory (comedy TV series), season 4, ep 3: in this, a character who is a physicist is debating with his girlfriend, who is a neuroscientist about the primacy of neuroscience vs physics. The physicist points out that a g.u.t would explain everything in the universe, including neuroscience, the neuroscientist counters that a g.u.t would be the product of a human mind and thus vindicate neuroscience, whereupon the physicist retorts that this is an instance of psychologism, which was denounced by Frege. It struck me that one rarely sees arguments like this in a tv series.
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Also, there is a nice little cartoon called "To Be," which raised the
personal identity problem with the whole tele-port machine scenario. A
bit more on the metaphysics side but still useful for critical
thinking, because students will have opposite intuitions on whether
the 'copy' is the same person or not, and you can ask them to
formulate arguments for their conclusions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc
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There are some good arguments this film: Gregory Peck in ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039416/
In fact, it’s quite wordy and stagy like ‘12 Angry Men’. Same period. It could easily be put on as a stage play. Deals with Anti-Semitism and hypocrisy and pragmatics.
Some clip here. But weirdly the most extensive clip have been dubbed into German!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYDIWrcevkQ
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This may not be exactly what you're looking for, but I have used the Monty
Python one called the argument clinic, especially for first years, giving
them a model of how argument ought not to proceed (through mere
contradiction), but that - ideally - it ought to proceed from principles.
The link is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y
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Thank you for Smoking (2005).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427944/
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Monty Python is a fertile hunting ground...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teMlv3ripSM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgcSVZoVe5U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP0sqRMzkwo&feature=related
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Do you know the book Philosophy goes to the movies? If not, it may provide lots of good ideas... There is also a good debate about tipping in Reservoir Dogs, if you don't mind the swearing.
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I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but I often use this Abbott and Costello clip to illustrate equivocation/sophistical reasoning:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtOjUVyBl8A
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There are a number of scenes in Werner Herzog's Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, most obviously when Kaspar is questioned by a logician about double negatives.
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I used the argument between Jules and Vincent near the end of "Pulp Fiction" over why Jules won't eat pork. And (still with Tarantino) the "tipping" argument in "Reservoir Dogs" could be worth a look. (A vastly more awkward - because of the subject matter and wildly un-PC idiom - debate in "Pulp Fiction" is the opening argument, also between Jules and Vicent, over whether Marcellus Wallace was justified in (allegedly) throwing Tony Rockamora off a balcony for (allegedly) giving Mia Wallace a foot massage. The way that Vincent defeats Jule's claim that foot massages can be non-sexual by asking for one from him is a fine touch.)
It's a much longer (and remarkable, and not in the least funny) scene, but around the middle of "Land and Freedom" (about the Spanish Civil War) there's a sprawling debate between people who've recently captured a little town, and some of the locals, on the question of land ownership.
The meeting of Romeo and Juliet is also kind of argument-like (in their verbal flirting debate over whether his kissing her hand is rude or not). It comes over pretty well in the Baz Lurhman film - it's been a while since I watched any of the other film versions.
A less well known complement to the "Witch" scene in "Monty Python & The Holy Grail" is on the soundtrack album, which follows the excerpt from the film with a mini-lecture analysing the logic of the scene. It's very funny, but may do more harm than good, because the analysis fairly quickly collapses, and contains some bizarre mis-information.
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What about the argumentative interchanges between William of Baskerville and Bernardo Gui in “The name of the rose”?
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In case people missed it because it got mis-named, I mentioned John Carpenter's Dark Star. The scene near the end where an astronaut steps into space to hold a philosophical debate with a talking device which is about to detonate itself. He begins by asking it if it's 'willing to entertain a few concepts'. Device: I'm always receptive to suggestions. A: Fine. Think about this, then. How do you know you exist? D.: Well, of course I exist. A: But how do you KNOW you exist? D: It is intuitively obvious. A: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have that you exist? D: Hmmm. Well... I think therefore I am. A moment later the device remarks that this is fun, but regrets it doesn't have enough time to think about it, because it has to detonate in 75 seconds, but our astronaut persists...
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How about one of the most obvious examples, Jim Garrison's derision of the Magic Bullet Theory in JFK?
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There's an excellent scene with a professor of logic in Herzog's _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_
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I showed my first year logic students a clip from the film "labyrinth" which talks about the "knights and knaves" puzzle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWw9y8UHs9c
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the show 'House MD' has arguments about ethical concerns regarding medical decisions or procedures in most episodes. (Sometimes arguments about different, more general issues as well.)
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There's an episode of Friends ("The One Where Everyone Finds Out") which Wiebe van der Hoek used to demonstrate dynamic epistemic logic in a presentation he gave in Bristol a few years ago. The plot goes something like this:
Monica and Chander are in a relationship (call this "x").
Joey learns x and Monica and Chandler learn that Joey knows x.
Rachel and Phoebe learn x, independently.
Rachel and Phoebe learn that Joey knows x, and Joey learns that Rachel and Phoebe know x. (All three of them come to have common knowledge of x.)
Rachel and Phoebe exploit their knowledge to play tricks on Chandler and Monica.
Chandler and Monica suspect that Rachel and Phoebe know x.
Chandler and Monica learn (from Joey) that Rachel and Phoebe know x, and Joey learns that Chandler and Monica now know that Rachel and Phoebe know x.
Chandler and Monica exploit this knowledge to counter Rachel and Phoebe's tricks.
Rachel and Phoebe suspect that Chandler and Monica have learned that Rachel and Phoebe know x.
Rachel and Phoebe learn (from Joey) that Chandler and Monica know that Rachel and Phoebe know x.
They end up using their knowledge of the other group's knowledge to play a game to see who will admit x first, even though they're all aware that everybody knows x already. At one point Phoebe says "God, they thought they can mess with us! They're trying to mess with us?! They don't know that we know they know we know! Joey, you can't say anything!" and he replies "I couldn't even if I wanted to."
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The animated clip wherein the Professor talks to Peter and Susan about Lucy and Edmond from "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" has always been a favourite of mine. It starts at about 4:51 in this clip and goes until about 6:42.
http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/animation/watch/v20482362dNetC2NY
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Here is one more clip from Hitchhiker’s Guide:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ctoT7ezTE&feature=related
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Eli Cohen's "The Quarrel" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105200/
It's not the greatest film, and the performances are quite wooden, but the characters spend the bulk of the film arguing their post-Auschwitz positions.
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There are many good examples from the Colbert Report (American TV show). One place is here:
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=156067
Here’s a discussion of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy in the American TV show The West Wing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL_vHDjG5Wk
And there’s also an argument at 8:20 in this episode of The Office (American version):
http://www.hulu.com/watch/135124/the-office-new-leads#s-p1-so-i0
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i would try to use clips from the old tv series of Sherlock Holmes. In there you can find several kinds of models of reasoning (inductive; evidence or analogy based; deductions)
You can have a look to what I suggest here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pq_M-HTIfs
Depending on what you have in mind there might be something useful in TV series like CSI.
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I have used clips from Jon Stewart's Daily Show and also Stephen Colbert (if I see something timely), but I am in the U.S. and most of this material is about American issues.
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The movie "Clue," and indeed many other detective thrillers, will have a scene in which the evidence for the murder attribution is laid out by the protagonist in the form of an argument.
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there's a pivotal moment teaching the relativity of morality in cluzot's "le corbeau"/"the raven" (which incidentally has, since 1943, been debated as either collaborationist or pr-resistance)
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This is of more use if you are doing work with quantifiers...
In describing how he knew that Taylor and Cornelius would go to the Forbidden Zone, Dr. Zaius explains (if memory serves me): "Only an apostate would go to the Forbidden Zone." Zaius thereby affirms the consequent (using the implicit premise that Taylor and/or Cornelius are apostates. (from Planet of the Apes)
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I can’t help feeling that there is plenty of material in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Here’s one clip in which an argument is outlined, although it probably is a load of dingos kidneys.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcncPpQ8loA
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I always use the classic Abbott & Costello routine “Who’s on first” when discussing the use/mention distinction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfmvkO5x6Ng
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The Cowboy in Mulholland Drive gives Adam Kesher some classic Stoic advice: he questions whether Kesher really believes in the Good Life, distinguishes between what is in Kesher's control and what is not ("This is the Girl!"), and alludes to the Stoic image of the dog and the cart ("There's sometimes a buggy ...").
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There are a number of scenes in Werner Herzog's Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, most obviously when Kaspar is questioned by a logician about double negatives, but not only there.
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The breakfast scene in Pulp Fiction, a demonstration of using false and spurious arguments to intimidate. The scene works like a rigged show trial, where the outcome is fixed before it even starts.
Clip here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6csp2fZt2E&feature=fvw
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A scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater?) - The logic of the stolen gears on the bike (Woody Harrelson)
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MEMENTO - the restaurant scene; on revenge and memory
MULHOLLAND DRIVE - meeting the cowboy sequence
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN - been-putting-it-up-your-whole-life dialogue
Best wishes
Havi
---
Dr Havi Hannah Carel
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy
Department of History, Philosophy and Politics
Faculty of Creative Arts, Humanities and Education
University of the West of England
St Matthias Campus
Oldbury Court Road
Fishponds
Bristol BS16 2JP
UK
Tel.: +44 (0)117 907 9359
URL: http://www.uwe.ac.uk/hlss/politics/staff_hcarel.shtml
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________________________________________
From: Film-Philosophy [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jan Koster [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 12 October 2010 09:54
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: New thread: Film clips for logic teaching
MEMENTO - the restaurant scene; on revenge and memory
MULHOLLAND DRIVE - meeting the cowboy sequence
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN - been-putting-it-up-your-whole-life dialogue
Jan Koster
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Film-Philosophy
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