The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast (Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey)

We finish our treatment of Capital, Ch. 1, covering the little bit that Marx says about actual communism (he was wary of utopianism, contra his reputation), and think through a number of related practical problems. We introduce "Fragment on Machines" (1858).

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Continuing on Inquiry into the Human Mind, getting further into the chapter on smelling as well as the conclusion and Reid's exchange with Hume.

What exactly is our relation with objects in the world according to Reid?

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Mark, Seth and Dylan continue talking about philosophy surrounding trans phenomena in light of our interview with Sophie Grace about Trans Figured.

In this supporter-exclusive discussion, we get into sex and gender as cluster concepts, ethical theory in equity discussions, and the practical matters you'd expect: sports participation, pronouns, bathrooms and dress codes.

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Here are some exchanges from part two, where we continue with Brian Wilson working through the text, considering Sunzi's strategies and assumptions, and how these might (or might not) apply to competing in the business world.

We discuss widely read papers about abortion, including an excerpt from Roe v. Wade (1973) and Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion" (1971).

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Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth summarize thoughts about our recent series on social construction, gender and sex, and Judith Butler's notion of "grievable lives." Should we stop covering so much contemporary work and/or political topics?

End song: "The Size of Luv" by Mark Lint from Mark Lint's Dry Folk (2018).

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To what extent has our podcast changed in reaction to current politics? Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan reflect back on our year, discuss how we select texts, and give some thumbnail sketches of potential topics. Also, does authorial intent matter, and how to talk philosophically about works that aren't philosophical texts.

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Mark and Wes go into more textual detail re. Lucretius’s take on atomism and the metaphysical and epistemological problems it entails. Start with Part one.

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On The Evolution of Agency (2022), with the author, and guest panelist Chris Heath.

What is human agency? How would we determine whether an animal is a legitimate agent, as opposed to just acting automatically? Tomasello investigates this by thinking about what capabilities and behaviors constitute agency and the degree to which near-human animals have these.

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How should we think politically about the current global crisis? Do extreme circumstances reveal truths of political philosophy or do they reinforce whatever it is we already believe? Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan talk about applying philosophical insights to real-life situations rife with unknowns, John Rawls' veil of ignorance and Adam Smith on our interconnectedness, utilitarianism, libertarianism, and more. A source we used was "How Coronavirus Is Shaking Up the Moral Universe" by John Authers.

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End song: "Date of Grace" by Rob Picott, as discussed on Nakedly Examined Music #80.

At last, the full, public release of this discussion between Wes Alwan and Bill Youmans covering Shakespeare's 1611 play about revenge, forgiveness, and authorship. Or maybe it's about exploitation, or how we react to changes in status, or perhaps how a liberal education can give you magical powers! Listen and decide for yourself!

Mark and Wes dive deeper into the text of the first several letters of On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795).

Are verbal descriptions of art destined to fall short?  What is it to put yourself forward as a representative of your species? These and many more of Schiller's puzzling proclamations are debated in detail!

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Wes, Dylan, and guest Chris Heath continue to discuss The Evolution of Agency (2022) in light of our interview with the author.

We relate examples from the book of animals of various levels of complexity making deliberative decisions, exhibiting rationality, experiencing causality, or otherwise engaging in agentive behaviors.

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Continuing with guest Chris Sunami, mostly discussing "The Good or The One," though we start off by completing "The Descent of the Soul" about why there is something rather than nothing, given that materiality is so undesirable compared to The One.

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On Ludwig Feuerbach's "Principles of the Philosophy of the Future" (1843) and the introduction to The Essence of Christianity (1841).

What was the original point of religion? Can we retain what was emotionally good about it yet direct our efforts to purely practical matters? Feuerbach says yes, and this was a key influence on Marx.

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Continuing on Book II (through ch. 20) of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).

How do we acquire our ideas of pain and pleasure, duration and motion? We talk primary (shape, size) and secondary (color, sound) qualities, the former of which are supposed to be actually in objects, and the latter just in our mind. Plus, is Locke really an atomist about experience?

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On Gottfried Leibniz’s Theodicy (1710).

Why does God allow so many bad things to happen? Leibniz thought that by the definition of God, whatever He created must be the best of all possible worlds, and his theodicy presents numerous arguments to try to make that less counter-intuitive given how less-than-perfect the world seems to us.

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On the remainder of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885).

How can we keep our spirits up and avoid nihilism? We consider Nietzsche's "solution" of eternal recurrence, why he uses a poetic, allegoric style, and more.

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On the aphorisms ("Diapsalmata") that begin Soren Kierkegaard's Either/Or (1843), plus the essay also in the first volume, "Rotation of Crops." What is it to live your life as if it were a work of art? K thinks such a life is unserious and unsatisfying.

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Mark and Seth ask Doug Lain (Zero Squared), Brett O'Shea (Revolutionary Left Radio), and C. Derick Varn (Symptomatic Redness) what they think of Debord and PEL's treatment of the book on Ep #170.

End song: "Open Your Eyes (Wake Up)" from Tyler Hislop, interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #24.

We continue on Being and Time, now in ch. 2 on what "the world" is in our Being-in-the-World and so what it is for us to encounter objects and how this is different than, e.g. the interaction of two physical objects.

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Morgan DeLisle, writer for the PodChaser "Behind the Streams Blog," interviewed Mark for a feature of our podcasts. Learn about the origins of PEL and NEM, how we make the shows, and what's coming up.

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Continuing on McCarthy's 1985 novel, we discuss the philosophy of war held by the character Judge Holden, plus whether the book's violence is gratuitous and why it might be unfilmable.

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A free-form discussion drawing on Stanley Fish's “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too” (1994), Joel Feinberg’s “Limits to the Free Expression of Opinion” (1975), and other sources.

What are the legitimate limits on free speech? Feinberg delves into the harm and offense principles. Fish argues that every claim to free speech has ideological assumptions actually favoring some types of speech baked into it. A lively back and forth ensues!

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On "On the Nature of Totalitarianism" and On the Origins of Totalitarianism ch. 13 (both from 1953).

Is totalitarianism just an especially virulent form of tyranny, or something unique to the modern age? Arendt says that unlike other forms of government, totalitarianism is not animated by an active psychological principle that motivates its participants. Instead terror is designed to make citizens incapable of agency altogether.

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Mark and Wes discuss Durkheim's Suicide (1897), getting into more of the details of his account and exploring comparative modes of explanation: Are there really "sociological facts" distinct from mere generalizations about psychological facts?

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Focusing on The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), ch. 2 "Perception."

Hegel's critique of the adequacy of perceptual knowledge has metaphysical aspects: The relation of substance to properties, properties to each other, and things to other things and to the perceiver all create difficulties that call for more active participation by the mind.

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Mark and Wes read through and discuss Karl Marx's The German Ideology (1846), delving deep into the middle of his critique of Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own. 

Marx articulates and criticizes Stirner's attempt to distinguish the mere common egoism of an unthinking person from the enlightened egoism that Stirner is recommending.

Read along with us, starting on p. 259 (PDF p. 255).

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More on Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror (1980) plus H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928).

What is the object of fear? Mark, Seth, and Dylan get clearer on Kristeva's view of the establishment and loss of the integrity of the self, what the "object" of abjection is, and what this all might have to do with feminism.

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On the Platonic dialogue written around 380 BCE about an encounter between Socrates and one of the leading Sophists of his day.

What is virtue ("the political art" according to Protagoras), and can it be taught? What are the relations of the various virtues to each other? Do they really amount ultimately to one and the same thing, i.e. wisdom? In this entertaining dialogue, Socrates and Protagoras swap positions, and Socrates seems to parody the Sophists' style.

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Continuing on Capital, Ch. 1 on commodities. We go into detail on his account of how money gets derived from the continued comparison of various commodities, how use value comes back into play when we compare the economic value of one commodity as compared to another, and finally, the details of commodity fetishism.

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On Susanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key (1942), ch. 8-10. Is music (the supposedly non-representational artform) a language? If it's "expressive," what exactly does it express?

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On The Vocation of Man (1799), Books I and II. What is reality?

Fichte's armchair journey starts him considering nature and thus himself as determined, but then he backtracks to say that actually, experience doesn't tell us whether we're determined or free. In Book II, he argues that since our experience is always of something going on in ourselves, then causality, the external world, the self, etc. must be our own mental creations. So we're free after all, yet everything is drained of significance!

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On The Ego and its Own (1844), another big influence on Karl Marx and a precursor of Nietzsche, or perhaps an early Ayn Rand.

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Concluding our close reading of Being and Time, on ch. 3, sec. 15 and 16 on the world as "ready to hand" or equipment.

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More on philosophical and psychological interpretations of and judgments about suicide with guest Drew Pinsky.

Is suicide an epidemic or a choice? Could it be both? Socrates didn't fear death and inspired Stoics and others to see suicide in some circumstances as brave. Or is it always cowardly? Does meaninglessness motivate suicide?

Listen to part one first or get the Citizen Edition, which will also get you access to the follow-up discussion.

End song: "Disappear" by Chris Cacavas as heard on Nakedly Examined Music #87. Please support PEL!

On Plato's mid-period dialogue from around 388 BCE. How do words relate to the things they represent? Socrates first argues that words represent things, and so doing etymology is a way of learning philosophical truths, then seemingly reverses himself.

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Mark, Seth, and Dylan are joined by the editor of our new book (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/book) to talk a bit about his background, meeting celebrities (or being met qua celebrity) and more generally how a writer or performer's real personality relates to their work, various things we're reading and watching, scientists' attitudes towards philosophy, and the usual musings about future episodes.

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On The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), focusing on lectures 1-3 and 20. What is religion and how should philosophers study it?

James describes it as a sincere, full-life reaction to the world, more emotional than intellectual, and conveys the experiences of the extreme "religious geniuses" that are merely received second or third hand by the believing masses.

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Concluding "Gender Trouble" (1990), with just Mark, Wes, and Seth going carefully through pt I, sec v: "Identity, Set, and the Metaphysics of Substance," and pt III, sec iv: "Subversive Bodily Acts: Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions."

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End song: "I'm a Boy" by Lys Guillorn as interviewed for Nakedly Examined Music #44.

On Allan Bloom's 1987 best-selleing polemic. What is the role of the university in our democracy? Bloom thinks that today's students are conformist, relativistic, and nihilistic, and that great books and thinking for thinking's sake are the cure.

Continued on part 2, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition plus an exclusive follow-up discussion. Please support PEL!

On Warspeak: Nietzsche's Victory Over Nihilism (2020) with Dylan, Seth, and guests Michael Grenke and Jeff Black.

What's a viable counter-ideal to the asceticism that Nietzsche thought is so pervasive? Lise's book works out strategies for re-valuing that emphasize Nietzsche's positive comments about the feminine and the power of words.

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On Jacques Derrida's "The Animal That Therefore I Am" (1999), Michel Foucault's "The Ethics of the Concern of the Self As A Practice of Freedom" (1984), and our guest's Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes (2020).

Philosophy devalues appearances, but our changing dominant metaphysics (there is no "underneath" but rather a complex built out of appearance itself) should have changed this. Our guest provided us with readings that elaborate this change, arguing for our continuity with animal nature (Derrida) and the ethical importance of self-care (Foucault).

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Oxford philosophy professor Timothy Williamson talks to us about his new book, Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy.

How can we best apply the insights of philosophy of science to philosophy itself? Maybe some alleged philosophical counter-examples are just the result of psychological heuristics gone wrong.

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We're continuing our treatment of Thomas Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), now discussing ch. 6: "Of Seeing."

Does vision provide the exception to Reid's point that our sensations do not resemble objects in the world? Images surely seem to do so! What does this mean for Reid's epistemology?

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On "The Needs of the Soul" from The Need for Roots (1943) and "Meditation on Obedience and Liberty" (1937).

What are our needs that should then drive what kind of society would be best for us? Weil says we need liberty yet obedience, equality yet hierarchy, security yet risk... and none of these words mean quite what you'd think. And to start off, why do the many obey the few?

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On G.W.F. Hegel's 1807 opus: A series of treatments of various theories in epistemology (among other things), seeing how they're internally incoherent, which then moves us to more sophisticated theories.

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Don't miss Mark's new podcast Philosophy vs. Improv.

Mark and Wes do a Closeread on the latter part of the dialogue, where Socrates argues to Cratylus that even if names (words) were devised to somehow depict the things they stand for, that wouldn't guarantee that they ACCURATELY describe the world. You can't look at the definitions of words to learn about the world; you have to actually investigate the world directly. 

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This Closeread and some others are also being made available to PEL supporters. If you're not hearing the full version of this discussion, you can sign up via one of the options described at partiallyexaminedlife.com/support.

On Kwame Anthony Appiah's "Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections" (1994), Charles Mills' "But What Are You Really?, The Metaphysics of Race" (1998), and Neven Sesardic's "Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept" (2010). With guest Coleman Hughes.

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Continuing on Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, ch. 1 and 2. We try to get clearer on Kristeva's talk of "object," the relationship between language and abjection, how Kristeva is advancing on Freud, how to be a mom that allows a kid to separate in a healthy way, and how abjection plays into religion and writing.

Listen to part one first, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition, and don't miss Mark's Close Reading, available to Citizens and $1+ Patreon members.

End song: "Eyes of Fire" by Jill Freeman, as discussed on Nakedly Examined Music #28.

Continuing from our overview in ep. 32, we do a close reading on selections from the introduction of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time to consider Heidegger's Being in relation to Aristotle's Categories, what questioning means, and some of Heidegger's basic terms.

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Continuing on Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018).

Fukuyama recommends a "creedal national identity" as a solution for tribalism; does this work? Is this "demand for recognition" that he describes foundational for the act of making an ethical claim? For self-consciousness itself? How does ideology prejudice the sort of theorizing that Fukuyama engages in?

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End song: "Cornerstone" by Richard X. Heyman, as discussed on Nakedly Examined Music #61.

On W.V.O. Quine's "Epistemology Naturalized" (1969). What justifies scientific theory?

Not theory-free observations, as Quine shows us by considering how we figure out foreign languages. Instead of basing science on epistemology, Quine thought we need to make epistemology part of science.

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Continuing on the foundational text of economics. We talk "invisible hand," "greed is good," tariffs, unproductive labor, city vs. country, and the education racket.

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End song: "With My Looks and Your Brains" by The Mr. T Experience. Hear about the singer/songwriter on Nakedly Examined Music #56.

On The Concept of Law (1961), ch. 6, "Foundations of a Legal System," on Hart's concept of a rule of recognition that ultimately determines what will count as a law in a given society. This ends up being more complicated than merely "The Constitution," but the action itself of officials respecting, obeying, and enforcing that Constitution.

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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.”

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Continuing on Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love with guest Peter Adamson. We consider F's views on beauty and fill out his neo-Platonic epistemology.

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Should literature be political? Jean-Paul Sartre thought that all literature is political, because of what literature is.

That's a very weird-sounding view. Mark Linsenmayer from the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast tries to make it sound like something you should at least consider.

This is but a Glimpse. To hear the full Partial Examination of this book, visit partiallyexaminedlife.com.

Continuing with the Econtalk host on the moral aspects of economics, focused by Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Should we sacrifice ourselves to the machine of the economy? How does Smith's idea of virtue and talk of the "impartial spectator" line up with economic growth?

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End song: "Needle Exchange" by Fritz Beer, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #2.

On Faces At the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992), a foundational text in critical race theory that presents thought experiments in the philosophy of law, including "The Space Traders." With guest Lawrence Ware.

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Continuing with our close reading of Being and Time, we talk about why time is the focus of Heidegger's analysis of the human condition, what are phenomena, and so what his phenomenological method looks like and why it must investigate us in our "average everydayness."

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On Plato's middle dialogue depicting the death of Socrates (390 BCE) depicting the death of Socrates. Should philosophers fear death?

In the course of giving arguments for the immortality of the soul, we get an elaboration of the recollection theory of knowledge (from the Meno) into Plato's first full account of Forms. But how literally are we supposed to take the words of Socrates as he comforts himself facing mortality?

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On Blaise Pascal's Pensées (1670). Is it rational to have religious faith? You're likely familiar with "Pascal's Wager," but our wretchedness is such that we can't simply choose to believe and won't be argued into it. Pascal thinks Christianity is the only religion to accurately describe the human condition.

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Today's episode is about questioning: how one might question, what sets the parameters for a proper answer, and how to give those answers in an informative and/or dramatically effective way. Watch out for dream pigs! Also, how to get into the VIP room at Stuckey's. Perhaps a pair of paralegals can help.

In the post-game, included JUST THIS ONCE for public enjoyment, we reflect on improv in the real world and some potential spin-off improv podcasts from our episode.

Mark philosophizes at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

Bill improvises (and teaches) at chicagoimprovstudio.com.

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Graham has released 25+ studio albums of soul-infused British singer-songwriter goodness since 1976, first with the Rumour, but often in the second half of his career playing live entirely solo.

We discuss "Lost Track of Time" by Graham Parker and the Goldtops from Last Chance to Do the Twist (2023), "Going There" by Graham Parker & The Rumour from Mystery Glue (2015), "She Wants So Many Things" from Struck By Lightning (1991), and "Between You and Me" by Graham Parker & The Rumour from Howlin' Wind (1976). Intro: "Local Girls" from Squeezing Out Sparks (1980). Hear more at GrahamParker.net

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To conclude our discussion of Aristotle's Metaphysics, we finish discussing potency by talking about the potential to learn (the Meno problem), the metaphysical priority of the actual over the merely potential, and how the Unmoved Mover motivates all primary beings to strive toward their full actualization.

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Are we underlyingly all really a single, unified organism? Or do we just have a lot in common? PEL's most verbose hosts Mark Linsenmayer and Wes Alwan begin unraveling this puzzling claim by reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 essay "The Over-Soul" and explaining it line-by-line. Watch this episode on video at YouTube. We encourage you to read along in the essay with us.

This is the first of four parts. To hear the others as they are released this week, plus weekly episodes going forward and three episodes already posted, please support this new effort at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy (or support PEL and Closereads together via support at the $10 level at patreon.com/partiallyexaminedlife).

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Radio legend Dr. Drew Pinsky talks with us about “Attachment and Reflective Function: Their Role in Self-Organization” by Peter Fonagy and two articles by Allan Schore.

The focus is "theory of mind"; how do we develop the ability to impute thoughts and intentions to others? What in our upbringing can interfere with this development? We relate this back to previous episodes (Hegel, Buber, etc.) on recognition by others of the self.

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Continuing on Kierkegaard's perhaps most famous book, this time focusing largely on "Problem One: Is There a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical?"

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Mark and Wes conclude our discussion of the younger Schlegel brother by going through more of his critical fragments, largely published in 1797 in the journal Lyceum Tier Schonen Kunste.

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On The Nature of Sympathy (1922), Part II: "Love and Hatred." What is love, and how does it relate to ethics and to sympathy?

For Scheler, love is a primitive, spontaneous movement from lower to higher values: We see the best in the love one and thereby help enable them to attain that excellence. So is love foundational for value, or is value foundational for love? The two seem to arise together.

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Continuing on "Knowledge First Epistemology" (2011), "Justifications, Excuses, and Sceptical Scenarios" (2015), and "Morally Loaded Cases in Philosophy" (2019).

How does knowledge-first epistemology relate to reliabilism? What are its moral implications? Does W. have a good argument against relativism and skepticism?

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Continuing on the Timaeus, we consider some quotes and details starting at the beginning of the dialogue where Plato argues for differences between the perceived, created, impermanent world and its perfect model. 

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One last take on John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), covering Book II, ch. 21 and 28.

What makes a moral claim true? Do we have free will? What makes us choose the good, or not? In this coda to our long treatment of Locke's opus, we bring together all he has to say about morality, which is strangely modern yet also just strange.

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Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan set ourselves as part of our ongoing Kierkegaard reading to re-listen to our 2010 episode 29 on Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death. This leads us to our personal histories regarding faith and how the idea of faith intersects with our philosophy studies.

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Continuing on Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), dialogue 7 where he gets into his occasionalist theory of causality. How does this relate to mind-body interaction and concepts in physics like inertia? What is the metaphysical relation of natural law to things in the world?

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Pano Kanelos, the president of St. John's College, Annapolis joins us to discuss Jacob Klein's “The Idea of a Liberal Education” (1960) and “On Liberal Education” (1965), plus Sidney Hook’s “A Critical Appraisal of the St. John’s College Curriculum” (1946) and Martha Nussbaum’s “Undemocratic Vistas” (1987).

What constitutes a liberal education? Should we all read the Western canon? Klein (and our guest) think that we need to wonder at the familiar, to explore the ancestry of our current concepts in order to avoid their sedimentation.

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Continuing on "Epistemology Naturalized" (1969), we work further through the text, getting into what this new psychology-rooted epistemology might look like and how Quine changed empiricism. Plus, more of us trying to figure out his claims about the indeterminacy of translation.

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On Desiderius Erasmus' The Praise of Folly (1509), featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Nathan Gilmour from the Christian Humanist podcast. Does some amount of foolishness enhance life?

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Mark, Wes, and Seth talk about horror media and what scares us in light of Halloween. We then give some follow-up discussion re. our Williamson and Chappell interviews. Do we actually want to participate in Williamson's science-minded analytic philosophy of the future? Were we too one-sided in our trans coverage? We respond to an email about our trans episode.

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Mark, Wes, and Dylan again talk politics, including conspiracy theorist psychology, whether post-modernism is responsible for current "post-truth" discourse on the Right (see the PvI David Shields episode), our previous guest John Ganz who now has a bestselling book, and finally the relief at actually having some Presidential choice that is not past their expiration date.

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Concluding our discussion of Aristophanes's play with Lucy Lawless and Emily Perkins. We focus on trying to connect its lessons to the here and now: Is Lysistrata's victory properly described as the ascension of some kind of "feminine spirit" over warlike values, and how does that actually relate to women's struggles now to attain positions of power?

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Continuing on "On the Relation Between the Plastic Arts and Nature" (1807) and Part 6 of System of Transcendental Idealism (1800).

We talk sculpture vs. painting and why art is the direct, intuitive way to achieve the insight that philosophy can only approximate using concepts.

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Learn about the online Core Philosophy Texts course Mark is running this fall at partiallyexaminedlife.com/class.

Continuing on Conditions, "The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself."

What makes philosophy possible? The four "conditions," i.e. mathematics, politics, art, and love, generate the truths, and philosophy is the pincers that gather these together in thought. But how exactly?

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Talking to the author about Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018).

What motivates people? Frank points to thymos, the demand for recognition, as at the root of both the "end of history" (i.e., democracy as demand for equal recognition) and our current tribalist stalemates, involving desires to be seen—in virtue of group membership—as superior. Thymos may in fact be central to self-consciousness, ethics, and the origins of political association.

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Continuing on Lear's Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (1988). Our highlight is about the relation between the three parts of the soul: which (if any) is basic?

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Continuing with Emily Wilson on her translation of the Greek epic poem. We discuss the "oikos" or estate, built on violence, and its connection to "xenia," or hospitality, which serves to forge military alliances. Also: status distinctions and the role of the gods in the text.

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End song: "Tiny Broken Boats" by Arrica Rose, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #66.

On "What Is Justified Belief?" (1979) by Alvin Goldman, where he tries to come up with a "function" for justification: If a belief has such-and-such non-epistemic properties, then it counts as justified.

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On Sir Francis Bacon's New Organon (1620).

Bacon claims to have developed a new toolset that will open up nature to inquiry in a way that wasn't possible for ancient and modern natural philosophy.

Mark, Wes, and Dylan consider how much what Bacon describes resembles modern scientific method, talk through Bacon's "four idols" that interfere with impartial inquiry, and consider how Bacon's method fits in with his larger political-ethical-religious views.

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Concluding our discussion of On Certainty, with guest Chris Heath.

We try one last time to get a handle on Wittgenstein's philosophy of science. How do people actually change their minds about fundamental beliefs?

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Concluding on Beauty (2009). Why would we be attracted to beauty if on Scruton's account it takes so much work? We consider the form/function distinction as it applies to architecture and human beauty.

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On Richard Rorty's Pragmatism As Anti-Authoritarianism (1997), ch. 1-2 about religion. Should democracy be defended on absolutist grounds, e.g. by reference to God-given or natural rights, the nature of Man, or the dictates of Reason?

Rorty says no! Democracy, ethics, and even truth itself are a matter for societies to decide for themselves. Monotheistic religion provides a negative model for ceding authority on these matters no something non-human.

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On Michael Tomasello's "Language Is Not an Instinct" (1995) and Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition (2003). With guest Christopher Heath.

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What is culture? In modern capitalism, Debord’s 1967 book describes it as all about the economy. It’s not just our jobs that keep us trapped, but our life outside of working hours is also demanded by “the system” via our activity as consumers, and this commoditization infiltrates every corner of our lives. Debord wants us to WAKE UP, break our chains, and live lives of immediacy, vitality, and authenticity.

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Continuing on "A Defense of Common Sense" (1925). Moore argues that physical facts are not dependent on minds and considers the various ways of analyzing the act of seeing and identifying your hand. Yes, he really does this!

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Continuing on the Introduction, we get into more detail on Hegel's goal and his tricky terminology.

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To conclude our discussion of the novel, we turn to the philosophies of Dmitri and Ivan, plus the Biblical book of Job and our takeaways. Do we need some philosophy of transcendence to cope?

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On two articles in the "ordinary language" tradition of philosophy called "Truth" from 1950 by J.L. Austin and P.F. Strawson.

Is truth a property of particular speech acts, or of the propositions expressed through speech acts? Does truth mean correspondence with the facts, or does the word "fact" make this definition totally uninformative? Does saying "is true" add any information content to a sentence over and above just stating that sentence?

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On Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) with guest Brian Hirt.

How does the form in which we receive media affect how we think? Education theorist Postman (building on Marshall McLuhan) claimed that television has eroded our capacity to reason and given us the expectation that everything in the world must entertain. Is this a viable piece of social construction theory? How does the critique apply to the Internet age?

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On the 1958 film and articles including Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) and Robin Wood's "Vertigo" (1965). What's the nature of love/lust? Are we really just loving an image we've built while remaining fundamentally isolated? And is it just an illusionary social construct that keeps us all from feeling fundamental vertigo? Lacan, existentialism, and more!

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