Episode 5: Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics
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? Read more...
1hr 41m Jul 16, 2009
1hr 41m
Episode 4: Camus and the Absurd
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 Read more...
1hr 37m Jun 22, 2009
1hr 37m
Episode 3: Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Social Contract
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! Buy the book or read it online Read more...
1hr 38m Jun 07, 2009
1hr 38m
Episode 2: Descartes’s Meditations: What Can We Know?
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 Read more...
1hr 39m May 14, 2009
1hr 39m
Part 2 of Episode 1: “The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living.”
More discussion of Plato’s “Apology.” Incidentally, the “celibacy society” that Seth refers to at one point in here has a T-shirt.
45m May 14, 2009
45m
The Unexamined Life pt 1 - Partially Examined Life
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 political stripes don’t usually examine their fundamental beliefs (but prob...
42m May 13, 2009
42m