Public Lectures at the London School of Economics

April 22, 2005 12:12 AM

Public Lectures at the London School of Economics are mostly free and cover a wide variety of topics. For those of you that can't attend, there's a list of transcripts from most of the lectures.
posted by mikeanegus (17 comments total)

Wow, this is very comprehensive. The lecture with Simon Baron-Cohen and Simon Blackburn must have been pretty nifty. I'm reading B-C's powerpoint on autism right now. Thanks!

Whoever's in the city should check out the lecture by Kim Sterelny on April 28. He's fascinating.

I thought something was amiss when I saw that one of the lectures was recently given by Gareth Evans - he was a young and brilliant philosopher of mind who died of cancer not too long ago - but it turns out that this is some other Gareth Evans. Odd name to be repeated.
posted by painquale at 1:39 AM on April 22, 2005

Excellent - thanks.
posted by TimothyMason at 1:50 AM on April 22, 2005

Is Autism an Extreme of the Male Brain?
Speaker: Ali G's brother!

thanks for the post
posted by matteo at 2:16 AM on April 22, 2005

painquale, that'd be the Australian Gareth Evans - former foreign minister, diplomat, member of several UN councils, and generally considered by both sides of politics here to be an expert in international relations and all-round smart cookie.

Pity about his little affair, though...
posted by Pinback at 2:18 AM on April 22, 2005

I recently attended an LSE lecture by Javier Solana, the ex-chief of NATO, on the creation of a NATO- or EU- sponsored "humanitarian rapid reaction force" of volunteers that could be deployed to crisis areas (think ethnic strife or natural disaster) in place of the military. It was very enlightening.
posted by LondonYank at 2:29 AM on April 22, 2005

For those who don't know, Simon B-C is Ali G's dad. Heheh.
Also, if you've ever been to Wales you'll know that Gareth Evans is a very common name!
posted by cushie at 2:46 AM on April 22, 2005

cushie, I thought he was his brother -- are you sure?
posted by matteo at 2:52 AM on April 22, 2005

Cultural Perspectives on Cities: from Georg Simmel to Italo Calvino - *swoon*

Great link! Wish I could attend these, they sound like so much fun.

(Some of the transcripts have really bad typos though - OCR errors?)
posted by Lush at 3:02 AM on April 22, 2005

cushie writes "For those who don't know, Simon B-C is Ali G's dad. Heheh."

Cousin.
posted by orthogonality at 4:37 AM on April 22, 2005

You're not going to get apple-cheeked Rob Lowe there and then proceed to make fun of "the colonies", are you?
posted by thanotopsis at 5:50 AM on April 22, 2005

More institutions that attract great lectures should do this, but, on the other hand, in academia there's something nice about knowing your talk isn't going to be published. For various reasons (wanting to keep the breakthroughs relatively under wraps until properly published, the kind of criticisms broad-brush work-in-progress might be open to), I could see some speakers thinking this isn't a good thing. (Granted, these are "public lectures" for a different audience than what I mention about scholarly publication. But I imagine the line is often fuzzy between the content of the two. Also, presumably you could opt out if you're that squeamish?)
posted by Zurishaddai at 7:11 AM on April 22, 2005

> More institutions that attract great lectures should do this...

Does anyone have similar lists from other places?
posted by pracowity at 7:43 AM on April 22, 2005

pracowity writes "Does anyone have similar lists from other places?"

I believe Don Knuth's Christmas lecture videos were mentioned at MetaFilter about nine months ago.
posted by orthogonality at 7:46 AM on April 22, 2005

Well I can see I'm going to get a lot done today...
posted by ZenMasterThis at 8:14 AM on April 22, 2005

They don't publish audio of these lectures, do they?
posted by ph00dz at 10:01 AM on April 22, 2005

Cousin.

So it seems.
posted by mr.marx at 10:15 AM on April 22, 2005

Re: Audio - I've been to these LSE lectures before and they often record them. I'm sure that you could obtain a copy if you wrote a nice letter, or even better we could campaign for them to be published on the web. If you do succeed in obtaining the audio please do upload it somewhere and post the link!
posted by drewlondon at 6:23 PM on April 24, 2005