I've been talking to Dereck (aka Skepoet) about coming on as a guest with us (on Saussure), and I noticed this new episode of Diet Soap features he and Doug Lain in a wide-ranging conversation on skepticism and its relation to phenomenology. One interesting point to add to the PEL deliberations on the growth of the self is from the post-structuralists (I guess) on consciousness itself being "built like a language." I'm not clear from the discussion what this means yet but look forward to figuring it out.
-Mark Linsenmayer
It was cool to hear clips of Louis C.K. (naughty comedian) and from “The History of Philosophy with no Gaps” (podcast from Oxford), one of Seth’s new favorites. The conversation itself was almost as wide-ranging as the audio clips. There is going to be a second part to the interview but I don’t any sense of closure there either. Skepoet took three class on nihilism as an undergrad – and he calls himself Skepoet. I think they’re on the verge of playing around with the idea that the world and the self are necessary fictions. How can that not be fun?
Thanks, Mark.
Mark, do you take requests for your closing songs? Maybe you could cover the Magnetic Fields song when you do the Saussure episode: http://69lovesongs.info/wiki/index.cgi?The_Death_Of_Ferdinand_De_Saussure. Rhymes “Ferdinand” with “Holland-Dozier-Holland”…
–R.
Nice!
“built like a language” sounds like structuralism unless one simply means that it is a matter of practices/socialization.
http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Humanistic%20understanding.pdf
I’m going to get Derick Varn back on the podcast to discuss structuralism and Althusser and we’ll aim at doing a Soapy version of PEL. That is, we’ll actually have a specific couple of texts to guide the conversation.