aspects of western philosophy, modulate lecture 8. This lecture will be concentrating on the theme modern philosophy or rather it aims it introducing some of the major concerns of modern philosophy, its background, the context in which modern philosophy became relevant in Europe, all these aspects will be very briefly covered by this lecture. So, when we talk about modern philosophy refers to a unique period in the history of European thought and this is very unique or this is very special because we have already seen some of the very important contributions of ancient Greek thought and then from the ancient Greek thought, we have discussed afterwards we have discussed the contributions of medieval philosophy or the middle ages, philosophy in the middle ages, where philosophy has become subservient to the theological or religious concerns or it has become theology, there is no independent philosophical thinking available for almost 1000 years, which this period is designated as the dark ages. And when we come to modern period, there is a kind of reemergence of free philosophical rational thinking, so this is what we designate as modern period in European thinking. And one very important feature that is visible during this age is the diminishing authority of the church, which we had seen was dominant during the middle ages. The middle ages was completely dominated by the authority of the church, the Catholic church, which controlled almost all institutions that existed in European culture during that period. So, now we will see the diminishing authority of the church during this period and the increasing authority of science, so this is quite interesting because on the one hand the church was gradually losing its relevance. On the other hand, science was emerging, the authority of science or the scientific temperament was quite visible in all aspects of life, particularly in philosophy. Then on the political side, again there is quite significant changes Europe has undergone during this period, states replacing church as authority that controls culture. So, nation states have become important rather than states during this period, so there is a change in the social, cultural, political and also economic domains that this period is undergone. And many important political events like the French and American revolutions have taken place during this period, they also have contributed significantly to the development of philosophical thinking, rational thinking, scientific thinking and also entirely new temperament in intellectual intervals during this period. And on the political side again democratization, the increasing democratization, constitutionalism, emergence of democracies, concerns for human rights, freedom, individual rights, all these ideas have become important during this era. But before we really start discussing philosophy in the modern age or philosophy in the modern times, let us have a very brief look into the passage from ancient to modern, from the Greek which we have already seen elaborately, we have discussed the Greek philosophy, we have also seen the contributions of the middle ages, but let us very briefly summarize these changes. So this is the Macedonian conquest that ended the Greek city-states, it is a very important phase in the history of Europe, a very important phase in the history of Greece and what happened that with the emergence or with the Macedonian conquest, the concept of city-states ended and we all know, we have already seen the contributions this idea of city-states have given to the intellectual and cultural development of the Greek world. Because almost all major philosophers emerged in different city-states, where Greek civilization was dominated by democratic temperament and which promoted and encouraged free thinking, critical thinking, rational thinking, scientific thinking and all that. But the Macedonian conquest with Philip and Alexander ended the Greek city-states, the Macedonians were later on conquered by the Romans. So the Roman conquest of the Greek world again, the Macedonians were conquered by the Romans and the Romans were later on conquered by the barbarians. So these are the political social changes that Europe has undergone in the ancient time from its passage from the ancient to the middle. So the decline of the Roman Empire by the barbarian invasions and by 5th century by the weakening of the Roman Empire, Christianity had become the official religion of the empire and churches become the most powerful organization in Europe. We have already examined this, we have already discussed this in the previous lecture. I am not elaborating it here. And when we talk about Christian domination which again to summarize, Christianity as an institution based on unquestionable faith and rigid dogmas in the place of free, rational, independent, philosophical thinking of the Greek. So this is what has happened with this domination of the church, the Catholic church and the cultural milieu of Europe during those middle ages. So the rational, free, independent, philosophical thinking was replaced by dogmas, rigid dogmas and unquestionable faith. The church destroyed many writings and works of art of the ancient civilization charging them for being pagan, un-Christian and immoral. This is what mostly religious authorities will do, have already done and even today they are doing it. Sometime back we had seen what the theocratic state of the Afghanistan has done. It has destroyed the great civilizational heritage which the Indian subcontinent had, the Buddha statues saying that it was un-Islamic or non-religious. So similarly the Catholic churches destroyed many writings and works of art of ancient Greek and Roman civilization charging them for being un-Christian or non-Christian. And social, cultural, economic and political domains were dominated by the church and there was a kind of visible shift from rational to supernatural, from logical to revelational. Because as we have already seen the Greek philosophical thinking or the Greek intellectual temperament was logical to the core. It was rational to the core, it was critical to the core. This was replaced by an idea of revelation because Christianity as a religion affirmed that the highest form of knowledge is not possible to the employment of mere human intellect or human intellect is incapable of knowing the ultimate reality by employing its own powers. Real knowledge, genuine knowledge, highest form of knowledge is rather revealed according to the Christian tradition. It is never discovered or found out by the intellect with its own efforts rather it was given to it as an act of mercy by God. So logical was replaced by revelation. Critical thinking is replaced by faith and acceptance which I have already mentioned. Openness is replaced by domination and tyranny. During this period the middle ages we could see that many attempts by scientist and free thinkers for critical thinking was curbed by the Catholic church. They were killed people like Bruno, Galileo all these people were prosecuted and even tortured by the Catholic church for promoting independent scientific thinking which goes against its dogmas and a faith based knowledge system. Science is replaced by superstition. When we talk about modern philosophy let us begin with a quote from Bertrand Russell. I quote, the period of history which is commonly called modern has a mental outlook which differs from that of the medieval period in many ways. Of course, two are the most important the diminishing authority of the church and the increasing authority of science Bertrand Russell a history of western philosophy unquote. So this is what but Russell has to say we have already mentioned this that it is a mental outlook which differs from the medieval period. So there is something which is new that is coming up and to understand what you mean by modern or modern temperament, modern philosophy, modern outlook we have to understand certain very important cultural and historical events that took place during this time. The most important one is what we today designate as the renaissance. Of course, there is the scientific revolution, there is the reformation, religious reformation moments initiated by the Protestant church or rather the people like Martin Luther and many other factors but all these factors can be summarized under one heading that is renaissance. The term renaissance it is a French word for rebirth. So you can see that what does it mean? It means a rebirth. What is reborn? Rebirth of reason. The reason or rational thinking critical thinking which was there in European history which was there during the Greek period was curbed or was controlled was dominated by the dogmas of church which is now taking a revival during this period. That period is called renaissance and changes which witnessed in almost all realms of human life, all realms of cultural life art, philosophy, literature anything for that matter. There is no end for human curiosity to know and to understand nature. The way in which man understands nature, and himself with nature everything changes during this period because according to the dominant Christian thinking the world was created by God. So it was given to man by God it expresses the supernatural. It is a mere expression of the supernatural or to put it in a different way trying to see from a platonic perspective it is a copy of the real. There is some real world somewhere else which is God's domain the heaven and this world is something which needs to be we are we are here we find ourselves here we are helpless we have to overcome that and regain the paradise which is lost. So this conception of world is replaced by a very positive approach towards nature. Nature is being viewed by man with a new spirit. It is not something which is a mere expression of the supernatural but nature as such is valuable. Man has to find himself in nature see nature understand it there are ways to understand it there are ways to cope up with nature there are different ways to cope up with nature not just living in it but changing in it changing nature the way in which the world functions can be changed. So science aims at that all these are part of this renaissance temperament. The modern outlook began in Italy with renaissance and the revival of the ancient wisdom. So to put it in one sentence renaissance is nothing but the revival of the ancient wisdom the revival of the outlook of the ancient Greek and Roman civilization which is significantly different from the middle ages outlook which is dominated by Christian church. The recognition that the ancient wisdom is a source of valuable insight. So this is another very important aspect to be noted to be underlined that this period there is a general recognition in the society that the ancient world is a valuable source of wisdom and insight and it is spanning the period from the middle of the 14th century to the beginning of the 17th century. So this is what we normally designate as renaissance from the middle of the 14th century to the beginning of the 17th century and by 15th century the original Greek works were read and appreciated. So this is very important because with the domination of church the churches or the Catholic church had it with its own vested interest as interpreted almost all Greek text in its own terms from the light of its own worldviews. So it was not possible for to read these original Greek text without interpretations given by the Catholic church. The Catholic church gave certain original interpretation for all these things. Now but by 15th century what happened was there was a possibility a possibility was opening up for reading for revisiting these texts in their original form. St. Thomas interpretation of Aristotle's were critically appreciated. This is another thing because I have already mentioned in the previous lecture that the contributions of St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas was an Aristotlean who has interpreted many of Aristotle's very important texts like the Nicomachian ethics, the metaphysics and all that. But these interpretations provided by St. Thomas were considered as authoritative by the Catholic church but now these interpretations were viewed skeptically. People started reading them, encountering them directly and started skeptically viewing the interpretations provided by the Catholic church predominantly the Thomistic interpretations were viewed with reasonable skepticism. The recovery of the classical languages, literature, art, history and philosophical insights resulted in the revival of the spirit of Greek humanism. This is another point which we need to be acknowledged that there is an emergence of a kind of humanism which was not present during the Middle Ages. The kind of humanism which was there during the Greek period where the power of human faculty, the power of human intellect is recognized and acknowledged in the pursuit of real genuine knowledge. Now, when we talk about humanism, recognition of the dignity and worth of human beings this is what we mean by humanism. This was there in the Greek period as I just mentioned and this is recognized by the modern philosophers as well. Acknowledge the power of human reason to know the truth of nature. It is not just revealed to us. All knowledge is not merely revelational but rather human beings can employ their natural power, natural faculties of intellect to understand nature and to interpret it and to change it to predict what is going to happen. All these things were made possible with the recognition of the dignity and worth of human beings. To realize that we humans have the capacity to determine, express and achieve what is good for us. So, this is another very important thing. See the last word, what is good for us? There are very strong ethical implications. As per the official Catholic doctrine, what is good for human beings are already written down in the Bible, already revealed to man by God directly. So, when is not supposed to employ his intellect independent of what is given, what is written down, what is already proclaimed, but he has to just follow. Here, what is good life is decided by the text which is already written. Goodness is something which is already written down, which is already decided, pre-decided. Human nature is pre-decided, man is not free. But here with the humanism, with the renaissance, to realize that we humans have the capacity to determine, express and achieve what is good for us. So, human reason can be independently employed in order to understand what is good, in order to understand what is desirable, in order to understand everything that concerns about our day to day life in this world. So, this is a very important revelation that happened during the renaissance period. Again, I have just mentioned about the ethical implications. When I talk about the idea of the good, the Greeks always had a very peculiar conception of the good which is linked with the participation in the life of the city states, where the social and the political aspects are emphasized. The social, political aspects, participation in the Greek city states with philosophies. So, you listen to each other, there is a kind of approach, there is a kind of tolerance, there is a kind of openness to what others have to say. The views and opinions of others is very important. So, each one of us as an individual has to live with others and by listening to others, by negotiating with others our conceptions about life. It is not that you know there is something a set of principles, a set of doctrines are already pre-given to all of us, but we determine it. So, this is the approach which was already present during the Greek period, which now takes a revival during the modern period. In middle ages to live according to the dictums of the church. So, it is already written down and renaissance, a revival of the ancient humanistic and the socio-political approaches and outlook is visible. Now, when we talk about the renaissance consciousness, renaissance is to restore to man the capacities, strengths and power of the individual person, which the middle ages had ignored. So, it is to restore to man that his capacities and strengths which is actually he has a possessors and this is to recognize the dignity of man and emphasis on individual achievements. So, it is not that everything human kind is actually reflects the eternal kindness and mercy of the divine know. Human beings have certain abilities, certain capabilities to attain things. So, emphasis on individual achievements superiority of the culture of the ancient world and not the present one. So, there is a recognition that the ancient world was superior, the Greek world was superior. Looking ahead to a new model of life, now you have to reshape your life, remodel your life based on insides, valuable insides that are available in the ancient traditions, revisit them, directly encounter them and try to imbibe them to the new modern situations. Now, another very important element that characterized the emergence of renaissance outlook and modern philosophical perspectives is the rise of science. Very important this is because modern science emerges during this period and we can see that very important scientists like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton are the preeminent scientist during this age. Though there are many others, these four are the most important ones and we can see that Copernicus's heliocentric view of the universe has overthrown existing paradigms. The Catholic Church has subscribed to a conception of universe, how the universe was created, the God created the world and all these pre-modern conceptions were overthrown by Copernicus heliocentric view which very broadly proclaimed that the sun is at the center and Kepler came up with mathematical interpretations of the heliocentric view. So, now you are presented a theory based on certain observations you made, certain systematic observations you made and this observations were further reinstated and justified in the light of mathematical interpretations which is provided by Kepler and Galileo developed the observation method with mathematical interpretations to new inside. There is a celebrated statement made by Galileo, Galileo's period is very important in the whole history of human intellect, the whole history of western philosophy or western history, this is very important period because it was Galileo who brought together in a very systematic way in a very emphatic manner the two elements of scientific temperament. On the one hand the empirical observation and on the other hand mathematical interpretations. So, Galileo's famous statement that nature is an open book written in the language of mathematics testifies this, nature I repeat nature is an open book written in the language of mathematics. So, if you know the language you can read it to know the language you have to learn mathematics to read it you have to observe. Now, observation needs to be synchronized with mathematical interpretations with this synchronization modern science was born. And again what happens as the consequence of this emerging scientific temperament is that the belief or faith based world views were replaced by the reason based scientific outlook. Everything for everything that happens in this world for everything that we see around us in this world has a purpose has a reason not a purpose has a reason behind it why is it that apples fall down the famous Newtonian question why is it that apples are not hanging on air they fall down because there is a reason behind it from this question the assumption is that there should be a reason for that and from this question Newton arrives at the conclusion the great gravitation principle was born or rather discovered as a result of this. Now, Copernicus and Galileo brought together the two important elements of scientific method I have already mentioned it the empirical which is based on observation and experiment and the rational which employs mathematical detective reasoning. Now, we have seen the context the kind of context in which modern philosophy took its emergence. Now, when we talk about philosophy during this period of renaissance we can see that it is not a very rich period philosophically it is not a very rich period it has not produced first rate thinkers even Descartes is a the who is hailed as the father of modern philosophy comes after renaissance. But at the same time we have to acknowledge that modern philosophy which began with Descartes would not have been possible without renaissance. So, renaissance is the essential the necessary prerequisite background for the emergence of modern philosophy the basic philosophical activities that the renaissance period witnessed where thinkers from various traditions revisiting the study of Plato and of course, of Aristotle as well. But, Plato was also read very carefully because you know we have already seen that with Saint Thomas interpretation of catholic principles in the light of Aristotle and philosophy Aristotle became the most prominent thinker in the European intellectual value. This was changing from the times of renaissance there is a kind of revival of the interest in the study of many other philosophers other than Aristotle particularly Plato. And now this is what Bertrand Russell says it encouraged the habit of regarding intellectual activity as a delightful social adventure not a clustered mediation aiming at the preservation of a predetermined orthodoxy. So, there is a purpose the purpose is the habit of regarding intellectual activity as a delightful social adventure not just where you just admit whatever is there given handed down to you by the tradition. And again Saint Thomas is we have already seen this interpretations of Aristotle's where skeptically viewed and the authority of both the Roman Catholic church and the Holy Roman Empire began to decline and a new look at philosophical issues ancient philosophy text and approaches took place. So, when we talk about the major philosophical activities during the renaissance age it consisted of this revisiting of the ancient text from a new light. And this is from Socrates to Sartre the Philosophical Christ by Leven I quote with the coming of the renaissance there occurs an expression of a humanistic faith in man in his powers to direct his life and the life of his society toward freedom and justice. Together the sense that this power which had been a possession of the individual in the ancient Greek world had been lost in the world of medieval Christianity. So, to summarize renaissance actually asserts it is an expression of a humanistic faith in man in his power to decide to direct his life and the life of society around it is not that something which is already pre-given to him these ideas not are not pre-given to him he has to sort of find it out clarify to himself and others learn from others and lot of other things. Now, when we look at the cultural impact of renaissance we could see that this is more visible in the field of art and literature because art and literature had seen a tremendous developments during this period of renaissance during that few centuries two or three centuries. We can see that independence of art and literature from religious dogmas and mythology this is the most significant aspect of renaissance art. If you examine renaissance art painting sculptures and other things this is quite visible that independence of art from the dogmas and mythology of religion portrayal of human glory and not just suffering and death we could see that during the middle ages art was dominated by the glorification of suffering and death which is part of the Christian mythology where the suffering of Jesus. So, this suffering was highlighted by most of the middle ages art forms death was glorified during this period because there was a visible skepticism about the life in this world life in this world is conceived or it is considered as the result of a sin the original sin I mean it is an impact of the original sin which human beings have committed in the heaven. But, instead during the renaissance period there is a portrayal of human glory and art and literature turned away from Christian themes to nature as it is seen and perceived I have already mentioned this few minutes back that the way in which man finds himself in nature understands nature relate himself with nature which includes both animate as well as inanimate world and other human beings everything changes with renaissance art and literature now turn away from Christian themes to nature. So, nature is reflected in the renaissance art in a very different way and in that reflection we could see humanism we could see a kind of very positive outlook towards life and even after lives are contemplated in a different fashion by the renaissance thinkers overcoming of body negativism which is also the result of the scientific temperament because as we have already mentioned body was treated as something which is the result of the original sin. So, some body is negatively viewed by the Christian world by the catholic world and this is what we normally understand as body negativism body is something which needs to be kept away and this was interpreted from the light of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy by the middle ages philosophers by the scholastic thinkers, but with the emerging new temperament this body negativism was overcome. We could see that art and literature particularly paintings and sculptures were increasingly highlighting the beauty of the human body. The human body is once again became a theme it was a maternal theme for the Greek or Roman civilization which was not very dominant during the Christian period during the middle ages. Now, it comes back it is revived the beauty the glory of the human body is highlighted and if you examine the domain of science again you can see that there are several new insights about the functioning of the human body. People like Leonardo Da Vinci and all these people have studied the human body thoroughly and there is a view that body is just like any other machine it is a machine just like any other machine it has got certain mechanical movements certain set the rules of mechanics the control the movements of the body as well and nature became interesting in itself not just as an expression of the supernatural I have already mentioned this nature is interesting in itself it is beautiful and we human beings are fascinated by its beauty and we have every right to enjoy it to appreciate it and enjoy it and express it our experience. So, renaissance artists were all occupied with this appreciation of the natural beauty and expressing this experience through their works of art. The return of the Greek joy in living so this is another aspect of renaissance philosophy which was absent during the Middle Ages where life is always considered as something which is gloomy something which is negating the eternal joy. So, the life in this world is always considered as an antithesis to the eternal life which is there in the heaven but here the return of the Greek joy the Greek joy what here means is that the happiness and joy human beings are capable of experiencing by being in this world from the objects of this world. So, your sensual pleasures are once again viewed or approached positively which is not the case during the Catholic period and when we talk about the new inventions and discoveries which naturally follow from this attitude this attitude of overcoming body negativism this attitude of accepting validity as well as the possibility of experiencing happiness and joy over objects in this world things in this world. So, this has led to very significant inventions and discoveries see for example, invention of the printing plus invention of gunpowder then improvement of the compass for navigation then the discovery of the new world by Columbus and his successors this is very significant because this has opened up possibilities of trading settling down in new places and of course, the promise of a new world everything was as a result of this which is also the result of new scientific advancements the discovery of the new water route to India and the forest around the Cape of Godot. So, it has encouraged trading and commercial activities and contributed to the material and a development of European men rise in growth of the protestant reformation of Martin Luther I have already mentioned this this is and the religious front where the Catholic dogmas were challenged by people like Martin Luther who highlighted the need for approaching and understanding the biblical text from the perspective of certain new insights because you know this is very important because this marks the emergence of hermeneutics modern hermeneutics because Catholic church has already given certain quote unquote official interpretations of the biblical statements every biblical expression was officially interpreted by the Catholic church or the church men schoolmen some of these interpretations were challenged by others, but the church was not ready to accept them gradually this is grown and there was a call for reformation in the hall conception of religion and Martin Luther was the prominent one to initiate it which is ultimately then resulted in the birth of the protestant church. So, the protestant opposition to Catholic dogmas or Catholic interpretations have they have resulted in the emergence of hermeneutics we can see in the works of Schreymacher and William Dalthay particularly Schreymacher who was concerned about the question of interpretation interpretation of original text initially of the Bible later on everything that is expressed now to come back to the question of the philosophy in Renaissance renewed study of Aristotle which you have already mentioned pre from the scholastic interpretations of Aristotle's work secular and scientific approaches and emergence of humanism with emphasis on moral philosophy that address the question of virtue and distancing from epistemological and metaphysical issues. Platonism was reintroduced with renewed interest in platonic themes and again the revival of stoicism, epicurinism, skepticism all these were part of the Renaissance philosophical temperament again to summarize this we could see the rise of science rise of humanism skepticism and now we find that there is a kind of reassertion of modern philosophy as epistemology where philosophy would examine the sources the kinds and limits of human knowledge and ethics the question of criteria and the possibility of moral life without religious principles how do you know what is good without really employing without really relying on religious principles and metaphysics questions of reality universe and God these questions were also re articulated and explored examine from the perspective of the new insights gained as a result of Renaissance. When we talk about the modern period awakening of the reflective spirit has to be re emphasized and there is of course a kind of critical approach which was presented in the Greek era which is reintroduced after more than a thousand years and against all authority and tradition it was emphasizing this aspect that every authority has to be challenged has to be questioned and tradition needs to be viewed with skepticism and against absolutism and collectivism so we need to employ the human intellect the human intellect needs to be allowed to explore nature by following its own rules and laws then assertion of freedom in thought feeling and action state took the place of church states more towards constitutionalism and democratic institutions so the emergence of individualism you could see that there is an overall change in all aspects of life during this period then again when it come to philosophy in particular reason becomes the only authority in philosophy and science truth needs to be achieved through free and impartial inquiry it is not something which is a result of revelation as the Christian theologians could thought it was but it has to be achieved through free and impartial inquiry and theology lost its importance the practical applicability of knowledge is emphasized during this period that is the reason why sciences become very important and with this background we will see the most important features of modern philosophy some of the features of modern philosophy are number one independent search for truth what I mean by independent is as I already mentioned free from the dogmas free from the religious and other dogmas that was inherited by the Catholic church in this aspect it resembles the ancient Greek thought it is rationalistic human reason is the highest authority nothing else but reason is the only arbiter it is naturalistic because it attempts to explain inner and outer nature without supernatural presuppositions so later on we would see that in modern philosophy some of the themes of modern philosophy are mind and body dualism mind constitutes an independent domain of reality which is inner nature world body is the domain of the external world which includes our body material bodies so these are all very important philosophical themes of the modern age which the modern philosophers try to approach from a very critical and rational perspective and then finally last but not the least scientific keeping in touch with the new sciences the new sciences that were emerging we could see that almost all the modern philosophers right from Descartes onwards they are very closely following the developments that were taking place during the modern period this is basically given by these future features were basically given by Frank Thily in his book a history of history of philosophy and again the emergence of rationalism and empiricism as independent and opposing schools of philosophy is a very important feature of modern philosophy we are going to see this in detail these are the two very important schools of modern philosophy rationalism and empiricism the impact of modern scientific understanding on philosophy philosophy regains the status of a foundational discipline as epistemology this is another aspect which needs to be understood in modern age because in ancient philosophy was truly a foundational discipline because ancient philosophers conceived philosophy as the discipline which would examine the foundations of all human reality so philosophers were reality seekers they were trying to understand truth they were trying to understand reality what is that reality out of which everything is constituted that was the primordial philosophical question so philosophy was a true foundational discipline but later on you could see that philosophy has been reduced to the level of merely a support to theology or religious faith and belief and all that by the middle ages and even during the Renaissance philosophy never had a very major role to play because it was basically considered as I mean with the emergence of science philosophy literally lost its glory philosophy was a foundational discipline by means of which we human beings know and understand nature but now with the emergence of modern science with its peculiar and unique methodology modern science is better equipped to understand reality to understand the world to know the world to have knowledge about the world so what will happen to philosophy loss we lost all its glory now philosophers during the modern period they are trying to reassert the importance of philosophy in human life as a foundational endeavor what is it it is epistemology all sciences of course sciences are concerned with knowledge they deal with knowledge knowledge about one or other particular department of the universe but philosophy is a discipline which deals with knowledge as such it raises the question what is knowledge how can you say that something is knowledge what is the criteria by applying which we distinguish between knowledge and opinion so what is knowledge what are the kinds of knowledge what are the sources of knowledge what are the limitations of knowledge these are some of the very important philosophical concerns during the modern period so philosophy as epistemology regains its foundational status during the modern period and philosophies objectives are re articulated as epistemological objectives no longer deals with the question of ultimate reality philosophy deals with knowledge I mentioned it the nature kinds and limitations and sources of knowledge so we can see that before we summarize the kind of philosophical approaches philosophical systems which we are going to deal under the heading of modern philosophy so we can see that it starts with Descartes who is considered as a father of modern philosophy who is followed by another philosopher Spinoza and Leibniz so these are people who are called as rationalist they are the rationalist and then on the other hand we could see that there was a different philosophical approach that was developing in the British world this is basically in the non English speaking European countries like France and Germany Descartes Spinoza and Leibniz Descartes was a French and but these philosophers mostly were British so we normally call it as British empiricism the most prominent ones are John Locke Berkeley and David Q so these are the two opposing traditions of modern philosophy rationalism and empiricism and we could see that these two opposing traditions where brought together into one single framework to explain the new modern temperament that is emerging by Emmanuel Kant in his critical philosophy so Kant really functions as a junction which brings together these two system and from there we can see two independent development or seven independent developments but basically and fundamentally two streams are quite visible one in the direction which goes upwards like people like Hegel, Fischer, Schilling and then Marx, Karl Marx then Schopenhauer Frederick Nietzsche all these people who develop what today we understand as the continental philosophical tradition which ultimately culminated in the development of phenomenology by the German philosopher Admin Dusserl Hermione takes by Gadamer and Heidegger then existentialism by Jean-Paul Sartre and many others and on the other hand the empiricist tradition develops in this direction through Bentham, Kant and J. S. Mill which culminates in the 28th century movements like positivism, logical empiricism and analytic philosophy to summarize this is what we normally understand as modern philosophy and its outshoots and the two traditions which we are going to address are empiricism and rationalism the two important schools of modern philosophy and the division is based on the sources of knowledge what is the question is what is the source of knowledge and one group of philosophers like rationalist would say that the source of knowledge is already innate and the empiricist would argue that the source of knowledge is experience. So, this is we will now wind up our discussion on the introduction to modern philosophy right here and carry out our further lectures by concentrating more on these traditions and contributes the philosopher the individual philosophers who have contributed to the development of these respective philosophical schools in the subsequent lectures now thank you.


Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to session six. This is our last session of the day and this session is titled You Can't Access a Reference That Isn't There, Interventions that Promote the Persistence of Web-Based Evidence in E-T-Ds. This will be presented by Sarah Potvin, Kathy Anders, and Tina Budsize-Weaver from Texas A&M University Libraries, along with Martin Klein from Los Alamos National Laboratory. My name is Ellen Amatangelo and I'll be your moderator for the session. A quick reminder to please keep your audio muted and your video off during the presentation portion unless you are presenting or you're asked to participate. You can use the chat tab to ask questions, which will be addressed during the Q&A portion and I'll monitor those questions as well in case anything comes in while the presentation is happening. But yeah, that's all I have for my intro and I will turn it over to the presenters. Great. Hi. Let me go ahead and share screen. Sorry. I was hiding my... Can everyone see my presentation? Yes. So, hi. I'm Kathy Anders. I'll start by introducing us, all of us. So, we have a number of scheduling, holiday things come up. So, I'm going to present the presentation on our behalf. So, Tina Budsize-Weaver, Sarah Potvin, and I are all formerly of the Texas A&M University Libraries when the libraries had a big shift. We moved into academic departments. So, Sarah Potvin and I are in English and Tina Budsize-Weaver is in the School of Performance Virtualization and Fine Arts, and we have been working with Martin Klein, who is a computer scientist in the Research Library at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This presentation is building actually on a presentation we did two years ago, talking about reference wrought. So, a little bit of background that Sarah Potvin formerly worked in digital scholarship. Tina Budsize-Weaver was an academic librarian for performance studies and I was a graduate studies librarian in the A&M Libraries. So, what we are here to talk to you today is about reference wrought in ETs. And so, we'll start by saying, what is reference wrought? What is going on with reference wrought in ETs? Okay. So, reference wrought is a term that Martin Klein working on some projects helps to introduce. And it talks about two problems with kind of known issues in web-based materials. So, one is link wrought.  You get a 404 or something like that. And content wrought, which is where you go to a page, but it's changed. So, if we want to talk about both link wrought and content wrought, both of which are issues in web-based materials, we talk about reference wrought. So, just to give an example of what we mean by wrought. Okay. So, this is an example of a page that has where the link has wrought it.  Sometimes you get a custom 404 error, but whatever the page was, whatever the content of that page was, whatever was there is no longer there when you click on that link. So, that is broken. Drift, on the other hand, is where the link still resolves, it still takes you to a page, but that page has probably changed over time. So, this was from an ETD we looked at, and this was a link to something called the Phlocteities Project, which I believe was a theater project for veterans. And so, this was the way it looked when the student was citing it, or as we're trying to do it. And this, if you go to the Phlocteities Projects today, is what it looks like. So, it's an online gaming site. Rather strange. Drift, but that's what happens. Oh, not gaming. Gamble it. Sorry. Different. Gamble it. Okay. Sorry. I don't know what happened. All of my slides went forward. Nope. Hang on. My bad. I don't know why it's going the wrong way. It's going to go real fast this way. So, what are some of the concerns with this, with reference rot in ETDs? And reference rot more broadly, right? We might think that the citation is there. And so, well, we know what it means. And if we think of citations as solely for the purpose of giving credit to a source, then that's unfortunate, but it's not perhaps as concerning as it is. If you think that you are losing records of an access to your sources and your data. So, if you think of references as a collection of sources, then that are being referenced in the scholarly work, and that there is some dependence of meaning between the scholarly work and the thing it's referencing, then losing access to that can be problematic. If the source is not there, then, you know, people trying to review the work later or work on reproducibility projects, their data is gone. And that's really an issue. In some cases, there might not be another copy of the material. So, I think a lot of times we think of web lengths as being kind of optional if they're to an article published in a journal or to a book, a Google book, because we think that there are archived online versions of that that are unlikely to break. So, sometimes that's true. However, sometimes that's not. Things on the web actually don't live forever. And so, particularly if you're looking at research from marginalized populations, particularly ephemeral works like blog posts or social media posts, there might not be another copy of the source that is the source that's being cited. And that leads to my fourth point. Part of why we started looking at reference rot in each of these, our current project stemmed from a previous project, which was to see what was going on with reference rot in A&M, E2Ds.  We have many, many students graduating each year. We're handling a very large number of E2Ds coming through. And so, we couldn't run this analysis on all of the E2Ds, but in our previous presentation at USEDEP, we were talking at the time, we were in the middle of doing this analysis, I don't remember the results. What Sarah and Tina and I did was we looked at our corpus of performance studies, E2Ds that were filed from 2012 to 2020. And so, we were trying to see which ones were perfectly functional in which the links linked to the thing that they seemed to indicate they wanted to go to and which ones suffered from reference rot. So, in that set of E2Ds, about 26% of the links were rotted. They didn't result, they were just broken. And just over 20% had what we called diminished functionality, which means that they suffered from some sort of significant drift where they weren't going quite to what seemed to be indicated in the citation. So, that, and now this is an admittedly small, small sample size. I don't think we can draw conclusions about the whole corpus from that, but it was, there was more reference rot than we expected there to be. So, with about 52% of the links being perfectly functional over a relatively short period of time, this was, this seems significant to us. Now, what we see is that this is going to continue to likely be a growing problem in E2Ds. This is an analysis of all of our, is an analysis of our entire publicly available E2D corpus. Some of our E2Ds are not publicly available, but you can see that there's an upward trend of the number of URIs, which includes a number of things, but our number of URIs that are in E2Ds being submitted over time. So, we can see at the very end when we get up to 2022, we have a pretty marked increase in the number of E2Ds that are submitting that have URIs in them. With that as a background, trying to understand, you know, what, what reference rot is, I think we, we, we felt like we established that it was an issue in E2Ds. Sarah, Martin, Tina and I decided to do a study to see what A&M students knew about reference rot and whether or not they were concerned about it. So, we ran two, two, two portions of our study. And I'll just say that our, our research was all IRB from A&M and Los Alamos approved. We kept all of our information confidential, only collecting demographic information about our students, but no identifying information since we don't have any student numbers or names or anything like that. So, we did two things. First one we did was we sent a broad survey to graduate students in February of 2023. This was just a large, qualified survey. And then the second part of the study was that we did two workshop interventions to try and teach graduate students about reference rot. And we did that in April of this year. We had it catered. It was about one and a half hours and we collected Korean post tests from the participants in those, in those workshops. So, I know we have a, I want to pause here for a second. Actually, I'm going to do this again. I know we have a Q&A session at the end, but I just want to make sure that I covered the topic of reference rot. So, there's comfort levels or understanding levels. Does anyone have any questions about what reference rot is? Is that a good answer? I'm not seeing anything in the chat, but yeah. Okay. Great. Good. Okay. Okay. So, just some of our initial findings from the survey is that, and I'm sorry, this is the text on the, on the side is small, but one of the things we found is that students are citing mostly web sources. So, these are, they might have appeared in print at some point as well, but they access them through the web. So, a huge, a huge number, a huge percentage of most are all of their sources coming from, coming from some sort of source that has a URL. They got it through the web. Students also know that, like sometimes things break. Not, not, not all the time, but a significant number of the students have at least at some point encountered some broken links. They, they know enough to know what they are when they tried to encounter something on the web. So, a very small percentage has never encountered, encountered a broken link or changed or otherwise become inaccessible. Like they, they can generally get to what they think they want to get to. So, they both know that they are citing web sources and, or they both are citing web sources and they know or have had experience at least with encountering a broken link. But, they have not thought about their links. So, even though they have this experience and they're doing this citing, most of the students either haven't thought about it or expect that the resources that they cite will be available in five years of the same URL. So, they're not, they're not necessarily taking what they thought about up there and coming in here. Now, I should say that this was a very broad survey sent to, I want to say around 12,000 or more graduate students. So, we picked graduate students at the college station campus who, who filed ETs. So, we didn't include campuses like our dental campus or our law school. And we didn't include professional schools. So, most of the filers are ETs, but the, the, this broad student population hadn't really thought about what was going to happen to their resources. So, that was our survey.  And part of our goal is to try and figure out how best to address this problem. So, how do we make graduate students aware of this reference fraud issue? And then, what do we think would be one way of addressing, could address it through getting graduate students to better preserve their own works to make permanent link options. Or another option would be to automate a system where, where links are preserved. So, when we did this workshop, trying to get a better sense of what students thought about these issues. We see this was a much smaller, much more specialized group. We think some of these students came, particularly because they were interested in the topic of reference fraud and web permissing. So, other students who came to our workshop, more of them either didn't know or thought the web materials on the web were permanent. But some did. And this is not exactly surprising given the sort of long standing narrative that like nothing ever disappears from online when people are thinking about their own online personas and their own online reputations. So, after the workshop. So, before we saw that the workshops raised some awareness because before most students didn't consider or a significant number considered materials on the web permanent. But afterwards we have that the overwhelming majority of students see reference fraud as an issue for your own scholarly work. So, if you think back to our survey when we were thinking about whether or not students thought that their own links might break, many of them didn't or didn't know. Here we see after this workshop that they did. The students liked the workshop. They found it or I should say they found it informative. Most students found it either, you know, somewhere in the range of very informative to somewhat informative with no one saying none. And I should say that these surveys were anonymous. We did not ask for any identifying information. We didn't know the participants. So, the flu weren't just trying to be nice. So, so workshop might be one way of raising this awareness about about reference fraud. However, when we think about this, we think about kind of her takeaways and our conclusions. Right. So, when we think about take place, the first thing we noticed kind of just off the top is that it's really hard to get students to attend optional workshops. Right. So, we sent out recruitment emails for catered workshops to over 12,000 students with fewer than 30 attendees over two days. And this was like good catering too from a very popular local restaurant. Additionally, attendees had the option of getting credit for our graduate professional development certificate. So, while we're sort of hopeful and we'd like to raise awareness and education around reference fraud, issues involving reference fraud, options for what to do to mitigate reference fraud, getting students to come to workshops about it is difficult, at least in our experience. When we asked students what they wanted, like they said, we asked them sort of like, how would you like to deal with this? We had a very low sample size, as I should say. This is not in any way definitive at all. But we did ask students how they would like to have an intervention. Like how do they think this would best be addressed? So, the first option is talking about automation or tools. So, having some sort of tool that will go through and archive all of your web links for you, either maybe in Virio or the thesis submission process or some sort of like browser add-on or something like that. So, they want automation or tools. Another set wanted some sort of online guide or instructions, like either a tutorial or PDF or something like that online to tell them what to do. The largest percentage wanted a workshop or class. Now, these are already students who are attending a workshop or class. So, you know, that might already be their preference. And a couple expressed the sort of like non-specific desire just to get more education about this somehow. So, as I was saying earlier, even though some students may want workshops, they may not be feasible. So, like we had just had an extremely low yield despite our free food. And with at least 12,000 graduate students who are in plans that require the filing of an ATD, workshops would be extraordinarily difficult to scale in any sense. So, the general idea is that even if we raise awareness, we're going to need some sort of tool for addressing reference fraud. And one of the things we're thinking about is how automated could that be and how might it be deployed to find the links and extract the URL references from an ATD to mint a permanent link or an archival or make an archival link through a number of services that do that. And then last step, put these persistent links back into ATDs such that someone who's opening the file can get the archival link again. So, those are kind of the steps that are necessary. And we're trying to figure out like what would be the best way to do those steps. So, part of what we wanted to do with this presentation was talk to y'all to see to kind of you are the thesis professionals. And we'd like to have a conversation about if your office has the capacity to administer training your tools. Does this seem like something that a thesis office could take on? And we recognize those are a variety of answers about that. And then what would be helpful for you to address reference fraud? And do you think that's even something that your office should do if it's not there? Where else might it be? And then if anyone's interested, we're looking trying to gather interest from future authors. So, can I consider if I open it up for discussion? Sure. Are you wanting people to just chime in? Yeah, that would be great. If people just unneeded and chimed in, that would be fantastic. Well, I have something to start off. So, I am the Institutional Repository Administrator. Okay. So, I do feel some, I guess, responsibility for reference fraud. But I don't know how to actually deal with it, I guess. I think I need my own workshop before I can train other people. Right. Okay. So, a workshop like more training just about what reference fraud is and options for dealing with it or mostly like options for what we can do about it. Okay. We've got a chat. Same. Okay. All right. Oh, sorry. I went, I didn't need to go back. Because would anyone be willing to share, like, do you think this is part of your wheelhouse? How would you find all the links in ATE? Yeah, this is a question. This is one of the questions that we would have to address for sure. There are softwares that can crawl and find them. So, it's possible to do. It's just, it's got a couple steps. This is coming from a chat. I'm an IR manager librarian too, and I'd appreciate education on how to teach others about it and deal with it. Okay. Yeah. Sure. Like, put together, put together like a, maybe a kit, like a kit that has some background readings and presentation slides, maybe something like that. A kit would be great. Okay. I think this is an issue, but not sure who can fix it. Yeah. I fit in tools to be used. Okay. Yeah. I think this is part of our question too. Oh, you don't allow in-document paper links, but allow web addresses. Okay. That's interesting. Yeah. We, we actually just looked at web addresses in our study software with the best, more efficient. Yeah. Exactly. Just, it's just probably not going to scale. I think one of the questions is where, where would this process or where would this kind of live? Like, who, who would be doing that? Would it be a library? Would it be a thesis office or would it be the university itself? Where, who, who, who manages that? Who looks at that? And we're trying to get a sense from the folks. Like, do you think that would be your library, your thesis office, something like that? I haven't looked into it in a few years, but archive at .org and I supposedly does, of archiving websites. Yeah. So there are, there are a number of archiving services. It's getting all of the links archived. So they all kind of have pluses and minuses to them from permalinks to, you know, looking at, like, internet archiver, a variety of archivers that, that do that. There doesn't seem to be at the moment a good site for archiving multimedia. Um, so things like videos, that's hard to archive. You don't have, okay, sorry, maybe you have a thesis dissertation office. They're able to handle these types of issues. We don't have such a thing at BYU and we don't have the manpower to be able to check out all the links in the ATV. Some colleges might check these things. Yeah, I don't know that anyone actually is doing like checking an ATV. It's a, it's a tolerator. Okay, you have no okay, small liberal arts undergrad college here. It would fall on the advisors and librarians for educational advisors. Yeah, a lot of advisors. That's a good point. We have no thesis office. Zotero automatically captures screenshots. Could those be part of the ETDR package? Maybe? That's it. We, we've talked about Zotero. One of the things I think sometimes we run into our copyright questions when we actually put images back in things. Um, so some things can get away with library issue, like library protections. So, um, but yes, doing something like making as a tarot add-on or something like that could start minting those might be a possibility. How are we cutting edge on the topic? No, we are, well, I would say. So, Martin is one of the reference rot experts. He really is at the, at the top of the reference rot game, so to speak. There are some other really good resources out there. We have an article by Nascott and Potter, which I don't have in front of me in the link to or the name of, but they do really good work. We have an article coming out on that initial project that I was talking about in performance studies, ETDs, which I think is coming out in 2024 and portal. So there are definitely people working on web archiving, for sure, and on reference rot. And people have started looking at it in ETDs. It's just not giant. I would appreciate the toolkit. Yeah. Okay. So is it fair for me to kind of characterize this discussion as saying toolkit would be helpful for education, both for yourself and for other folks. And that checking that, that some sort of tool, if this were going to be administered, some sort of tool would do that. Yes, it is also a citation issue, which involves the disciplines. Sorry, I got distracted. Absolutely. So part of this is if you have a citation system that doesn't require a link or has said we're past links, that's an issue. And so there might not be a link to, link to. Yeah. Okay. So hit a tool eventually, and then it sounds like a variety. There are just really a variety of responses in terms of who does what at different institutions. Thank you, everyone, for that. I am happy to just, oh, great. Would it be helpful for provide training for campus departments for doing the approvals? What stage of approvals? I mean, yes, but what, like, are you talking about like, sort of like ETT chairs, or the thesis office members themselves who are doing the approvals? Sorry, I'm going to chime in. Since I'm the moderator, I can speak, right? So that was my question. I was just thinking, like, our campus departments have their own approvals that theses and dissertations go through. Would it be helpful if during that process, they double check links to make sure that they're valid? I don't know if that's that helpful in the long term, but maybe up front, it could help catch some of those that are not useful. Yeah. Yeah. I see what you're saying. I think actually, it's not just checking to see if the links are broken at the time, it's to mint an archival link, and then put that archival link into the ETT so that someone can access it in the future, because I mean, these links definitely break over time. So something that's there, right? When they're approving it, you know, in five years might not be there, but we need to get the archival versions of, we need archived webpages and archived web links. But I solution to that could be something that could go to committees. Okay. I see. Okay. So you've got a couple of steps. So it would be you training the librarians would then go to the advisors and then go to like the best practices. So it would be like a train that trainers trainer type model. So in terms of tools, like as part of this is definitely raising awareness, education, but some of this is also giving people a tool to do this relatively quickly because it takes a long time to archive all your links.  So if anyone is interested in developing a tool or thinking about a tool or something like that, let us know. We're getting funding for like a larger grant project. Yes, absolutely. So as Elizabeth said, I think you might need a hierarchy of what might break links to actual journals would be less of a problem than sites. Yes, that is definitely true. Although I will say we were surprised by some of the things that broke. Part of it is a question about who who's doing the archiving and maintenance, right? Like librarians, if we're talking about journals, where these things have been archived many times, then that's less of a problem. Even if filling breaks, you can go find the article. But there are other things that we thought would be more durable. Like when we looked sort of down farther, that we're surprising. I mean, maybe it shouldn't be surprising at the moment, but government data was surprisingly breaky, surprisingly wrought, reference rotted. And so there is kind of a thought about what might break. And in some cases, it's not even, I mean, there's sort of this issue of links breaking and having a tool to do this on mass. But then there's also even in some ways like the need to educate students about how to represent their sources in their work, like if you're referencing a conversation or an interview or something like that, like you might need to write in parts of that into your thesis, thinking about the way you describe things, particularly a thermal. Y'all have any questions for me? Like we answer as we have, I think six minutes left. It almost seems like we need to archive on our RRs. I mean, our RRs kind of are archived. But do you mean an archiving tool on your repository? Yes, no, that's not too fetched. That's exactly what we're talking about. Like we need some sort of tool that crawls a document, pulls out the URIs, sends them over to something that mints the archived versions, and then puts those archival links back into the document. Yeah, no, that is exactly what we're talking about. And it could go a couple places. Like it could go into a citation manager software, like be an add-on for an open citation manager software, something like that. It could go into Virio, like whatever the submission system is. If all of your works are getting stuck in an institutional repository, maybe there could be some sort of in-between step there, but yes, that's the sort of thing we're talking about. Yeah, that's an option into Virio, supplemental files. Well, I will go to my thank you slide and say thank you. This is a really helpful discussion.  But thank you. Thank you for all of your ideas. That is very helpful. Feel free to contact us too if you want to talk more. Thank you so much. That was very informative. A lot of things I hadn't thought about. So, and now I need to think about them. So, thank you. Well, thank you so much. So, we are going to close out this session. This is our last session of the day, but we hope to see you all tomorrow at eight or sorry, eight o'clock Mountain Time. I'll just put that out there because I'm in Mountain Time. And it's 10 o'clock Eastern. So, please join us at the same link and we will see you all tomorrow. Have a great afternoon.


Secret ways to make money on YouTube. Look, nobody wants to tell you. They keep all of that good information to themselves. Those top YouTubers that are making all that money, they don't want you to know about this stuff. But in this video, I'm gonna share with you the secrets that they know that help them make money. And you know what? It has nothing to do with running ads in their videos. And we're starting right now. Hey, I'm JR Fisher. Welcome to my channel. If you haven't been here before, click on the round. And don't forget to hit that subscribe button down there and turn on all notifications, the bell notifications. Make sure you turn on all of them. That way, when I do one of these videos, you'll be notified, you'll know about it. And if I go live, you'll also be notified about that. You'll be part of the VIP group, the Fisher family. Okay, let's jump right into this. Now I've been online for over 10 years now. I've sold millions of dollars of both digital and physical products. And this whole YouTube thing really interested me. So I got involved in it. And I've kind of cracked the code as far as what's gonna really make you money on YouTube. You don't need a lot of subscribers. You don't have to have tons of views.  So let's jump right into it. Now the first thing I'm gonna tell you, most people believe that all that money's being made on ads. And that's just not the case. Ads can be a portion of your income, but it's really a small portion. It may only be 10 or 20% of your income from what you can do. Now, the way you're gonna start off first off is you've gotta build a real niche, okay? So in other words, don't just do random videos. Don't do just me blogging going down the street. You know, that may work for a celebrity, but for the average person, they have to have a niche. They have to have a particular subject that they stay on that people know they can come back to and see more videos about that particular subject. Now, of course, once you build a niche, once people know you and you get known for something, yeah, you can sell anything. You think of somebody like Kim Kardashian, and no matter what she puts her name on, it's gonna sell because she's built that brand. But that's the stage that most of you guys are at right now is you're building that brand. And to build that brand, you have to start with a niche, something that is very particular to you. Now, my niche is that I sell stuff online and I teach people how to sell stuff online and make money. So it's all online business, okay? I don't do real estate. I don't do, you know, living, blogging. I don't do restaurants. I don't do any of that. It's all about making money online. So that's my particular niche. That's why somebody comes to this channel is to learn all the different ways to do that. Let's talk about all these ways you can make money. I'm gonna say number one is sell merchandise. Now, selling merchandise is very profitable. I suggest that if you've got a channel and you've got a niche worked out, whether it's about, you know, kittens or whether it's about fishing or golfing or whatever, that you start selling some apparel. Nowadays, you don't have to print up apparel and sell it to people. That's not necessary. You can use one of the services that will actually print on demand, which is POD. You can use something like Printify or Printiful. I'll put links below in the description so you can figure that out. But basically, the way it works is somebody's gonna buy a shirt from you for, say, $25. You're gonna pay Printiful or Printify the eight or $10 that it cost you to print that shirt and they're gonna actually ship it out. That way, you don't have to have all these sizes and stock and all these different colors. You can just upload your designs to one of these websites and once you do that, you can actually start selling those shirts and they're gonna send it out for you. So that's the first way is to sell merchandise. Number two way is to have free opt-ins. Now, you say, well, how am I gonna make money with free opt-ins, Jay? Our free is free. You don't make any money on that. Now, what the opt-ins are is your way of building a list of people who have interest in what you've got to sell. So let's say I'm doing a video like this and I'm gonna say below, there's a free course you can get, which there is, it's a $97 course, but you can get it absolutely free. There's my opt-in, okay? And right now, you should do that. You should grab that course, by the way. It's a really good course. It's not gonna be free forever. So once somebody opt-ins for that course and they like that course, I offer them some of my other courses I have for sale. So what I've done is I've built that audience and I can now market to those people. Next up is do sponsored reviews and videos. And what do I mean by sponsored?  So maybe you're reviewing cameras, maybe you are reviewing certain softwares or some product for the kitchen, you know, if that's your niche. There are companies that will actually pay you and send you the product for you to do a video on it. Now, I get these requests on a regular basis, but a lot of them just don't fit. So, you know, I had somebody the other day when we do a video on Bitcoin and Bitcoin is just not my thing. I'm not into that. I'm not a big believer of it. So I can't do a video on that. So the one thing I'll tell you is if you're gonna do a sponsored video where somebody actually pays you to do a video, you wanna make sure it's something that you believe in. You don't wanna be known as the person that will sponsor anything, that will do a video on anything. That's not what you want. And I know you're thinking, well, you know, I don't have a big enough audience. I only get a few hundred people. You'll be surprised how many of these companies just wanna get some videos out there. Maybe they'll just send you a free product for you to review. That's good enough, right? You're starting to make money. And the more of these videos you make, the more real estate you have. That's one thing that people don't understand is that they need to keep making these videos because the more videos you make, the more views you're gonna get. Initially, you're not gonna get a lot of views. You may get no views in the beginning, but if you keep making them and you keep doing them, you're gonna get views. And as you get more views, there's more opportunities out there to do videos that are sponsored videos. Next thing I'm gonna tell you is affiliate links. Affiliate links are awesome. They really are. And affiliate links are gonna be placed in the description of your video right below the video. Now these affiliate links could be Amazon links. Amazon links are great. You're not gonna make a lot of money on Amazon links. I do wanna warn you about that. However, you're gonna make some money. And it's not really about, I hear people saying, well I'm not gonna make with five or $10 on that. But what if you made $5 or $10 20 times a month and you had it on 20 videos? You see, it does start to add up. So what you need to think about is all these different little revenue streams. Now, getting an Amazon link is really simple.    Once you've done that, then all you have to do is go to Amazon, find a product that you want to offer out there. I know in the bottom of this video here, I've got a lot of links to some of the equipment that I've got in my office here because people wanna know, hey, what kind of light do you have? What kind of camera do you have? What kind of camera stand do you have? So I put those links below so people can click on it and go find those products. So once you've found a product on Amazon you wanna sell, all you do is you go up to the top left hand corner and you'll see your links up there. You can click on it and you can get a text link. You can get a picture link, whatever you want. And then you're gonna put that in the description of your video below. When somebody clicks that link and they go to Amazon and they actually buy that product, you're gonna receive a commission. But here's the cool thing. If they buy another product after they've clicked that link within the next 48 hours, you're still gonna get a commission on it. So that's really pretty cool way of having money come in and it's really passive. Now what I've done is I've put a lot of those links into my automatic upload texts that every time I do a video, they're just there. I don't have to enter them in every single time. This takes a lot of time. So what you wanna do is build all those links, have all those links ready so that every time you upload a video, they're just there. The next thing is use Patreon. Now I don't use Patreon but there's a lot of YouTubers that do it. There's a lot of different ways of going about it.  So maybe the people who pay you get to see your videos a little bit sooner. Maybe the people who pay you will give a free Q&A once a month or once a week. Maybe the people who pay you will get some merchandise once a month. So there's all kinds of different business models there. I would say go to patreon.com, see how it works, look at some of the examples there and you can make money on that. I know one YouTuber actually does a lot of videos and he travels around the world and what he does with his Patreon account is he actually gives that money back which is pretty cool to business owners because he goes around the entire world and he talks to business owners and as he does that, the money that comes in in Patreon, he will actually give it to a deserving business owner. Now he has money coming in from other sources so he just takes that portion of money just to hand out. Now here's the cool thing about that. You're saying well he's giving away the money he's getting so it doesn't do him any good. It does him a lot of good because people love watching those videos. They love seeing him do that and since they love seeing him do that he makes money on the next thing I'm gonna tell you which is running ads on your videos. Now this is not something you're gonna be able to do in the beginning. However, it is something you'll be able to do on down the road as long as you keep uploading videos. This is the biggest thing I see with people and I see so many channels out there that have 50 subscribers or 150 subscribers and they don't upload videos. They just don't and they go we want more subscribers. Well, they've already watched your eight videos. There's nothing else, there's no reason to subscribe to you because you haven't uploaded in three months or four months or six months. If you don't consistently do this guys you can never build an audience and if you don't build an audience you can never monetize your videos. Now to monetize you're gonna need 4,000 hours of watch time in the previous 12 months. So as you can see this is not the number one way to make money because most people just can't make money in the beginning that way.  It's a lot more than that. There's a lot more you gotta do. All those steps I just went through will make you money instantly if you just do those steps. The problem is most people don't do those. They don't even put a description. So they don't put affiliate links in their description. They don't put free courses. Remember I got a free course, you gotta go grab that free course down there. They don't put those things in the description so they can't build a list and if they can't build a list then they can't market to the people and they can't make money. Now I wanna hear, do you have a channel? Are you working on it? What's your niche? What have you tried to do? I wanna hear what you're doing out there. I know a lot of you are working on your channel right now. You're trying to figure this thing out. You're trying to figure out how to make money and you may be a little surprised that some of the top ways to make money have nothing to do with running ads. Give me your opinion in the comments below.  Tell me about your channel. I wanna go check it out. If you post down there and you just say I've got a channel, I'll click on your name. I'll go to your channel. Maybe I'll subscribe to your channel and help you build your list. And don't forget, you gotta help me. You got to what? Ring the bell, right? Turn on all bell notifications. That way you're part of the Fisher family, the VIP group that gets notified and also subscribed to my channel. I really appreciate you listening to this video and I'll see you in the next one. Hey, thanks for watching my video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right here so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also, click on one of those videos there. Keep watching on my channel.