The Partially Examined Life Podcast
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A Philosophy Podcast
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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion.
About Podcasting:
For those of you new to podcasting, Click Here to read our "Introduction to Podcasting" Article.
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http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com
Episode 56: More Wittgenstein on Language
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Tue, May 15, 2012
Continuing discussion of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Part I, sections 1-33 and 191-360. Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Philosophy Bro talk about “family resemblances” in concepts, including the concept “game” as used by Wittgenstein: is there really no theory that can capture all and only instances of games, e.g. do all games have rules? Also, what [...]
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Episode 55: Wittgenstein on Language
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Wed, May 02, 2012
On Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Part I, sections 1-33 and 191-360 (written around 1946). What is linguistic meaning? Wittgenstein argues that it’s not some mysterious entity in the mind, but that it is a public matter: you understand a word if you can use it appropriately, and you know the context in which it’s appropriate [...]
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Episode 54: More Buddhism and Naturalism
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Fri, Apr 06, 2012
Continuing our discussion of Owen Flanagan’s The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011). Are the basic tenets of Buddhism compatible with a respect for science? In episode 53, Owen Flanagan outlined a science-friendly project of comparative ethics, and touched on Buddhism’s empiricist theory of knowledge and its metaphysics of impermanence. If that was the lecture, this [...]
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Episode 53: Buddhism and Naturalism with Guest Owen Flanagan
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Mon, Mar 26, 2012
Discussing The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011) with Owen Flanagan. What philosophical insights can we modern folks with our science and naturalism (i.e. inclination against super-natural explanations) glean from Buddhisim? Flanagan says plenty: Buddhism is founded on common human experience (not faith), and we can profitably put Buddhist ethics in dialogue with familiar types of [...]
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Episode 52: Philosophy and Race (DuBois, Martin Luther King, Cornel West)
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sat, Mar 17, 2012
On W.E.B. DuBois’s “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” (1903), Cornel West’s “A Genealogy of Modern Racism” (1982), and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963) and “The Black Power Defined” (1967), plus Malcolm X’s “The Black Revolution” (1963). What kind of philosophical lessons come out of the history of black oppression in America? Historian [...]
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Episode 51: Semiotics and Structuralism (Saussure, et al)
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Fri, Feb 24, 2012
On Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) (Part I and Part II, Ch. 4), Claude Levi-Strauss’s “The Structural Study of Myth” (1955), and Jacques Derrida‘s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966). What is language? What is the relation between language and reality? Saussure argued that a language [...]
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Episode 50: Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Fri, Feb 03, 2012
On Robert M. Pirsig’s philosophical, autobiographical novel from 1974. What’s the relationship between science and values? Pirsig thinks that modern rationality, by insisting on the fundamental distinction between objects (matter) and subjects (people), labels value judgments as irrational. Society therefore largely ignores aesthetic considerations in the buildings and machines that litter our landscape. People rebel [...]
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Episode 49: Foucault on Power and Punishment
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Wed, Jan 11, 2012
Discussing Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), parts 1, 2 and section 3 of part 3. Are we really free? Kings no longer exert absolute and arbitrary power over us, but Foucault’s picture of the evolution from torture and public executions to rehabilitative, medical-style incarceration is not so much a triumph of liberty but a [...]
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Episode 48: Merleau-Ponty on Perception and Knowledge
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sat, Dec 17, 2011
Discussing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "Primacy of Perception" (1946) and The World of Perception (1948).
What is the relation of perception to knowledge? In M-P's phenomenology, perception is primary: even our knowledge of mathematical truths is in some way conditioned by and dependent on the fact that we are creatures with bodies and senses that work the way they do. Science is great, but it doesn't discover the truth of things hiding behind perception: it is an abstraction from certain kinds of perceptions. Other modes of approaching things, e.g. art, can equally well give us knowledge, though of a different kind.
For more on the topic, links to the readings, and discussion, visit partiallyexaminedlife.com. Please donate $1 if you enjoy this discussion!
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Episode 47: Sartre on Consciousness and the Self
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Thu, Dec 01, 2011
Discussing Jean-Paul Sarte’s The Transcendence of the Ego (written in 1934). What is consciousness, and does it necessarily involve an “I” who is conscious of things? Sartre says no: typical experience is consciousness of some object and doesn’t involve the experience of myself as someone having this consciousness. It’s only when we reflect on our [...]
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Episode 46: Plato on Ethics & Religion
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Thu, Nov 17, 2011
Discussing Plato’s “Euthyphro.” Does morality have to be based on religion? Are good things good just because God says so, or (if there is a God) does God choose to approve of the things He does because he recognizes those things to be already good? Plato thinks the latter: if morality is to be truly [...]
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Episode 45: Moral Sense Theory: Hume and Smith
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sat, Oct 29, 2011
Discussing parts of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1740) and Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Where do we get our moral ideas? Hume and Smith both thought that we get them by reflecting on our own moral judgments and on how we and others (including imaginary, hypothesized others) in turn judge [...]
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Episode 44: New Atheist Critiques of Religion
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Tue, Oct 11, 2011
Discussing selections from Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel C. Dennett. Should we be religious, or is religion just a bunch of superstitious nonsense that it’s past time for us to outgrow? Does faith lead to ceding to authority and potential violence? Can a reasonable person be religious? We say lots of rude [...]
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Episode 43: Arguments for the Existence of God
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Thu, Sep 15, 2011
Discussing the arguments by Descartes, St. Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, William Paley, Kant, and others, as analyzed in J.L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1983), chapters 1-3, 5-6, 8, and 11. Are the ontological, cosmological, and teleological (argument from design) arguments for God’s existence any good? Mackie, a [...]
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Episode 42: Feminists on Human Nature and Moral Psychology
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Mon, Sep 05, 2011
Discussing Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian novel Herland (1915) and psychologist Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1983). How does human nature, and specifically moral psychology, vary by sex? Charlotte Perkins Gilman claims that when philosophers have described human nature as violent and selfish, they have in mind solely male nature. Females, left to themselves in [...]
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Episode 41: Pat Churchland on the Neurobiology of Morality (Plus Hume’s Ethics)
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Tue, Jul 19, 2011
We spoke with Patricia Churchland after reading her new book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality. We also discussed David Hume’s ethics as foundational to her work, reading his Treatise on Human Nature (1739), Book III, Part I and his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Section V, Parts I and II. What [...]
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Episode 40: Plato’s Republic: What Is Justice?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Tue, Jul 12, 2011
Discussing The Republic by Plato, primarily books 1 and 2. What is justice? What is the ideal type of government? In the dialogue, Socrates argues that justice is real (not just a fiction the strong make up) and that it’s not relative to who you are (in the sense that it would always be just [...]
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Episode 39: Schleiermacher Defends Religion
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Fri, Jun 10, 2011
Discussing Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “On Religion; Speeches to its Cultured Despisers” (1799, with notes added 1821), first and second speeches. Does religion necessarily conflict with science? Schleiermacher says no: the essence of religion is an emotional response to life; it doesn’t give knowledge or even tell us what to do exactly. Moreover, this attitude is a [...]
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Episode 38: Bertrand Russell on Math and Logic
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Wed, May 25, 2011
Discussing Russell’s Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), ch. 1-3 and 13-18. How do mathematical concepts like number relate to the real world? Russell wants to derive math from logic, and identifies a number as a set of similar sets of objects, e.g. “3″ just IS the set of all trios. Hilarity then ensues. This book [...]
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Episode 37: Locke on Political Power
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Fri, May 06, 2011
Discussing John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government (1690). What makes political power legitimate? Like Hobbes, Locke thinks that things are less than ideal without a society to keep people from killing us, so we implicitly sign a social contract giving power to the state. But for Locke, nature’s not as bad, so the state is [...]
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Episode 36: More Hegel on Self-Consciousness
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Mon, Apr 11, 2011
Part 2 of our discussion of G.F.W. Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” covering sections 178-230 within section B, “Self-Consciousness.” Part 1 is here. First, Hegel’s famous “master and slave” parable, whereby we only become fully self-conscious by meeting up with another person, who (at least in primordial times, or maybe this happens to everyone as they [...]
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Episode 35: Hegel on Self-Consciousness
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sat, Apr 02, 2011
Discussing G.F.W. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Part B (aka Ch. 4), “Self-Consciousness,” plus recapping the three chapters before that (Part A. “Consciousness”). This is discussion one of two: here we only get as far as “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” i.e. sections 166-177. This is plenty, though, as this may be the most difficult text [...]
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Episode 34: Frege on the Logic of Language
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sun, Mar 13, 2011
Discussing Gottlob Frege’s “Sense and Reference,” “Concept and Object” (both from 1892) and “The Thought” (1918). What is it about sentences that make them true or false? Frege, the father of analytic philosophy who invented modern symbolic logic, attempted to codify language in a way that would make this obvious, which would ground mathematics and [...]
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Episode 33: Montaigne: What Is the Purpose of Philosophy?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Fri, Feb 18, 2011
Discussing Michel de Montaigne’s Essays: “That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die,” “Of Experience,” “Of Cannibals,” “Of the Education of Children,” “Of Solitude,” and “Of Solitude” (all from around 1580) with some discussion of “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Renaissance man Montaigne tells us all how to live, how to die, how to raise our [...]
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Episode 32: Heidegger: What is “Being?”
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Tue, Feb 08, 2011
Discussing Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), mostly the intro and ch. 1 and 2 of Part 1. When philosophers try to figure out what really exists (God? matter? numbers?), Heidegger thinks they’ve forgotten a question that really should come first: what is it to exist? He thinks that instead of asking “What is Being?” [...]
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Episode 31: Husserl’s Phenomenology
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Mon, Jan 10, 2011
Discussing Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1931). How can we analyze our experience? Husserl thinks that Descartes was right about the need to ground science from the standpoint of our own experience, but wrong about everything else. Husserl recommends we “bracket” the question of whether the external world exists and just focus on the contents of [...]
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Episode 30: Schopenhauer on Explanations and Knowledge
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sun, Dec 19, 2010
Discussing Arthur Schopenhauer’s On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, published in 1847 (as an expansion of his doctoral thesis from 1813). What kinds of explanations are legitimate? S. thought that causal and logical explanations are often confused, resulting in philosophical errors. In laying out the four types of explanation — the [...]
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Episode 29: Kierkegaard on the Self
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sun, Nov 21, 2010
Discussing Soren Kierkegaard’s “The Sickness Unto Death” (1849). What is the self? For K. we are a tension between opposites: necessity and possibility, the finite and the infinite, soul and body. He thinks we’re all in despair, whether we know it or not, because we wrongly think we’re something we’re not, or we reject what [...]
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Episode 28: Nelson Goodman on Art as Epistemology
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Mon, Nov 01, 2010
Discussing Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978). What’s the relationship between art and science? Does understanding works of art constitute “knowledge,” and if so, how does this relate to other kinds of knowledge? Goodman describes art as a symbol system (including art like instrumental music that doesn’t seem representative), which can symbolize successfully or not. While [...]
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Episode 27: Nagarjuna on Buddhist “Emptiness”
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sun, Oct 10, 2010
Primarily discussing “Reasoning: The Sixty Stanzas” and “Emptiness: The Seventy Stanzas,” by the 2nd century Indian Buddhist Nagarjuna. Is the world of our experience ultimately real? If not, does it have something metaphysically basic underlying it? For Nagarjuna, the answers are “no” and “no… well… not that we can talk about.” Mark and Seth (Wes [...]
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Episode 26: Freud on the Human Condition
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sat, Sep 25, 2010
Discussing Civilization and its Discontents (1930). What’s the meaning of life? Well, for Sigmund Freud, an objective purpose rises or falls with religion, which he thinks a matter of clinging to illusion, so to rephrase: what do we want out of life? To be happy, of course, yet he sees happiness as a matter of [...]
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Episode 25: Spinoza on Human Nature
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Fri, Sep 10, 2010
Discussing Books II through V of the Ethics. Continues the discussion from Ep. 24. What is the relation between mind and body? How do we know things? What are the emotions? Is there an ethical ideal for us to shoot for? What is our relationship to God? Our rational nature prevails over urges to scream, [...]
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Episode 24: Spinoza on God and Metaphysics
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Tue, Aug 24, 2010
Discussing Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), books 1 and 2. We mostly discuss his weird, immanent, non-personal conception of God: God is everything, therefore the world is God as apprehended through some particular attributes, namely insofar as one of his aspects is infinite space (extension, i.e. matter) and insofar as one of his aspects is mind (our [...]
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Episode 23: Rousseau: Human Nature vs. Culture
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Thu, Jul 29, 2010
Discussing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse in Inequality and book 1 of The Social Contract. What’s the relationship between culture and nature? Are savages really slavering beasts of unquenchable appetites, or probably more mellow, hangin’ about, flexin’ their muscles, just chillin’, eh? Rousseau engages in some wild speculation about the development of humanity from the savage to [...]
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Episode 22: More James’s Pragmatism: Is Faith Justified? What is Truth?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sun, Jul 18, 2010
Discussing William James’s “The Will to Believe” and continuing our discussion from Episode 20 on James’s conception of truth as described in his books Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, again featuring guest podcaster Dylan Casey. Does pragmatism give ground for religious belief, like if I say it feels good for me to believe in [...]
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Episode 21: What Is the Mind? (Turing, et al)
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Mon, Jun 28, 2010
Discussing articles by Alan Turing, Gilbert Ryle, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and Dan Dennett. What is this mind stuff, and how can it “be” the brain? Can computers think? No? What if they’re really sexified? Then can they think? Can the mind be a computer? Can it be a room with a guy in it [...]
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Episode 20: Pragmatism – Peirce and James
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Wed, Jun 09, 2010
Reading Pragmatism by William James and “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” by Charles Sanders Peirce. Is truth a primitive relation between our representations and things objectively in the world, or is it an analyzable process by which propositions “prove their worth” by being useful in some way, like by [...]
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Episode 19: Kant: What Can We Know?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Fri, May 14, 2010
Reading Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, which is sort of a post-publication Cliff’s Notes to his Critique of Pure Reason. Do we have any business doing metaphysics, which is by definition about things that we could not possibly experience? Kant says that yes, we can, to a limited extent, but that everyone before [...]
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Episode 18: Plato: What Is Knowledge?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Wed, Apr 21, 2010
Discussing the Theaetetus and the Meno, two dialogues about knowledge. We’re returning to Plato for a somewhat more thorough treatment than we gave him in Episode 1. This should be considered part two (Hume being #1) of three discussions intended to convey the main conflict in the history of epistemology between the empiricists (like Hume) [...]
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Episode 17: Hume’s Empiricism: What Can We Know?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Mon, Mar 29, 2010
Reading David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. David Hume thinks that all we can know are our own impressions, i.e. what our moment-to-moment experiences tell us. Funny thing, though: he thinks that no experience shows us one event causing another event. We only experience one thing happening, then another, and these sequences tend to [...]
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Episode 16: Danto on Art
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Thu, Mar 04, 2010
What effect should the avant garde have on our understanding of what art is? We read three essays by modern, first-rate American philosopher Arthur Danto, all published in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986): the title essay, “The Appreciation and Interpretation of Works of Art,” and “The End of Art.” I understand you may not [...]
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Episode 15: Hegel on History
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Wed, Feb 24, 2010
Discussing G.W.F Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Though he didn’t actually write a book with this name, notes on his lectures on this topic were published after his death, and the first chunk of that serves as a good entrance point to Hegel’s very strange system. How should a philosopher approach the study [...]
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Episode 14: Machiavelli on Politics
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sun, Feb 07, 2010
Reading Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince and Ch. 1-20 of The Discourse on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy. What’s a philosophically astute approach to political matters? What makes a government successful? Should you keep that fortress or sell it for scrap? If you conquer, say, Iraq, do you have to then go and live [...]
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Episode 13: What Are the Metaphysical Implications of Quantum Physics?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sun, Jan 03, 2010
Reading Werner Heisenberg’s “Physics and Philosophy” (1958), and talking about it with an actual former particle physicist, Dylan Casey. What weird stuff about reality does quantum physics imply? Is Heisenberg (of the Uncertainty Principle fame) right that we need to reject “metaphysical realism” based on this very well established scientific framework? The discussion ranges over [...]
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Episode 12: Chuang Tzu’s Taoism: What Is Wisdom?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sun, Dec 06, 2009
Discussing the “Chuang Tzu,” Chapters 2, 3, 6, 18, and 19. It’s the second-most-famous Taoist text and the most humorous, with anecdotes about people singing at funerals and jumping out of moving coaches while drunk. What could it possibly mean to “make all things equal?” and how is the Taoist sage different from our other [...]
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Episode 11: Nietzsche’s Immoralism: What Is Ethics, Anyway?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Tue, Nov 10, 2009
Discussing The Genealogy of Morals (mostly the first two essays) and Beyond Good and Evil Ch. 1 (The Prejudices of Philosophers), 5 (Natural History of Morals), and 9 (What is Noble?). We go through Nietzsche’s convoluted and historically improbable stories about about the transition from master to slave morality and the origin of bad conscience. [...]
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Episode 10: Kantian Ethics: What Should We Do?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Mon, Oct 19, 2009
Discussing Fundamental Principles (aka Groundwork) of the Metaphysic of Morals. We try very hard to make sense of Kant’s major ethical principle, the Categorical Imperative, wherein you should only do what you’d will that EVERYONE do, so, for instance, you should not will to eat pie, because then everyone would eat it and there would [...]
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Episode 9: Utilitarian Ethics: What Should We Do?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Fri, Sep 18, 2009
Discussing Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation chapters 1-5, John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, and modern utilitarian Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”) Going full tilt on the Greatest Happiness principle, with talk of gladiators, consensual cannibalism, and illegal downloads. How many Pleetons were in your last orgasm? Should animals count [...]
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Episode 8: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (and Carnap): What Can We Legitimately Talk About?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Fri, Sep 04, 2009
Continuing last ep’s discussion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with some Rudolph Carnap (a logical positivist from the Vienna Circle: “The Rejection of Metaphysics” from his 1935 book Philosophy and Logical Syntax) about what kind of crazy talk is outside of legitimate discourse. Carnap interprets W as simply ruling out as unscientific most of the talk [...]
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Episode 7: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: What Is There and Can We Talk About It?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Wed, Aug 19, 2009
Discussing the beginning (through around 3.1) of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Mr. W. wrote that the world is made up of facts (as opposed to things) and that these facts can be analyzed into atomic facts, but then refused to give even one example to help us understand what the hell he’s talking about, and so [...]
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Episode 6: Leibniz’s Monadology: What Is There?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Fri, Jul 31, 2009
Have some tasty metaphysics, in mono! Leibniz thinks that the world is ultimately made up of monads, which are like atoms except nothing at all like atoms, because they’re alive, and mindful, and eternal, and windowless, placed in the best kind of harmony at the beginning of time by God. Is there a concept album [...]
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Episode 0: Introduction to the Podcast
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sat, Jul 25, 2009
Listen to this here episode first. A priori, that is. Before experiencing the world yourself. Why should you bother to go through the trouble of downloading and listening to one of the full length episodes? Who are we anyway? Why shouldn’t you just go listen to some philosophy lectures posted by university professors instead of [...]
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Episode 5: Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Thu, Jul 16, 2009
Discussing Books 1 and 2. What is virtue, and how can I eat it? Do not enjoy this episode too much, or too little, but just the right amount. Apparently, if you haven’t already have been brought up with the right habits, you may as well give up. Plus, is Michael Jackson the Aristotelian ideal? [...]
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Episode 4: Camus and the Absurd
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Mon, Jun 22, 2009
Discussing Camus’s “An Absurd Reasoning” and ”The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942). Does our eventual death mean that life has no meaning and we might as well end it all?  Camus starts to address this question, then gets distracted and talks about a bunch of phenomenologists until he dies unreconciled.  Also, let’s all push a rock up [...]
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Episode 3: Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Social Contract
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Sun, Jun 07, 2009
Discussing Hobbes’s Leviathan, Chapters 13-15. Have we implicitly signed a social contract whereby our native right to punch other people in the face is given to the President? Hobbes does things that eventually result in the U.S. Constitution and makes Wes nauseous. Plus: Star Trek and the Bible! You can get the reading from http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-c.html [...]
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Episode 2: Descartes’s Meditations: What Can We Know?
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Thu, May 14, 2009
Discussing Descartes’s Meditations 1 and 2. Descartes engages in the most influential navel gazing ever, and you are there! In this second and superior-to-the-first installment of our lil’ philosophy discussion, we discuss what Descartes thinks he knows with certainty (hint: it is not you), the Matrix, and burning-at-the-stake.com. Mark and Wes agree to disagree about [...]
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Part 2 of Episode 1: “The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living.”
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Thu, May 14, 2009
More discussion of Plato’s “Apology.” Incidentally, the “celibacy society” that Seth refers to at one point in here has a T-shirt.
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Part 1 of Episode 1: “The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living.”
Author: Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
Wed, May 13, 2009
Discussing Plato’s “Apology.” This reading is all about how Socrates is on trial for acting like an ass and proceeds to act like an ass and so is convicted. Big surprise. On this our inaugural discussion, Mark, Seth, and Wes talk about how philosophers are arrogant bastards who neglect their children, how people of all [...]
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- Published:
September 2010
- LearnOutLoud.com Product ID:
T036999
Philosophy
History of Philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophers
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