Precognition of Ep. 89: Berkeley’s Idealism
Wes Alwan introduces George Berkeley's Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous.
31m Feb 18, 2014
31m
Episode 88: G.E.M. Anscombe: Should We Use Moral Language?
On Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958), Intention sections 22-27 (1957), and “War and Murder” (1961). No, Anscombe thinks that our moral language was developed in a theistic context,...Read more »
1hr 47m Feb 18, 2014
1hr 47m
Precognition of Ep. 88: G.E.M. Anscombe
Guest Philosophy Bro introduces Elizabeth Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy," and Intention sections 22-27.
10m Jan 18, 2014
10m
Precognition of Episdoe 88: Anscombe on Morality
Special guest Philosophy Bro introduces us to Elizabeth Anscombe’s essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” and her book Intention (sections 22-27).#anscombe #philosophybro #moralityGo to the blog: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2014/01/18/precognition-88-anscombe/
10m Jan 18, 2014
10m
Table read of Sartre's "No Exit" with Lucy Lawless and Jaime Murray
In support of our upcoming ep. #87 on Sartre, the PEL Players present our 2nd annual dramatic reading of a work of philosophical theater. Mark Linsenmayer and Wes Alwan are joined by real actresses Lucy Lawless (Xena, Battlestar Galactica, Parks & Recreation, etc.) and Jaime Murray (Defiance, Dexter, Warehouse 13, etc.), who are pals through working together on Spartacus. Warning: This is a c...
1hr 27m Jan 02, 2014
1hr 27m
Episode 87: Sartre on Freedom and Self-Deception
On Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1946), “Bad Faith” (pt. 1, ch. 2 of Being & Nothingness, 1943), and his play No Exit (1944)....Read more »
1hr 56m Jan 01, 2014
1hr 56m
Thomas Kuhn on Scientific Progress - Partially Examined Life
On The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published mostly in 1962. Does scientific knowledge simply accumulate as we learn more and more, coming closer and closer to a full and truthful picture of the world? Kuhn says no! Instead, each scientific sub-culture has its own “paradigm,” or model for what constitutes legitimate science, which includes what problems to study, what to counts as a r...
1hr 28m Dec 24, 2013
1hr 28m
Precognition of Ep. 87: Sartre on the Human Condition
Mark Linsenmayer lays out some themes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism” and the “Bad Faith” chapter (Part 1, Ch. 2) of Being & Nothingness.#Sartre #Existentialism #Humanism #badfaithGo to the blog: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2013/12/20/precognition87-sartre/
9m Dec 20, 2013
9m
John Rawls' on Social Justice - Partially Examined Life
On John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), most of ch. 1-4. What makes for a just society? Rawls gives us a thought experiment: Imagine you don’t know whether you’re rich or poor or any of the other specifics of your situation (he calls this going behind “the veil of ignorance” into the “original position”). Now what principles would you pick to determine basic social institutions? Would you ...
1hr 46m Dec 07, 2013
1hr 46m
Precognition of Episode 86: Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions - Partially Examined Life
Dylan Casey lays out Thomas Kuhn’s thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The full PEL episode on this book will be released in a few weeks. A transcript is available on our Citizen site’s Free Stuff page.#kuhn #science #paradigmGo to the blog: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2013/12/07/precognition-of-ep-86-thomas-kuhn/
6m Dec 07, 2013
6m
Precognition of Episode 85: John Rawl's Theory of Justice - Partially Examined Life
On the evening of 11/10, we’re discussing John Rawls. What is justice? Rawls interpreted this question as asking what basic social rules and structures would result in a society that we’d consider fair. Justice is fairness, on a social level. Fairness, of course, is an intuitive notion, and begs for a philosophical definition, but instead of doing some sort of old fashioned search for a defini...
11m Nov 10, 2013
11m
Frithjof Bergmann Q&A on New Work - Partially Examined Life
"In light of our ep. 83, many listeners had questions on Frithjof’s social/political/economic proposals for creating a post-job, pro-meaningful-work world. Mark Linsenmayer here pitches a number of these questions (culled from our blog and Facebook group) to Frithjof. What would a future New Work world look like? How do first-world folks fit into the project? How can I make MY calling economic...
58m Nov 01, 2013
58m
Frithjof Bergmann on Work - Partially Examined Life
Talking with Frithjof Bergmann, Prof. Emeritus from U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor about his book New Work, New Culture (2004, English release coming soon). Frithjof is a world-renowned ex-Hegel/Nietzsche scholar who has worked since the early 80s on projects to realize the goal of “New Work,” which is an alternative to the current, dysfunctional job system. New Work enables people to do work (whic...
1hr 30m Oct 11, 2013
1hr 30m
Popper on Science - Partially Examined Life
On Conjectures and Refutations (1963), the first three essays. What is science, and how is it different than pseudo-science? From philosophy? Is philosophy just pseudo-science, or proto-science, or what? Popper thinks that all legitimate inquiry is about solving real problems, and scientific theories are those that are potentially falsifiable: they make definitely predictions about the world t...
1hr 52m Sep 24, 2013
1hr 52m
Precognition of Episode 83: Frithjof Bergmann's New Work, New Culture - Partially Examined Life
An introduction to and summary of Frithjof Bergmann’s New Work, New Culture, read by Mark Linsenmayer. The full episode on this topic will be posted in a few weeks. #Bergmann #Work #Culture Go to the blog: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2013/09/15/precognition83-frithjof-bergmann/
13m Sep 16, 2013
13m
Jung on the Psyche and Dreams - Partially Examined Life
On Carl Jung’s “Approaching the Unconscious” from Man and His Symbols, written in 1961. What’s the structure of the mind? Jung followed Freud in positing an unconscious distinct from the conscious ego, but Jung’s picture has the unconscious much more stuffed full of all sorts of stuff from who knows where, including instincts (the archetypes) that tend to give rise to behavior and dream imager...
1hr 36m Aug 29, 2013
1hr 36m
Precognition of Episode 82: Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations - Partially Examined Life
A summary of the first three essays in Karl Popper’s collection Conjectures and Refutations, read by Dylan Casey. The full episode on this topic will be posted in a few weeks.#Popper #Philosophy #Epistemology #Knowledge Go to the blog: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2013/08/28/precognition82-popper/
13m Aug 28, 2013
13m
Not School Digest Aug 2013 - Partially Examined Life
"Excerpts of discussions about Frithjof Bergmann’s New Work, New Culture, Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and Martin Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism.” Given rising economic productivity, we should all be working less, but we’re not, and the job system is not healthy for ou...
44m Aug 23, 2013
44m
Partially Examined Life Not School Digest #3: Work, Blood Meridian, Mind, and Heidegger
Excerpts of discussions about Frithjof Bergmann's New Work, New Culture, Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism."
44m Aug 23, 2013
44m
Precognition of Episode 81: Jung's "Man and His Symbols" - Partially Examined Life
An introduction to Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols, read by Wes Alwan. We’ll have a full episode to be released in a few weeks. Go to the blog: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2013/08/06/precognition81-jung/
14m Aug 06, 2013
14m
PREVIEW-PEL Ep 79: Heraclitus on Understanding the World
Eva Brann discusses her book The Logos of Heraclitus (2011). What is the world like, and how can we understand it? Heraclitus thinks that the answer to both questions is found in “the logos.” Looking for the full Citizen version? (https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2013/07/15/ep79-heraclitus-citizen/)
30m Jul 15, 2013
30m
The Logo of Heraclitus (with Eva Brann) - Partially Examined Life
Eva Brann discusses her book The Logos of Heraclitus (2011). What is the world like, and how can we understand it? Heraclitus thinks that the answer to both questions is found in “the logos,” which is a Greek word with multiple meanings: it can be an explanation, a word or linguistic meaning, science, rationality (the Latin word is “ratio”), the principle of exchange between things… So the wor...
1hr 42m Jul 15, 2013
1hr 42m
Precognition of Episode 80: Heidegger's Letter on Humanism - Partially Examined Life
A short summary of Heidegger’s “Essay on Humanism,” which we’ll have a full episode on to be released in a few weeks, read by Seth Paskin. This is a new kind of mini-episode for us, and you should tell us at partiallyexaminedlife.com whether we should keep recording them. Our hope is that this will encourage more people to want to read the text in advance of our full-length discussions, and th...
13m Jul 14, 2013
13m
Aristotle on Virtue - Partially Examined Life
Discussing books 1 and 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics. 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? #ethics #virtue #aristotle
1hr 41m Jul 02, 2013
1hr 41m
Plato on Justice - Partially Examined Life
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 to help your friends and hurt your enemies). Justice ends up being a matter of balancing your soul so t...
1hr 36m Jul 02, 2013
1hr 36m
Santayana on Appreciating Beauty - Partially Examined Life
What are we saying when we call something “beautiful?” Are we pointing out an objective quality that other people (anyone?) can ferret out, or just essentially saying “yay!” without any logic necessarily behind our exclamation? The poet and philosopher Santayana thought that while aesthetic appreciation is an immediate experience–we don’t “infer” the beauty of something by recognizing some natu...
1hr 47m Jun 09, 2013
1hr 47m
Why do Philosophy? - Partially Examined Life
Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan share what drove them into philosophy and keeps them there. How is philosophy different than (or similar to) science? Than religion? Art? The consensus seems that philosophy, to us, is inevitable for the curious. It’s just inquiry, unbounded (in principle at least) by any fixed assumptions. While scientific and religious endeavors can be self-questioning as well, the...
1hr 14m Mar 23, 2013
1hr 14m
Terrorism (with Jonathan R. White) - Partially Examined Life
We read: *Donald Black’s “The Geometry of Terrorism” (2004)*J. Angelo Corlett’s “Can Terrorism be Morally Justified?” (1996)*Igor Primoratz’s article on terrorism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2007, revised 2011)*Karl Heinzen’s Murder and Freedom (1853)*Bhagat Singh’s “The Philosophy of the Bomb: A Brief Response to Gandhi” (1930)*Carl von Clausewitz’s On War (introduction) (1816...
1hr 46m Mar 09, 2013
1hr 46m
Not School Digest Jan 2013 - Partially Examined Life
Excerpts of discussions about Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, an article on emergence called “More Is Different” by Nobel Prize Winning physicist P.W. Anderson, John Searle’s Mind: A Brief Introduction, and Italo Calvino’s trippy science fantasy novel Cosmicomics. How does the world fit together, with its different layers of organization, each with its different science? What’s the r...
50m Jan 24, 2013
50m
Partially Examined Life Not School Digest Jan 2013
Excerpts of discussions about Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus,  an article on emergence called "More Is Different" by Nobel Prize Winning physicist P.W. Anderson, John Searle's Mind: A Brief Introduction, and Italo Calvino's trippy science fantasy novel Cosmicomics.
50m Jan 23, 2013
50m
PEL Players Audiobook of Plato's Gorgias - Partially Examined Life
Three podcasters and two listeners join to read Plato’s fabulous dialogue, which is discussed in PEL Episode 69. Listening to this will be MIGHTY good preparation for listening to that discussion. We are freely sharing the first half of this unabridged work of profound genius, in which Socrates (Mark) and his pal Chaerephon (Eileen), at the behest of Callicles (Dylan), call on the famous orato...
1hr 23m Jan 12, 2013
1hr 23m
Chalmers on Scrutability (with Chalmers as guest) - Partially Examined Life
On his book Constructing the World (2012). How are all the various truths about the world related to each other? David Chalmers, famous for advocating a scientifically respectable form of brain-consciousness dualism, advocates a framework of scrutability: if one knew some set of base truths, then the rest would be knowable from them. What sort of base? Well, there may be many principles bases,...
1hr 34m Dec 22, 2012
1hr 34m
Not School Digest Dec 2013 - Partially Examined Life
Excerpts of discussions about David Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, and Paul Auster’s City of Glass. What’s the relation between mind and brain? What is consciousness? Can science study consciousness, and can evolution really account for it? What is the self and how does this relate to language? All these questions are tackled i...
31m Dec 16, 2012
31m
Carnap on Language and Logic - Partially Examined Life
On Rudolph Carnap’s The Logical Structure of the World (1928). What can we know? Carnap thinks that all the various spheres of knowledge (e.g. particle physics, attributions of mental states, moral claims, the economy) are logically interrelated, that you can in fact translate sentences about any of these into sentences about sets of basic, momentary experiences. This book, better known as the...
1hr 47m Dec 07, 2012
1hr 47m
Quine on Linguistic Meaning - Partially Examined Life
On W.V.O. Quine’s “On What There Is” (1948) and “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951). What kind of metaphysics is compatible with science? Quine sees science and philosophy as one and the same enterprise, and objects to ontologies that include types of entities that science can’t, even in principle, study. In these two highly influential essays, he first tells how to determine what ontological co...
1hr 57m Nov 21, 2012
1hr 57m
Celebrating 2 Million Downloads Highlight Reel - Partially Examined Life
As of 11/7/2012 we hit two million downloads; the screenshot above shows our stats as of this morning. (For those of you keeping track, we hit 1 million last May.) In honor of this, we’ve got some special recycled audio for you all.#Philosophy
7m Nov 08, 2012
7m
Existentialist Heros in No Country for Old Men - Partially Examined Life
On philosophical issues in McCarthy’s 2005 novel about guys running around with drug money and shooting each other and about fiction as a form for exploring philosophical ideas. What can morality mean for people who have witnessed the “death of God,” i.e. a loss in faith in light of the horrors of war? For both the protagonist and antagonist in “No Country for Old Men,” morality is about being...
1hr 49m Sep 21, 2012
1hr 49m
Voltaire's Candide - Partially Examined Life
Is life good? Popular Enlightenment philosopher Leibniz argued that it’s good by definition. God is perfectly good and all-powerful, so whatever he created must have been as good as it can be; we live in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire loads this satirical adventure story up with horrific violence to demonstrate that Leibniz’s position is just silly. Life is filled with suffering, an...
1hr 27m Sep 05, 2012
1hr 27m
Nietzsche on Truth - Partially Examined Life
What is truth? This essay, written early in Nietzsche’s career but unpublished during his lifetime, is taken by many to make the extreme claim that there is no truth, that all of the “truths” we tell each other are just agreements by social convention. The regular foursome are joined by a U. Texas grad school classmate, Jessica Berry from Georgia State University. She argues that Nietzsche is ...
1hr 49m Aug 15, 2012
1hr 49m
Aristotle on the Best Form of Government - Partially Examined Life
On Aristotle’s Politics (350 BCE), books 1 (ch 1-2), 3, 4 (ch 1-3), 5 (ch 1 -2), 6 (ch 1-6), and 7 (ch. 1-3, 13-15). Aristotle provides both a taxonomy of the types of government, based on observations of numerous constitutions of the states of his time, and prescriptions on how to best order a state. These are meant to be practical; though he does spend some time on the “ideal” government, he...
1hr 41m Jul 23, 2012
1hr 41m
MacIntyre on Moral Justification - Partially Examined Life
On Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981), mostly ch. 3-7 and 14-17. What justifies ethical claims? MacIntyre claims that no modern attempt to ground ethics has worked, and that’s because we've abandoned Aristotle. We see facts and values as fundamentally different: the things science discovers vs. these weird things that have nothing to do with science. In Aristotle...
1hr 44m Jul 05, 2012
1hr 44m
Bergson on Humor - Partially Examined Life
On Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900). What is humor? Bergson says that, fundamentally, we laugh as a form of social corrective when others are slow to adapt to society’s demands. Other types of humor are derivative from this: just as the clown falls on his face because of a (pretended) physical flaw, as if he’s a machine that doesn't work and so becomes noticeable...
1hr 43m May 31, 2012
1hr 43m
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations - Partially Examined Life
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 to use it and how to react when you hear it in t...
1hr 52m May 02, 2012
1hr 52m
More Buddhism and Naturalism - Partially Examined Life
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 episode is th...
1hr 37m Apr 06, 2012
1hr 37m
Owen Flanagan on Buddhism Naturalized (with Flanagan as guest) - Partially Examined Life
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 ...
2hr 3m Mar 26, 2012
2hr 3m
Philosophy and Race (DuBois, Martin Luther King, Cornel West) - Partially Examined Life
*W.E.B. DuBois’s “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” (1903)*Cornel West’s “A Genealogy of Modern Racism” (1982)*Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963) and “The Black Power Defined” (1967)*Malcolm X’s “The Black Revolution” (1963). What kind of philosophical lessons come out of the history of black oppression in America? Historian and intellectual DuBois describes the “double co...
1hr 52m Mar 17, 2012
1hr 52m
Semiotics and Structuralism - Partially Examined Life
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 at a given time has a structure, where you c...
1hr 47m Feb 24, 2012
1hr 47m
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Partially Examined Life
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...
1hr 26m Feb 03, 2012
1hr 26m
Foucault on Power and Punishment - Partially Examined Life
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 shift to more subtle but more pervasive exertions of powe...
1hr 42m Jan 11, 2012
1hr 42m
Merleau-Ponty on Perception and Knowledge - Partially Examined Life
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 doe...
1hr 41m Dec 17, 2011
1hr 41m