Žižek!

"Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian-born political philosopher and cultural critic. He was described by Terry Eagleton as the "most formidably brilliant" recent theorist to have emerged from Continental Europe. Zizek's work is infamously idiosyncratic. It features striking dialectical reversals of received common sense; a ubiquitous sense of humour; a patented disrespect towards the modern distinction between high and low culture; and the examination of examples taken from the most diverse cultural and political fields. Yet Zizek's work, as he warns us, has a very serious philosophical content and intention. Zizek challenges many of the founding assumptions of today's left-liberal academy, including the elevation of difference or otherness to ends in themselves, the reading of the Western Enlightenment as implicitly totalitarian, and the pervasive skepticism towards any context-transcendent notions of truth or the good. One feature of Zizek's work is its singular philosophical and political reconsideration of German idealist philosophy (Kant, Schelling and Hegel). Zizek has also reinvigorated Jacques Lacan's challenging psychoanalytic theory, controversially reading him as a thinker who carries forward founding modernist commitments to the Cartesian subject and the liberating potential of self-reflective agency, if not self-transparency. Zizek's works since 1997 have become more and more explicitly political, contesting the widespread consensus that we live in a post-ideological or post-political world, and defending the possibility of lasting changes to the new world order of globalization, the end of history, or the war on terror."
from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

I am no fan of Žižek nor do I agree with many things he says, but his influence is certainly impossible to ignore. This is a documentary dedicated to Žižek.

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A Brief Introduction to Idealism

George Berkeley

Idealism is a monistic doctrine that says the world is only mental, and all of the reality exists as ideas.

Here is a video that explains what idealism is under 2 minutes.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Language

"Considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein played a central, if controversial, role in 20th-century analytic philosophy. He continues to influence current philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and language, perception and intention, ethics and religion, aesthetics and culture. There are two commonly recognized stages of Wittgenstein's thought — the early and the later — both of which are taken to be pivotal in their respective periods. The early Wittgenstein is epitomized in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. By showing the application of modern logic to metaphysics, via language, he provided new insights into the relations between world, thought and language and thereby into the nature of philosophy. It is the later Wittgenstein, mostly recognized in the Philosophical Investigations, who took the more revolutionary step in critiquing all of traditional philosophy including its climax in his own early work. The nature of his new philosophy is heralded as anti-systematic through and through, yet still conducive to genuine philosophical understanding of traditional problems."

--- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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Each video clips span around 3 to 5 minutes. The speaker is Michael Sugrue, and the lectures are taken from Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition, Part V.

Questions to considers about this lecture are:
1. Does philosophy require absolute certainty?
2. Why is philosophy so concerned with language?