De Beauvoir on the Ambiguous Human Condition (Part Two)
Continuing on Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity(1947), parts I and II. We discuss all the various ways to fail to wholly will your own freedom, i.e., will it all the way to where you will the freedom of others. The first step is admitting that human consciousness is an ontological negative, i.e., it doesn't have static being in the way a rock or tree or even an instinct-driven squir...
1hr 17m Jun 06, 2016
1hr 17m
NEM Ep 17: Carrie Akre's Different Ways of Fronting
Carrie fronted Seattle grunge favorite Hammerbox in the early ’90s, then moved to the more poppy guitar rock band Goodness for the latter part of the decade, and released three solo albums in the ’00s. The overall movement is from harsh exuberance to quiet reflectivity, and Carrie’s role evolved with her starting off as new newbie to rock bands singing over already-composed music and ending up ...
1hr 16m Jun 04, 2016
1hr 16m
De Beauvoir on the Ambiguous Human Condition (Part One)
On Simone De Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), parts I and II. We return to existentialism! Instead of describing our predicament as "absurd," de Beauvoir prefers "ambiguous": We are a biological organism in the world, yet we're also free consciousness transcending the given situation. Truly coming to terms with this freedom means not only understanding that you transcend any label of...
1hr 3m May 30, 2016
1hr 3m
PEL News and Previews: Plato’s “Crito” and the Hegel’s Logic Aftershow
Brian Wilson's Not School Intro Readings in Philosophy Group discussed Plato on why you should obey the state and other musings from a condemned Socrates; you can be part of the group's next discussion on Sun. 6/4 5pm EDT. Purdue's Chris Yeomans was our guest Hegel scholar as we reflected back on eps 134/135, joining Mark and Danny Lobell with PEL listeners to discuss Hegel's theology, metaphy...
39m May 27, 2016
39m
Nakedly Examined Music #15 w/ Craig Wedren (PEL Crossover Special)
Hey, PEL Listeners, go subscribe to Nakedly Examined Music at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com or on iTunes! Craig led Shudder to Think from 1986 to 1998 and has since had a solo career and done soundtrack work. Shudder to Think was a band that started as part of Washington DC's "hardcore" scene, but challenged musical conventions to try to achieve U2-level success with Captain-Beefheart-level weirdne...
1hr 38m May 26, 2016
1hr 38m
PEL Special: Nakedly Examined Music #15 with Craig Wedren
www.nakedlyexaminedmusic.com
1hr 38m May 26, 2016
1hr 38m
NEM Ep 16: Narada Michael Walden Funks the Moment
Narada started as a fusion drummer in the ’70s (with Mahavishnu Orchestra, Jeff Beck, etc.) then released numerous solo albums and produced and wrote for artists like Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Aretha Franklin, and many more. He believes in working fast: creating a mood and getting the most out of it. We discuss “Freedom” (written by Richie Havens) from Evolution (2015), “I Shoulda Loved Ya...
1hr 2m May 26, 2016
1hr 2m
REISSUE-Ep. 42: Feminists on Human Nature and Moral Psychology
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 an isolated society,...
1hr 53m May 23, 2016
1hr 53m
bell hooks on Racism & Sexism (Part Two)
Continuing on Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism(1981) and Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992, Intro, Ch. 3, 11), with guest Myisha Cherry. We talk about black feminist "essentialism" (i.e., a single narrative of oppression) and how that relates to bell hooks's project of media critique. Every person's journey is individual, yet she thinks there are right ways and wrong ways to ...
1hr 11m May 16, 2016
1hr 11m
bell hooks on Racism & Sexism (Part One)
On Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) and Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992, Intro, Ch. 3, 11). How do these pernicious forces interact? bell hooks (aka Gloria Watkins) describes black women as having been excluded both from mainstream historical feminism (which was led by white women who didn't want to alienate Southern whites) and black civil rights struggles (which we...
51m May 09, 2016
51m
Searle Interview on Perception (Part Two)
Mark, Wes, and Dylan discuss the interview with John in part one on Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (2015) and try to sketch out the view and its potential problems in a little more detail. The two main issues are first, Searle claims that his theory is much better than historical alternatives because this "presentation" of the world is not an intermediary: we are directly pe...
53m May 02, 2016
53m
NEM Ep 14: Jonathan Donahue (Mercury Rev): Mountain Man of Subtlety
After serving a stint with the Flaming Lips, Jonathan has been putting out albums with Mercury Rev since 1991. Over time, their music has shifted from noisy alternative rock to symphonic, soundtrack pop songs… still psychedelic, but now with an unapologetically Disneyesque influence, with the magic of nature swirling out through harp glissandos and french horns, all standing behind a simple, st...
1hr 41m May 01, 2016
1hr 41m
http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2016/04/25/ep138-1-john-searle/
We interview John about Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (2015). What is perception? Searle says that it's not a matter of seeing a representation which is then somehow related to things in the real world. We see the actual objects, with no mediation. But then how can there be illusions? Well, we see things under an aspect: a presentation of the thing. And that presentation pr...
1hr 8m Apr 25, 2016
1hr 8m
Bourdieu on the Tastes of Social Classes (Part Two)
Continuing on Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979) with guest rock star Tim Quirk (from Too Much Joy). We continue talking about Bourdieu's conclusions regarding his survey of musical tastes: People use their tastes to distinguish themselves, to assert their social superiority. Bourdieu thinks the Kantian, upper-class, art-for-art's-sake paradigm of ...
1hr 15m Apr 18, 2016
1hr 15m
NEM Ep 12: John Philip Shenale on String Arrangement, Composing, Producing
Phil is the long-time string arranger for Tori Amos and has done a heap more production, arrangement, and keyboard work. He has a very deliberate production style, carefully crafting a very natural-sounding theatrical background using both cutting-edge and very old tools. We talk about “Cross the Channel” from the Brik & Shenale EP (2012), Phil’s arrangement and production of “Stars that Speak”...
1hr 18m Apr 12, 2016
1hr 18m
Bourdieu on the Tastes of Social Classes (Part One)
On Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), introduction, chapter 1 through p. 63, conclusion, and postscript. How do our tastes in music, art, and everything else reflect our social position? This philosophically trained sociologist administered a few detailed questionnaires in 1960s France and used the resulting differences in what people in different...
57m Apr 11, 2016
57m
Adorno on the Culture Industry (Part Two)
Continuing on Theodor Adorno's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" (1944). We cover topics within art and entertainment like the role of style: You think you're being so original with your personal style, but Adorno sees you has having already been brainwashed into being a clone, so your "authentic" expression is anything but. Also, humor is not, as you might think, a way of...
1hr 19m Apr 04, 2016
1hr 19m
Adorno on the Culture Industry (Part One)
On Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), plus Adorno's essay "Culture Industry Reconsidered" (1963). How does the entertainment industry affect us? Adorno and Horkheimer (who co-authored the book, but it looks like Adorno mainly wrote the essay we read) are founding figures of the Frankfurt school, wh...
59m Mar 28, 2016
59m
NEM Ep 10: Nick Eede (Cutting Crew): Escape from the 80s
In 1986 Nick van Eede released a song (“I Just Died in Your Arms”) that will be played long after we are all dead. But he’s got a lot more going on than that, and on his new album (still under the moniker “Cutting Crew”) he’s recorded his best songs from the last decade without regard for continuity with the sound that made him famous. We discuss “Reach for the Sky” from The Scattering (1989), ...
1hr 15m Mar 25, 2016
1hr 15m
Hegel on the Logic of Basic Metaphysical Concepts (Part Two)
The last of our four releases on G.W.F. Hegel's The Encyclopaedia Logic (1817). Here we finish sections 78–99 (still with guest Amogh Sahu), giving Hegel's account of how Being supposedly leads, when you analyze the concept itself, to Nothingness, and then Becoming, Quality, and Quantity. And we also get Infinity in there, which is nice. So, how does this work? Well, Being, which is the only s...
1hr 9m Mar 21, 2016
1hr 9m
NEM Ep 9: Roderick Romero: Psychedelic Treehouse Poet
Roderick Wolgamott Romero founded and fronted the Seattle 90s space rock band Sky Cries Mary. So how does a poet get a band? Is a poet’s process different from a typical lyricist’s? We discuss “Gliding” from Taking the Stage Live: 1997–2005 (2011), “December Snow” from Roderick’s in-progress project One Point Moment Still (featuring Romanian techno duo We’d), and “Queen of Slug Theater” from Mo...
1hr 7m Mar 19, 2016
1hr 7m
Hegel on the Logic of Basic Metaphysical Concepts (Part One)
A whole second discussion on G.F.W. Hegel's The Encyclopaedia Logic (1817), hitting sections 78–99 on the dialectic and how it's supposed to generate basic metaphysical categories like Being, Becoming, Quality, and Quantity. We also talk about Understanding vs. Reason: Kant thought that we can't do metaphysics because we can only talk sensibly about abstractions (via the Understanding) from ou...
1hr 1m Mar 14, 2016
1hr 1m
NEM Ep 8: Tim Quirk Is the Philosopher-King of Beers
Tim describes himself as not a singer, but a writer with a band, and he shouted at the front of Too Much Joy in the late’ 80s–’90s and has since recorded as Wonderlick while working as a big dog in the digital music industry with Google, Rhapsody, and now Freeform. We discuss “King of Beers” from Cereal Killers (1991), “Donner Lake” from Wonderlick (2002), “Just Like a Man” from Mutiny (1992), ...
1hr 16m Mar 11, 2016
1hr 16m
Hegel on Thought and World aka Logic (Part Two)
HegelMore on G.F.W. Hegel's The Science of Logic (1812–1816), §1–§129 plus The Encyclopaedia Logic (1817) §1–§25. We continue trying to make sense of Hegel's method and purpose: How does he think that we can deduce something like Kant's categories (e.g. quantity, quality)? We can't start with the manifold of experience, which presupposes a subject-object distinction, which would be me having p...
1hr 11m Mar 07, 2016
1hr 11m
Hegel on Thought and World aka Logic (Part One)
On G.F.W. Hegel's The Science of Logic (1812–1816), §1–§129 (i.e., the two prefaces and the introduction), plus The Encyclopaedia Logic (1817) §1–§25, which is supposed to dumb it down more so we can understand what's going on. "Logic" for Hegel isn't about symbolic logic; it's about how thought interacts with the world. In short, our thoughts about fundamental metaphysical categories bear the...
56m Feb 29, 2016
56m
Freud on the Human Condition (with New Intro)
Discussing Civilization and its Discontents (1930). How can we live happily in society when happiness is a matter of fulfillment of pent-up desires? Originally released Sept. 2010. Newly introduced with reflections by Wes and Dylan. End song: "The Easy Thing" by New People from The Easy Thing (2009). Sponsored by Harry's. Try their razor service free, including a shaving kit, by visiting harr...
2hr 23m Feb 22, 2016
2hr 23m
NEM Ep 5: Jeff Heiskell: Positive Verite
Jeff was the voice of JudyBats until ’94, and is now Heiskell. He sings with character, or characters, always articulate, overly introspective, with intimacy issues. We discuss his current status as happy, self-funded, free-styled, hands-off yet obsessive compulsive solo artist and his high-pressure, compromise-filled time on a major label that led him to quit music altogether for a while. Song...
1hr 12m Feb 22, 2016
1hr 12m
Ep. 130/131 Aftershow (Preview) on Aristotle feat. Rebecca Goldner
Wes Alwan and Danny Lobell were joined by St. John's Annapolis tutor Rebecca Goldner, Michael Burgess, Nick Halme, Erik Weissengruber, Chase Fiorenza, and Scott Anderson to review our episodes 130 and 131. PEL Citizens can hear the full discussion, or anyone can watch it on YouTube
15m Feb 21, 2016
15m
PEL Special: Nakedly Examined Music #1 with David Lowery
Welcome to Nakedly Examined Music, our first spin-off of PEL. Hear more at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com or find it via iTunes. Mark interviews songwriters about why and how they do what they do. Think of it as applied philosophy. Four episodes are now posted; this cross-post of our pilot features David Lowery of Camper van Beethoven and Cracker talking through three of his songs. He's as well-spok...
1hr 16m Feb 18, 2016
1hr 16m
Erich Fromm on Love as an Art (Part Two)
Continuing on Fromm's The Art of Loving (1956). In this second half of our discussion, we talk about love as requiring knowledge: as "knowing the secret" of humanity or at least being interested. This is related to sadism. Is there a difference between motherly and fatherly love? Fromm thinks so. He also talks about different degrees of maturity in one's belief in God, the best being like Spin...
1hr 9m Feb 15, 2016
1hr 9m
NEM Ep 4: Gareth Mitchell: Granular Creativity
Gareth Mitchell is a post-rock academic, an innovative guitarist who now uses recorded splices of treated guitar (among other things) made into loops to meticulously construct electronic music, as on his upcoming album, 72. We dive deep into his tracks “Circle” and “Decay” from this album and get a taste of his dreaming singer/songwriter material with “Sovereign” from Spectre (2012). We also de...
1hr 17m Feb 15, 2016
1hr 17m
Erich Fromm on Love as an Art (Part One)
A Valentine's Day special topic! What is love, really? This psychoanalyst of the Frankfurt school thinks that real love is not something one ""falls"" into, but is an art, an activity, and doing it well requires a disciplined openness and psychological health. Love is the answer to the deep human need to rid ourselves of isolation, but a mere sexual union won't provide real intimacy. To connect...
53m Feb 08, 2016
53m
NEM Ep 3: Kevin Godley: Pure Play in the Devil's Shoes
Kevin Godley is a multi-media master, having directed many of the coolest music videos you’ve ever seen. But before that, he was half of Godley & Creme and 1/4 of 10cc, singing, drumming, and mostly coming up with ideas, ideas, and more ideas. Today he runs Whole World Band, a platform for collaborative video creation, and recently released his iBook autobiography Spacecake, but he still perfor...
1hr 26m Feb 05, 2016
1hr 26m
Living Stoically with Seneca and Massimo (Part Two)
Continuing with Massimo Pigliucci on selected "moral epistles" by Seneca: 4. On the Terrors of Death, 12. On Old Age, 49. On the Shortness of Life, 59. On Pleasure and Joy, 62. On Good Company, 92. On the Happy Life, 96. On Facing Hardship, and 116. On Self Control. With the preliminaries out of the way, we really get into the essays to see what Seneca has to say about love and other emotions,...
1hr 10m Feb 01, 2016
1hr 10m
Living Stoically with Seneca and Massimo (Part One)
On selected "moral epistles" (from around 65 CE) by Lucius Annaeus Seneca: 4. On the Terrors of Death, 12. On Old Age, 49. On the Shortness of Life, 59. On Pleasure and Joy, 62. On Good Company, 92. On the Happy Life, 96. On Facing Hardship, and 116. On Self Control. We're joined by Massimo Pigliucci of the How to Be a Stoic blog, who for a long time was on the Rationally Speaking podcast. Bac...
1hr 3m Jan 25, 2016
1hr 3m
Aristotle’s “De Anima”: What Is the Mind? (Part Two)
Concluding our discussion of On the Soul, book 3. Now that we're done with perception, we get into imagination and then to ""nous"" proper: the contemplative intellect that understands by grasping the ""forms"" of things. This is our gateway to talking about knowledge, because while sensation in the sense of grasping green can't be wrong, once we make a claim like ""this book is green,"" we're...
1hr 2m Jan 18, 2016
1hr 2m
Aristotle’s “De Anima”: What Is the Mind? (Part One)
Our second discussion of De Anima or On the Soul (350 BCE), this time on book 3. What is the intellect? In ep. 130, we talked about Aristotle's idea of the soul as the form of the body and about two of its functions or parts: the nutritive and the sensitive. Here we talk more about how sensation is supposed to work according to Aristotle, and how the sense organs interact with each other. Aris...
51m Jan 11, 2016
51m
Episode 130: Aristotle’s “De Anima”: What Is Life? (Part Two)
Continuing on De Anima, books 1 and 2. We talk about the nutritive part of the soul, which is the only kind plants have, and the perceptive part, which animals have too, which for Aristotle means they have (or many of them have) imagination too. We grapple more with types of causation and what Aristotle means by forms. How does the soul "cause" the living body? Listen to part one first, or get...
54m Jan 04, 2016
54m
Aristotle’s “De Anima”: What Is Life? (Part One)
On De Anima or On the Soul (350 BCE), books 1 and 2. We lead off with listener mail; Aristotle starts 18 minutes in. What can this ancient text tell us about biological life? Much of the interest and difficulty here is the very different conceptual schemes at play: What counts as a scientific explanation? Aristotle gives a highly general account about what, for all living things, makes them al...
1hr 11m Dec 28, 2015
1hr 11m
Holiday Special 2015: Mark Lint’s “Songs from the Partially Examined Life” with Many Guest Greetings
PEL gets nostalgic, playing songs and bringing back guests from yesteryear. Both beloved former guests and some new behind-the-scenes friends of PEL chatted with Mark about what they're up to, and each of them took on a song to try to make sense of. Some of the many projects we discuss include: The 2016 PEL Calendar, with sweet philosophy art by Sterling Bartlett and funny text mostly written...
2hr 7m Dec 24, 2015
2hr 7m
Is Faith Rational? (Part Two)
Continuing on faith and reason with Nathan Gilmour and Rob Dyer. In this half we focus on the critique of evidentialism in Basil Mitchell's “Faith and Criticism” (1994), Peter van Inwagen's "Clifford's Principle" (1994, from his "Quam Dilecta"), and Alvin Plantinga's “Is Belief in God Properly Basic?” (1981). We consider briefly how mysticism plays into the idea of private experience counting ...
1hr 10m Dec 21, 2015
1hr 10m
Is Faith Rational? (Part One)
Nathan Gilmour (Christian Humanist podcast) and Rob Dyer (God Complex Radio) join Mark and Wes for to discuss the reasonableness of religious belief reading: Antony Flew, "The Presumption of Atheism" (1976)Norwood Russell Hanson, “The Agnostic’s Dilemma” (1971)Steven Cahn, "The Irrelevance of Proof to Religion" (1969)Alvin Plantinga, “Is Belief in God Properly Basic?” (1981)Merold Westphal, "S...
1hr 11m Dec 14, 2015
1hr 11m
Hilary Putnam on Linguistic Meaning (Part Two)
Continuing on ""The Meaning of Meaning"" (1975). We finish giving Putnam's positive theory for ""meaning"" something, which involves not only referring to something (whose properties, per Kripke, you may well not know) but being familiar with a stereotype of the thing, which is like a description, but isn't the thing that picks out the referent. For example, my stereotype of ""elm"" may (if I ...
1hr 15m Dec 07, 2015
1hr 15m
Hilary Putnam on Linguistic Meaning (Part One)
On "The Meaning of Meaning" (1975). So if per Kripke (we're following the thread from #126), meaning is NOT a matter of having a description in your head, then what is it? Hilary Putnam reformulates Kripke's insight in terms of Twin Earths: If Earth-water is H2O, and on Twin Earth, they have something that looks just like water but is a different compound, then we wouldn't call that water, rig...
56m Nov 30, 2015
56m
John Dewey on Experience and the World (Part Two)
Continuing on Experience and Nature (1925), through ch. 4. We focus here on how philosophy supposedly gets warped by fear and desire in human nature, how we pretend that abstractions we've created are metaphysically real and basic. So how do the objects of our experience, then, relate to those of science? And can we talk about ""ends"" (teleology) when doing science? Learn more about the topic...
1hr 21m Nov 23, 2015
1hr 21m
John Dewey on Experience and the World (Part One)
On Experience and Nature (1925), through ch. 4. What's the relationship between our experience and the world that science investigates? Dewey thinks that these are one and the same, and philosophies that call some part of it (like atoms or Platonic forms) the real part while the experienced world is a distortion are unjustified. We need to remove the unjustified split between perception and re...
1hr 5m Nov 16, 2015
1hr 5m
Saul Kripke on Possibilities, Language & Science (Part Two)
On Naming and Necessity (1980). What's the relationship between language and the world? Does a term like ""tiger"" as we use it refer to that animal because we have a certain mental image or definition of that animal in our heads? Saul Kripke says no: If ""tigers have stripes"" was part of the definition of a tiger, then it would be a logical contradiction to talk about an abnormal, stripe-les...
1hr 16m Nov 09, 2015
1hr 16m
Saul Kripke on Possibilities, Language & Science (Part One)
On Naming and Necessity (1980). What's the relationship between language and the world? Specifically, what makes a name or a class term (like ""tiger"") pick out the person or things that it does? Saul Kripke wanted to correct the dominant view of his time (which involved speakers having some description in mind, and it's that description that hooks the word to the thing), and used modal langu...
1hr 8m Nov 02, 2015
1hr 8m
Not School Digest: Asimov, Camus, Jaspers, Brecht, Peirce, Historical Jesus
Discussion clips covering topic we haven't had time to cover on the podcast proper. Brief yourself on these topics via the enclosed 10–15 minute bursts, or become a PEL Citizen to listen to these bonus discussions in their full length. Mark is joined by Nathan Hanks to tell you how to get involved in a discussion yourself. First, learn about Isaac Asimov's story, ""The Last Question"" (1956) (...
1hr 27m Oct 26, 2015
1hr 27m
Not School Digest: Asimov, Camus, Jaspers, Brecht, Peirce, Historical Jesus
On Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question," Albert Camus's "The Fall," Karl Jaspers's "Truth and Symbol," C.S. Peirce's "The Fixation of Belief," Bertold Brecht's "Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction," and Thomas Sheehan's Stanford lectures on the Historical Jesus. These are snippets covering topics we haven't had time to cover on the podcast proper. Brief yourself via these 10–15 minute...
1hr 27m Oct 25, 2015
1hr 27m