Exhibition: Philosophy in the Open

The first video on this page is perhaps the most impressive in this sub-collection. A fuller title, according to its production notes, would have been ‘Is bodily identity sufficient and/or necessary for personal identity? Is memory sufficient and/or necessary for personal identity?’ It marks a step up in production standards. We get a Neil Sedaka song (omitted here for copyright reasons), better animations, and actors in staged scenarios that include Locke’s lesser-known thought experiment, The Princess and the Cobbler. Rosalind Hursthouse is the star, and her enjoyment transmits to the other participants, especially in the discussion at the end. Even today, this could serve as a useful visual introduction to the Williams-Parfit dialectic of that era, with staged brain-swapping complete with bandages.

In the second video, the only person allowed to challenge Wittgenstein is Wittgenstein, a dominating influence on British philosophy of that period. Ossie Hanfling gives a characteristically lucid introduction to Wittgenstein’s early picture theory of meaning and explains how various elements of Wittgenstein's later philosophy hang together to 'show the fly the way out of the fly bottle'. 

In her essay for this exhibition, Azita Chellappoo refers to ‘the impact of colonial legacies on philosophical thought and pedagogy’. A stark example of this has had to be cut from the Wittgenstein video. The removed segment lasts around half a minute and would have appeared at [0’54”], between “But what is language?” and “Words and sentences have meaning”. In it, Hanfling says:

"Suppose you were an explorer and had come across an unknown tribe. It seems obvious that they are talking to one another. But are they? Perhaps they are just making those sounds because they feel like it. What would make them language? Language has to be about something."

Interspersed with this we hear voices and see video of a scene in a modern African village. The language is a dialect of Yoruba, which has some 45 million speakers, mostly in Nigeria, a British colony until 1960. A man at an outdoor meeting is half heard saying (in Yoruba) that someone needs to have something explained to them.* Yet the viewer is meant to interpret this as members of an “unknown tribe” potentially just “making sounds because they feel like it”. The footage came, it turns out, from a BBC Horizon documentary. Its use in the original OU Philosophy programme is a prompt to reflect critically on what was driving other stock examples from that period of Anglo-American philosophy, such as Quine’s ‘gavagai’, Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ or Ned Block’s ‘China Brain’.

OU Philosophy stopped making videos like these. In units of pedagogical value per pound spent, successful videos would have seemed wasteful. AV production budgets put enormous pressure on the rest of the module. The chief merit of television programmes, in fact, was as advertising to potential recruits. Perhaps video will return now it costs so much less and now that technology makes it so much more flexible a teaching tool. Watch this space.

[Please note that sections of audio and footage have been removed from the videos on this page for rights purposes]

Alex Barber
Alex Barber is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University

** Thanks to Abiola George for this information.