Ep. 220: 10-Year Retrospective of The Partially Examined Life

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point sit on doing philosophy for a living and then thought better of it. Our topic for episode 220 is nothing. It's a 10 year retrospective. We're gonna just talk about the state of philosophy in the public space and how that's changed over time and people being a philosophy podcaster and what our goals for this podcast were and have become, et cetera, et cetera. We hope you've listened to some episodes besides this one. First, my name is Mark Linsenmayer speaking to you with great affection.

0:39 Seth: From Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin with an immense amount of gratitude. In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Allan.

0:47 Wes: In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey,

0:50 Dylan: full of hugs for everyone. In Madison, Wisconsin.

0:54 Mark: Wes has no hugs. Wes has no affection. No gratitude. Is that what you're saying, Wes? You're just in?

1:00 Wes: I'm in.

1:03 Mark: Well, that's good enough. As long as you guys are in, that's all I've ever required.

1:07 Dylan: Good.

1:08 Mark: The general strategy today was to pretend we're doing a news article and kind of front load the stuff that will be of the most interest to the most people and save our personal feelings and our personal goals and the fuzzy wuzzies and the inside baseball till the end. Does that seem reasonable?

1:27 Seth: I don't like being constrained like that, but I submit to the will of the majority.

1:31 Mark: Well, why don't you start us off, Seth? You had had some ideas I know you expressed to me beforehand, that actually are exactly what I had in mind in terms of the front facing, most interesting to the widest audience kind of topic.

1:42 Seth: So the first thing was that when we started out 10 years ago, the thing that keeps impressing itself upon me is how much has changed in 10 years, beginning with just the state of podcasting. So, you know, I tell this story all the time. I say, oh yeah, this guy that I went to graduate school with reached out to me and said, hey, do you want to do a podcast? And I said, sure, what's that? And three weeks later we were recording. But 10 years ago, podcasting wasn't ubiquitous. It wasn't clear that it was something that would become a way for anybody.

It wasn't like YouTube or one of those things where everybody could express themselves and that we would end up defining all of these kind of niches and it would somehow become a contrast to mass media. None of that stuff was clear. It was just very much a nascent kind of expression or technology. I'm not sure. What. So when I look back, the thing over 10 years that strikes me is how we kind of connected into this emerging technology, this emerging kind of thing, and we've established a place in the podcasting world and the Internet world. We're like a cable channel.

It's strange to look back and think that there's a sense in which we're mainstream within this not particularly mainstream kind of format. And. And just how many of the changes, how much stuff has changed with advertising, with the big media companies as well as the big advertisers coming into the space, and just the flood of content. Here we are, we keep turning the crank, we keep putting out our two hour long conversations about shit that only a small number of people are interested in and they keep showing up. So I think that's pretty amazing.

3:36 Dylan: I think it's pretty amazing too. I'm the newbie, which is kind of funny, I guess. The first episode I appeared on episode 13 or something like that new guy.

3:46 Wes: Oh, Quantum mechanics.

3:48 Dylan: Yeah. But in 2011, around episode 40, the Republic. It's funny for me that the story is always that I was around at the beginning, but I wasn't part of the original start of the podcast, even though I've been around for no 8/10 of it.

4:07 Seth: Is that a thing for you?

4:09 Dylan: Is it a thing for me?

4:11 Seth: Does that get at you somehow? Because I don't even think of you as like a latecomer.

4:16 Dylan: It doesn't really. It's only comes in so far as one way of talking about something if somebody's never heard of it, is that when they ask you about the podcast is part of it's the history. So for me, my role in the history of it is frequently talking about how I joined after it had started and that you guys had started it

4:34 Mark: initially because the tagline does not technically apply to you, that you are not going to do philosophy for a living, then thought better of it. So you're always an imposter.

4:45 Dylan: In a funny way, it does apply to me because it was a choice between doing political philosophy and doing physics for me going into grad school. And I picked physics for a number of reasons, including intellectual ones and also including philosophical ones and practical ones. But it's true, technically, that I considered it. I just didn't get as far in my consideration as you guys did.

5:07 Mark: I'm glad that has finally been cleared up. Now I will no longer consider you an imposter.

5:12 Seth: Maybe we need to come up with another tagline.

5:16 Mark: Well, yeah, I guess the fact that, well, I'm already getting an inside baseball. But like the fact that we make money off it. We're not doing it for a living. Technically, we're not in academia, but it's not the hobby that it was when we started. Of course, we would have long stopped if it was merely a hobby.

5:32 Dylan: I do feel really proud having been around the podcast, being around for 10 years, and I think it was just such a stroke of intuition and being smart just to get out there that early and jump on it. Because the fact that we started so early in the popularity of podcasts has made a big difference. When you read about what guidance is for, if you want to start a podcast, what should you do? Almost every single recommendation is something that we don't do. You should be about 20 to 40 minutes long.

6:05 Mark: You should write a script, you should

6:07 Dylan: have no more than two people on it.

6:10 Seth: It's true.

6:11 Dylan: One of the things that's been relatively consistent is our preoccupation with having something specific to read and reading a text. That's probably the thing that is most different about us compared to any other podcast out there, even if they're conversations, is they almost all follow a very basic interview format and that the subject is topical or the book that whoever the guest is has written, or something like that. I guess I don't know of another podcast that does exactly what we do, except for podcasts that spun off of us. Combat Classics does a similar thing. Phi Fic does a similar thing, but they're related to us.

6:51 Mark: I'm sure there are like literary reading groups out there that are maybe approximate what we do, but I don't listen to any of those, to any of you guys.

7:00 Dylan: I don't listen to a ton of podcasts, but I listen to some. But I've never heard anything that's like what we do.

7:07 Seth: I do listen to quite a few podcasts, but none of them are similar in format in any way, shape or form to what we do.

7:13 Dylan: Do you guys think that that's part of the success?

7:17 Seth: If you listen to the comments of the people who listen to us, the answer is yes. There's a group of people out there who are interested in deep dives. They're interested in text based, if you will, kind of approach to things. The core audience that we have, the core group of people that we have, I think are people that are like us. They want to get quiet and engage with the text. They want to explore arguments and concepts. And when we've been putting out surveys about what sorts of things would they be interested in. Everybody wants to go deeper. They want more in depth. We're an ersatz academic experience for a lot of people. I think it's the same for me at least, that this is kind of an ersatz academic experience when I get together with you guys and we have these conversations.

8:05 Mark: So, yes, people should comment on this blog post for this episode and tell us there really should be podcasts like this in every area of the humanities. There's no reason for there not to be, and I just don't know if that is the case.

8:16 Dylan: One of the things that has been a theme for us is the evolution of different kinds of cultural commentary. Not that we have a ton of it on our podcast, but we have had readings that were resonating with different cultural issues going on. And we've talked a bit about to the extent there is a changing landscape in intellectual commentary and how podcasting has affected or not affected it. Because podcasting is relatively new, that is, you know, in the past 10, in 15 years, maybe it's possible to overstate whether actually anything different is going on compared to, you know, radio or television or print journalism. That's one thing I'd wonder if you guys think that we are in any way part of any kind of new way of talking about things or new way of engaging in cultural activities.

9:08 Mark: See, I wonder if the extent to which we're. You always use the word parasitic upon, but maybe the better way of describing it is halfway between casual conversation and academia. One of the things that's happened is that people go and listen to online courses. That's essentially what they're getting here. It's just in a slightly different format. There's still a great respect. There's a culture of expertise. And maybe this is why there aren't more podcasts like this, because one would think that to do a podcast like this, you should really have people who are professionals in the field, right?

You should have Russ Roberts of Econ Talk and for other economists. So, you know, sometimes he does that and he's done that individually. Like, let's look in depth at Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. And so it's he and another professor get on and do something like what we do. But to have three or four people like that, universities. This is something you brought up to me, Seth Offline, that universities haven't gotten the idea that this is a way that they would be fulfilling their mission, to actually pay in the way Russ Roberts is paid by an academic institution, I guess, to do this kind of thing to have these conversations particularly cooperatively.

I mean, I don't think it's an accident that again, it's the culture of expertise. Not just that Russ is a professor, but that every single person he talks to is like the expert talking about their own book, talking about their subject. Whereas even a group of economists talking about historical economics or the world of economics and going through issue by issue by issue, they would inevitably get out of their area of specialization very quickly. And so the whole point of them being professors in this area would be sort of defeated, other than they have general academic skills from being professors, are good at talking through their experience, talking to students.

So it's really just the fact that we didn't get academic jobs but have enough of those skills. If we were going to think that this would be repeated in other disciplines, well, it would have to be kind of people like us who are grad school dropouts or something like that. I don't know if there's something unique about philosophy grad school dropouts who are uniquely still attached to what they do. Right. I know plenty of people Even who got PhDs in history or some other subject like that who simply felt that it was fine to move on to a real job.

So you ask somebody what they do, like the fact that they were some form of liberal arts major doesn't mean that they are just feel the pull of I must do analysis of literature, or I must talk about intellectual history or linguistics or something like that. If you're a linguistics major, it might be fascinating and give you the same sort of delight that a philosopher gets when they're in graduate school, but there's something about philosophy that attracts people who cannot get out of the fly bottle, as Wittgenstein would say. Right. We're sucked back in.

And as much as the premise of this podcast in the first place is like, we got out, we're over it. We didn't become professors. We're not going to let this rule our lives. Well, maybe it's only ruling 40 or 50% of our lives, or 20%, but it's got its claws in us.

12:22 Dylan: I guess I'm just thinking about the relationship between the conversation at the bar after seminar and seminar itself. And if there's a difference in those exercises, that's important. That is the difference between us and academia.

12:37 Mark: So, yeah, that is how we pitch the podcast to start off, or how I pitched it, which is it is more like the discussion at the bar afterward. But when you go to the bar afterward, you don't bring 40 pages of notes and read quotes. So maybe that initial romanticized image has kind of fallen by the wayside. And I blame you, Dylan, in part because it became more like a St. John seminar than like a let's swear and drink and make jokes, but we're already clearly headed in that direction.

13:09 Seth: Anyway, what was motivating me talking about this? I was mentioning how nobody at the University of Texas. I live in Austin. I went to the University of Texas, I'm part of this podcast, and nobody in this town gives a shit. Nobody reaches out to me, nobody cares. And even when I went to the memorial for Ed Allaire and I met people and I was like, oh, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They were just like, so wrapped up. I mean, I saw Corey Jewell. Do you guys remember Corey?

13:37 Mark: Did he become head of the department or something?

13:40 Seth: Who knows? Everybody becomes head of the department eventually at that place. But nobody had any interest in being outside of where they were. You think about all of the proposals we get. They want us to have the authors on. How many proposals do we get a week for copies of books so that we can have the authors on for an interview or whatever. I just keep thinking like, if you were a philosopher and you were an academic and somebody said, oh, yeah, there's this outlet where there's, you know, you can reach 30, 40,000 people with your ideas or whatever, why wouldn't you want to take advantage of that? And how is it that you're not plugged into what's happening in the zeitgeist? I mean, I can't even imagine what it's like for those people to teach, you know, 18 year olds.

14:23 Dylan: Isn't the answer pretty clear, though? Unless they write a book or appear in a media, that they'll become some kind of celebrity in that region, there's nothing about doing that that will move their career forward. Their career will move forward by participating in conferences and professional societies and that kind of thing. They will not get tenure even close by participating in podcasts or writing culture columns.

14:54 Seth: But do you not have any desire to get recognition? I mean, so when we had Sandel on, is it the sense that if you go outside the academy that you're a popularizer and I just don't get it?

15:06 Wes: Yeah, it can be frowned on. From what I've read, I think that

15:09 Dylan: there are some people that manage to become successful at doing it, and the administrators at universities like it because they have people who are public faces that are recognizable. But in terms of getting your tenure and the judgment of your peers at that institution. I think actually it probably it's at best something that is just ignored and more likely is something that you're making up for the fact that you're spending time doing that kind of work, which is not really of genuine new value. I think in general that's what happens.

15:46 Mark: I doubt Russ Roberts would describe his experience that way. We'd have to ask him. And we'd also, in philosophy in particular, we'd have to ask like Tamler Sommers for very bad Wizards. The way that they pitch it is like the going out and having drinks and don't expect to get any education out of this. And they're certainly much less serious about sticking to the text than we are. But I still get the feeling that like he does it to help his career. You know, he still writes his book about honor or whatever. And then because of the podcast was able to go on Sam Harris's podcast and tout his book and like, you know, it's been a really big thing for his career.

16:22 Dylan: That's really good to hear, actually. So maybe that's an aspect of things that have changed. In fact, that podcasting has made a difference in this respect, that it allows for so many more channels, that there's a possibility of having philosophy oriented radio hour that you can have a more accessible, interesting interaction like that. That's great.

16:44 Mark: I think it's just the energy involved in creating a podcast. I haven't gotten that much resistance from people for being on podcast. It was only when I was doing the after shows during that brief period where I said, okay, for the after show, let's try to get a scholar in the area on. And granted, I was often targeting grad students or somebody like that, but I even went like James Wetzel. That's one for Augustine. I believe that we posted the whole thing publicly. He was a full professor and jumped at the chance. An Augustine scholar, which seems like not generally a public facing kind of area.

It's not one of the most popular zeitgeist connected areas in philosophy. I just don't know. I think a lot of them maybe just haven't thought about it or the institution is not pushing it. Then there's no financial incentive or even time incentive. You know, people are overworked with all their regular classes.

17:34 Dylan: Well, maybe it's exactly the kind of thing that, as you pointed out, if we really wanted to know, I can't say that I'm speaking from anything more than my little supposition and experience with the little place that I worked at. And going to school.

17:47 Mark: Tell us more about the St. Johns, Because I was thinking, we've had Eva Brann, we've had Stuart Umphrey, and they were very game. And in fact, unlike people from almost any institution, knew how to have this kind of conversation.

17:58 Seth: Knew how to have a conversation, yes.

18:01 Mark: Not just give a lecture. And so it was wonderful. But you're saying even in that institution, the idea of going outside the classroom and public philosophy that there was. Oh, and we had Panos, the president of the college.

18:13 Dylan: Let's be clear. What I think is that going out and doing that in general, there's a positive sense of it. Because in some sense, they're doing, as you pointed out, are very much like the work of the college. Right. That makes sense. What I don't think is, I don't think that it would contribute to you getting tenure, for instance, if I stayed and I was doing the Partially Examined Life. I don't think that that would matter one iota. I mean, I had tenure before I started this, but I don't think it would matter one iota for me getting tenure to be on a podcast, even a podcast like this one.

18:44 Mark: I have thought occasionally, if I was going to reapply to grad school to just finish the PhD, if I get the energy to write a philosophy book, then, like, yes, I want to use that as my dissertation. And so I will try to reapply to Texas or reapply some. Or, you know, figure out, is there somewhere that I don't have to take all these courses? But would the fact that for longer than most people have been in grad school or school at all, perhaps I will have been doing this podcast, or would that matter to admissions committees? I don't know. That would be an interesting question to see whether you get any respect out of that. We certainly haven't got people offering us honorary degrees from their school. When is St. John's College going to give me an honorary philosophy PhD? Come on.

19:24 Seth: I don't believe they're able to grant PhDs anyway.

19:27 Mark: So Bill Cosby got one. Not from St. John's but I think they took it back.

19:33 Seth: I'm in favor of the honorary PhD. That's what I'm aiming for. But none of the places I'm sucking up to can actually bestow that honor upon me.

19:42 Mark: Ah, can the president do it? Give you a PhD can. Pardon? You should be able to give you a PhD too.

19:49 Dylan: So what do you guys think? Are things that we have done really well and opportunities that we haven't yet seized.

19:59 Wes: Hmm.

20:00 Seth: Here's what I think we've done. Well, we've simultaneously provided a demonstrable example of civil discourse around difficult topics without hyperbole, without the sense in creating a circus around it. I think we've set an example for 10 years about how to have a conversation about something, how to have a reasonable, civil, rational conversation about something. You know, I think when we started that wasn't such a rarity. But now I feel more than ever that we're a light unto the nations about how to engage with somebody on a difficult topic.

Even relative to academia, which was snarky and lame when I left it, a big part of why people are attracted to us is not so much the content, although that's important to a lot of people. But just listening to reasonable people have a reasonable conversation. There used to be a forum, you know, there used to be public discourse like this. You used to have Dick Cavett and Charlie Rose and where it wasn't just screaming and whatever, there was sober conversation about heavy topics. And I think there might be some other places on earth where that's still true.

But there are a number of people out there who are craving that, who want rational, sober discourse around topics that are important to them. It's clearly a minority, but it exists.

21:31 Mark: Well, and you think that the academic setting is where that normally happens, but you mentioned it being snarky and certainly I'm not sure if that was because our peers were grad students and we were at the age of snark at that point in our 20s. But even among the professors, I didn't get the sense that there was a lot of respect among the different types of philosophy, the hardcore analytic people versus the soft continental folks. I witnessed a lot of snark on the part of 70 year old respectable professors, especially Allaire, who you mentioned his funeral.

He was a hilarious guy and so obnoxious about some of the things. Even within analytic philosophy. He's like, I can't believe some people have to read that shit. I think that is something that we self consciously chose to do or perhaps we just ran out. The fact that there's multiple among us, you know, it's not just one host setting the agenda. We're kind of picking things that other people and that our listeners request. Certainly 10 years ago I did not take identity politics as a serious philosophical issue like that is as far from philosophy.

If we weren't getting constant feedback from audience members and engaging ourselves with the literature, you know, the current news literature and things out there, if this were just a local reading group, say, and was not a public forum, I'm sure we would not have ventured so far out of our comfort zone into some of these different areas.

22:59 Seth: That's probably true. I mean, I'm plugged into a meetup group here in Austin that's a philosophy meetup group that meets very regularly and has been consistent for many, many years. It's very much like, okay, we're going to watch this great courses thing and have a conversation about. It's like ersatz academia. And that's not what we are. No, we're not attempting to replicate or to provide. I think we've been pretty explicit about it. This is not the seminar. This is the pub after the seminar. It's the freeform. And we respect the text and we're anchored by the text, but we're not bound by it.

Our yardstick is real life. It's our experience. And so in that respect, you know, it's not that we're trying to seek out. Well, I don't know. I mean, we just talked about trying to get honorary degrees and whatever, but I don't do this because I'm craving some academic institution's acknowledgment. And this is a substitute for not getting the PhD that I set out to get.

24:02 Mark: I've voiced in the past that I thought one of the essential elements in this is that this is about witnessing real people trying to internalize this stuff. And thereby, as a listener, maybe you can identify with one or the other of us. Probably not me. People mostly say I usually think the same things that Seth thinks. That's the most common. So in that sense, it's not being authority figures is good. And I've even gone so far as to say one of the things I kept saying in the early episode is that what I really wanted to impress on audience members is that, look, this is hard material.

You shouldn't be intimidated by it. You should develop an opinion. It doesn't even matter so much if it is something that you would get an A on if you wrote the essay expressing that opinion. It's the fact that you are engaging with it. It is your journey. You can always go back to the text more. You can always read the secondary literature. You can always consult the experts onto what the scholarly history about it. You can always get a more complete understanding.

25:03 Wes: But.

25:03 Mark: But the most important understanding is the one that actually gets in your head, that is actually you putting yourself on the line and engaging with this stuff. And so I encourage right Even if you are completely misinterpreting the text, if you are getting something out of it that is affecting the way that you see the world in a positive way, I couldn't ask for a lot more than that. But I think when I've voiced that, Wes, you have strongly disagreed, it sounds like your prep is kind of the same as it would be if you were teaching this in a class. What do you think about this whole issue?

25:37 Wes: I don't think that taking philosophy seriously requires being in academia. And I think close readings of texts are actually very valuable. It's different than going deep with one very, very specialized area where you read a lot of secondary literature. But I have had experience doing that at ut. So, for instance, I took a Leibniz class. Seth was in that class. And I did a lot of research on the ideality of relations, something called the ideality of relations. And I realized. I just ended up concluding that it was a really empty scholastic issue.

And I think being a scholar is different from being a philosopher and getting a sort of breadth of education. One of the unfortunate side effects of academia is losing that breadth. I think there are virtues to specialization. I'm not just denigrating that, but I think if you think about what philosophy has been historically, it has looked different than scholarly specialization in a university. And philosophers have been very broadly educated, not just in philosophy, but in the sciences, for instance. Now, granted, that was earlier on when there was less of a body of stuff to master.

In a way, people were. I'm thinking of early modern philosophy now, not inventing the discipline, but reinventing it at that time. And then, of course, in ancient philosophy, inventing it. But I still think there's a value to getting a broad education. And yeah, I take seriously the preparation and what I'm getting out of it. And I think any of us could write a book and do the research required to write a good dissertation or a good book. And I think we would do it much more quickly than the average grad student. There's something to be said for experience.

Whether it's formalized or not, it'll happen someday.

27:29 Mark: One of us will produce an actual philosophy related, published thing. But we probably haven't updated the audience on this in a while. But, you know, we have agents interested come out with the partially Examined life book. We've just found we can collaborate this way, but almost no other way does that seem accurate. Four of us, four people with very different sense of people and very different motivations. It's amazing that we've stumbled on this thing that we've been able to do together for 10 years. Because every other thing we've tried, like especially putting things on a page and then somebody else is going to respond, or we're all going to do essays that are of the same basic type and interleave them, or, you know, all the things we've tried, it never happens.

28:10 Dylan: But there's something, I think, that's very natural about that problem being in a conversation. It's a whole thing on its own that has as many active parts as there are voices in the conversation. Just like a band is a whole thing that has numerous active parts, all interacting with one another. Writing a book collaboratively isn't like that. It's not that kind of collaboration.

28:32 Wes: Yeah, Think about how many books you've taken off the shelf that are collaborations. Unless they're, you know, scientific papers, scientific journals. But it's huge teams.

28:41 Dylan: It might be close to, like. Analogously to like, building a house in which everybody has a separate role. Someone builds a wall and someone builds a floor. Just like someone writes this chapter, someone writes that chapter, but in the end, there's someone that has the plan that everybody fits in with. And that's just different. That's a different activity than a conversation that's dynamic and active. And so I think it's, in a very natural way, challenging.

29:06 Mark: I mean, I thought we had a really promising idea when I was going to do all the adjectives, and Wes was going to do all the nouns, and Seth was going to do all the verbs. You know, I'll do the punctuation, the conjunctions.

29:19 Seth: There's a sense in which a project like this, it's fueled by the fact that there's creative tension. And it makes sense that we're not collaborating to produce an artifact. You know, a book or a documentary, you know, a movie, something like that. It's that this is a dynamic enterprise where we're all contributing something individually, and what comes out of it is some kind of a greater whole. And it's that tension that ultimately is what makes the enterprise attractive. And we've talked so many times about so many different ways to channel that into something that would be more static. And it just. Now we never seem to be able to find that thing. And maybe that's just the way it is.

30:08 Mark: Well, we are talking, apparently we're going to have a podcast on vinyl is at least a company that we're talking to. That'll be a static thing. It'll be a thing you can hold in your hand. And we'll sell five copies.

30:22 Seth: I'm supportive, but I've intentionally not bothered to learn, follow any of the discussion. Just let Wes make that a reality. What it is that we do, it's more like a talk show than a book, you know, to produce an artifact that would be static and set in stone.

30:38 Mark: Right. So I guess the most recent idea that we had for the book was let's just take transcripts of our favorite episodes and release those. And so we had a bunch of transcripts made that were similarly themed. And I believe, Seth, you looked at them and like, no, this is unreadable.

30:53 Seth: It wouldn't work. No.

30:54 Mark: So it would have to be heavily edited further, which is a lot of work.

30:59 Seth: You can't recreate the experience of either having the conversation or listening to the conversation in a book form. Written texts that I've seen that are basically transcripts of conversations just don't come across that well. So, you know, ultimately, if we wanted to somehow extend the PEL project to a different format, we have to come up with a new way of thinking about it or doing it. And, you know, we'd love some input from our fans on about what that might look like. But it's not simply a transcript or a conversation in text, for sure.

31:37 Mark: So that seems adjacent to the topic of kind of where in general, we're interested in steering this thing at this point. How our goals of this have changed since we started. We've got through a lot of the basic philosophical texts. Like, there are always more things to go back to. Of course we should do some more Leibniz, and we should fill in holes like Malebranche. And there are still whole areas of philosophy, Islamic philosophy and stuff, you know, so for me, there's just always an endless list. But are you getting close to being satisfied or wanting to talk more about current events kind of topics, or how is your tolerance for philosophical discussion and your interest in it? How have they changed since you started here with us?

32:18 Dylan: I completely understand that we're a philosophy podcast, and I completely understand that most of the books, the things that we have had and dealt with, have been the kinds of things you would only run into in a philosophy class in college. Not wholly, but I really, really think that what we do and the way we engage with texts is not something that is in any way constrained to reading philosophy. And I think that we've proved that over and over again. And for me, it's the way in which we engage with texts that is by far the most interesting. And, yes, we do that with philosophy books, but when we've done it with no country for Old Men, or with Henry David Thoreau or with a movie, I think that it works exactly as well.

And I think that if there was anything that I would do a little bit more of, it would be bringing that kind of close reading, and that's called a philosophical disposition to other kinds of work that aren't straight up canonized philosophy, because it's the partially examined life, after all. I mean, I understand the subtext is a philosophy podcast, which to me is a clarity of branding.

33:34 Seth: I'm sympathetic, Dylan, to that. But I do believe that the academic training that we got in philosophy does somehow inform what we do. This is the thing I've struggled with when we've wanted to branch out to other areas, particularly speaking about popular culture or politics, is like, I'm afraid that what I would have to say about poetry, for example, would be naive. And there's a sense in which that pisses me off. But when you listen to people who really know what they're talking about, talk about literature, it doesn't sound anything like, you know, it could be that it's just maybe when we talk about philosophy, we don't sound anything like anybody who knows anything about what they're talking about. But I don't understand romanticism.

34:23 Dylan: We don't talk about philosophy. If you were to record the papers given and the exchanges made at the apa, we do not sound like that.

34:33 Mark: I mean, I hope we at least are informed by our training so that what makes those exchanges especially valuable is just how clear and lucid and how if you're paying attention to the subtleties and not just being glib, then you're actually hopefully responding to each other in a very specific way in hopefully a productive way. Although obviously that's not, as we saw, say, from the Austin-Strawson debate. Not necessarily what marks off non academic philosophical discussions for me is just how glib and vague people are. So you say something that is clearly important to you, but it's not really totally clear to other people what you mean, and they just let it go and they're just like, ah. And then they kind of say, and so maybe we do that, maybe we fail. But I'm hoping that we have enough of the actual juice from our days in academic philosophy that we aren't doing that.

35:29 Dylan: Maybe it's informed in terms of technique. And that's why I would agree with something like a philosophical disposition that was inquisitive at a kind of sophisticated, reasoned way where you're chasing something down to understand it. And we have continued to cultivate a conversation. In which we're trying to get at what a text is saying and what its context is. As well as the preparation involved for that. But I think that maybe because of form, really trying to get at reading poetry in the same way. We won't sound like poetry scholars, but I think that we would get a lot out of that was still true about reading a poem just in the same way as we've done with literature.

36:18 Seth: It's a good point, Dylan. It's like if our goal was for us to get something out of it ourselves. And it somehow had ancillary benefit to people who were listening. Would it matter if it was naive or off track or not informed in the way that righteous, proper like. We feel like we're operating within some sort of normal constraints when we talk about philosophy. Just because we understand the lingo and the jargon and the norms. But if we were to step outside that swim lane and have a conversation about something like poetry. Where we didn't know all the nuances of whatever it's called pentameter and iambic pentameter and all those things.

And I was just coincidentally this week. As I was driving around on various tasks. Listening to, I guess, a speech or a presentation by Billy Collins. Who was at one point the poet laureate of the United States. And just thinking about his form of doing poetry, which is much more accessible than many others. And thinking there's a lot of stuff in what he says that it's attentiveness to the everyday and things like that that would be worthy of a conversation. But not feeling somehow justified or validated or certified to have that conversation.

37:46 Dylan: There is a lot to be said for earnest inquisitiveness. And that's something that I have felt that we regularly touch on enough so that we recognize a spectrum regarding expertise. On any given episode, it's often the case that one or more of us has more. Let's call it expertise. And more background in something than the other. I've said this kind of thing before, and I guess I just. In a retrospective, it makes sense for me to say it again. That it's not about philosophy for me, it's about the activity of reading something closely together.

38:23 Mark: Philosophy is so wide that I feel like there are things that are just mysterious as poetry would be to me, that we have read. That's one thing I really have changed in my approach over the years. Is just getting more and more comfortable with different Kinds of ways of expressing things, you know, in terms of my reading them, that I was very intolerant of essays, you know, or an Emerson episode and things like that. I just feel so much more comfortable.

38:46 Dylan: That crappy Thoreau episode we did, one

38:49 Mark: of our most popular episodes ever, that I was raging against him. Yeah, definitely. My eyes have opened in certain ways. So it's been really illustrative to me to start reading these more current philosophy of Mind essays. It kind of reminded me that the whole historically focused St. John's approach that we've been doing for most of our history is really not what I was trained in. What I was trained in was more like what we were doing in reading these current philosophy of mind, you know, more current from the 80s, from the 70s, philosophy of mind essays.

And I have simultaneous opposite reactions to them. On the one hand, I propose to you guys, can I just do some offline sessions just with me and Gregory from the Pantheologies, where we just read way more articles and talk about them than you guys could possibly stand, Because I want to get back in that I want to master this. But on the other hand, I've had less fun prepping for the last couple episodes. And, I mean, we pushed off our next functionalism episode to do this discussion instead, at my suggestion, because, man, they're kind of a drag, these current analytic philosophy articles.

So I kind of would rather just read novels half the time than make this our life's work. What is going on, Wes?

40:09 Wes: I haven't had anything to add.

40:11 Dylan: Have you changed your mind at all about the relative way in which you read or the things you want to read and engage with over the past 10 years?

40:23 Wes: I'm up for anything. I actually haven't found these consciousness articles, or maybe in the past I would have found them tedious and also more confusing. But maybe it's just because I have the background now. They're actually not so difficult to get through. I find it much simpler to read these. It's not as enjoyable. If I were reading Lucretius, I'd have. I mean, I have done a lot of thinking. I always walk around Boston thinking about various things, but often just more like tangents. But, yeah, I find other things, more social theory, social thought type stuff, more compelling, like Sartre, for instance. So political philosophy and social thought in general are where it's at for me, but it's always been that way.

41:10 Dylan: So it sounds to me like you're saying this is true for me is that my palette has gotten more tolerant of other flavors but there's still things that I gravitate towards. So I was surprised, in my own experience of reading through the latest philosophy of mind stuff, is that a little part of me was dreading it, knowing that it was in this category of analytical philosophy, which I have generally winced at when I start reading it. That is not my background. And I've in the past found it much more tedious than I found these articles. I found them both more interesting and easier to deal with than I had expected. So that was good. But I. I also probably wouldn't be reading them except for doing the podcast. Well, of course, maybe only people in philosophy read them.

41:59 Wes: I'm more tolerant. I'm less opinionated about the philosophy of mind than I used to be, so it doesn't anger me the way it used to.

42:08 Seth: I don't feel the same way.

42:10 Wes: I just think linguistic, conceptual analysis, that approach the philosophy of mind. I find it dishonest. I find it just a way to try to get around the problem by pretending you can analyze it a way through language. It's so bizarre to me, especially in ut. I was bewildered because I had never encountered this stuff and it seemed vacuous, but I didn't know why. So that was frustrating. And then now I have a much better conception of why. And I also see that philosophy has moved beyond it. And I can be gratified by the critiques that are being leveled at it that make it much clearer what's going on and how that path was kind of a dead end for whatever reason. It's not as tedious and it's not as irritating to me.

42:58 Dylan: Do you think that's because of the podcast and participating in there? Or do you think that's just because you've gotten old?

43:05 Wes: I mean, partly it's. Yeah, partly it's age. It's definitely because of the podcast as well. So it's because I have a better grasp the philosophy of mind we did years ago. I spent a lot of time looking for papers that could explain to me my gut intuitions about my criticisms. And I found them. So I did a lot of secondary reading. And now I can just walk around Boston and think, which is very pleasurable, and formulate some of my own thoughts about this stuff. We have a good balance of stuff for these episodes, functionalism versus various types of identity theory, and it's an educational experience.

I love philosophy of mind. I love thinking about the problem of consciousness as futile as it ultimately is. But I would say, yeah, if you have to prioritize your time Thinking about social and psychological phenomena. Sort of the intersection of maybe moral psychology, the type of thing Nietzsche's doing, but also the intersection of psychology and political philosophy and maybe sociology in the classic sense. But that stuff is more like there are real insights to be had there. Talking about machine states, it all sounds great, you know, it all sounds very technical and fancy, but they're not getting anywhere.

44:23 Dylan: They're not changing the way you live your life.

44:25 Wes: Like I said, I'm actually enjoying this. But it has a feel of something people do because it's their profession. It's nibbling away at a problem. It's the nibbling, but there's not even anything coming off. There's not crumbs coming off. It's just hitting your head against the wall.

44:40 Dylan: Do you think it's stunt philosophy?

44:42 Wes: What?

44:42 Dylan: Stunt philosophy?

44:44 Wes: What do you mean?

44:44 Mark: I've never heard that term.

44:45 Dylan: I just made it up just now. But philosophy, that is exercising for its own sake on a problem that ultimately doesn't matter. So what you're seeing is you're seeing the activity of philosophers doing philosophy, but there's literally nothing else going on. Do you think it's as bad as that?

45:05 Wes: I mean, the problem matters to me and I wouldn't go so far as to say there's nothing. I think it's valuable in a certain way. It's not like someone thinks about this for years and years and then writes their critique of pure reason or something like that. That's not the way things happen anymore. You're not getting a delivery of someone who's grandiose and ecstatic about their insights and who feels entitled to be super speculative. You know, Schopenhauer or someone who's going to tell you about this radical idea. It has to be sober, it has to be very limited and precise, and it has to be just a small, specific contribution to a field.

It's very insightful to talk about functionalism and it tells you more about the problem. As usual in philosophy, you just get to know more about the problem. But that's what's great about going back to all the classic texts. You're getting much more ambitious forays into the subject by people who had the confidence to do that.

45:59 Mark: Well, by classic, I think could even mean early 20th century.

46:02 Seth: Right.

46:02 Mark: The Chalmers paper is mentioning this book by CD Broad that just sounded fascinating to me. Like it sounded like full on Schopenhauer level interesting about emergentism. And I looked at the beginning of the book and like, so, yeah, I think this is a pretty recent Phenomenon, analytic philosophy, doing it the way it does. I haven't completely made up my mind on it because even though, you know, if I just read one Ned Block paper, I might think something along the lines, what you're saying, but especially holding that giant book Blockheads, with all these different things he's written about, and then seeing the excitement that he has about addressing some of these things, I do feel like maybe the whole is adds up to a philosophy.

Even though the individual way that you have to express the individual points in the analytic papers are like, I'm addressing this one little picky thing in this ongoing debate. And in fact I wrote a paper 10 years ago or five years ago that kind of said the same thing that I'm going to quote a lot of. There have been a few more cycles in the debate since then, so I'm going to give you an up. There's something very tedious about that whole, very professional, I should say, about that whole way of approaching thing. I think there is still certainly in David Chalmers when we talk to him, and I think we're going to see in Ned Block too, maybe these are just two shining examples.

But I would say even in Papineau, hearing the interview with him, that there still is an honest to goodness holistic philosophical excitement. And you hear about, you know, Kripke, who wrote these very picky sort of things that seemed like just a super interesting guy. You hear the same thing about Wittgenstein being this almost mystical figure when at the time he was writing the frickin Tractatus. Like one of the things that's probably responsible for what we're complaining about right now is a way of writing that goes back to the Tractatus, or at least built on what was wrong with the Tractatus, et cetera, et cetera, correction up to the present day, I don't know.

So I got to think that there are still beating hearts in these people. I really like talking to Blackburn last year when we did that, even though he's addressing these pretty picky analytic debates.

48:05 Wes: Yeah, I've generally enjoyed the analytic stuff, even though it's not my style. I mean, I wouldn't say contemporary continental philosophy is my style either, which is ironic given my interest in psychoanalysis, the obscurantist way of approaching things. But continental philosophy, that goes back well, early modern and German idealism. So you have to go back a little ways for me to really, really for it to be exciting. But it's good to have both. Analytic philosophy gives you a lot of tools.

48:34 Mark: So Seth, you Always presented yourself that you started in your early days as kind of an analytic mathematical philosopher. You really went the other direction studying Heidegger and all that stuff, and now have been kind of not very tolerant of the analytic stuff that we've delved back into. Do you still feel that way, that, like, your soul is most engaged by the more humanistic stuff, or do you also have this, at least, ambivalence about it that Wes and the rest of us have expressed here?

49:02 Seth: No. No, this is painful and unpleasant. Here's the thing. Objectively, the questions are fascinating and interesting. The problem is, whatever the answer is, whatever the outcome is, it doesn't change anything about how we live our lives. Hard or easy, compatibilist, epiphenomenal. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what the answer is because it doesn't change the way we subjectively experience life. You're not going to alter the way that you react to people or treat your spouse or whatever based on. And then to just be dragged through, you know, over the coals.

I don't even know the right term. The nails and the shards of. You know, here I'm just going to quote. Is pain a brain state, parentheses, or is the property of having a pain at time t, a brain state? It is impossible to discuss this question sensibly without saying something about the peculiar rules which have grown up in the course of the development of analytical philosophy. Rules which, far from leading to an end of all conceptual confusions, themselves represent considerable conceptual confusion. Conceptual confusion. This is a rhetorical move, a snarky rhetorical move that one makes inside of the discourse of analytic philosophy to say, oh, these other analytic guys have been supposedly parsing things out in a way that exposes their conceptual confusion and gets us to the root, but all they've done is introduce more confusions.

But me using parenthetical remarks twice or three times in a sentence and with liberal use of use versus mention, are somehow going to clarify that confusion for you. It's brutally tedious. If there was a way for me to engage in the conversation that I would somehow abstract myself from the rhetoric. I really do think the questions are fascinating, but ultimately the answer doesn't seem to matter. And that's what I struggle with.

51:00 Mark: Let me ask you, Dylan, something. So I've always been a little shocked by the fact that we haven't done much more philosophy of science, cutting edge metaphysics that overlaps with science, cosmology, that kind of stuff. It seems like I'm the only one who occasionally brings that up. Like, let's do the Stephen Hawking book or something, and we never get around to it. But that's like your profession and that was your training. Is it just because you're a little more passive in choosing topics and I'm so aggressive and always have somebody, or do you just not care so much? Like, I've never heard from you pushing for us to do things in this area that supposedly was your font of inspiration? Is the science part of your brain and the philosophy part of your brain segmented, or are those really the same motivating spiritual force?

51:47 Dylan: There have been enough interesting things to read. Trying to go into, you know, something on philosophy of quantum field theory just seems like it would be, I don't know, maybe you guys would find it interesting. There's a really interesting book called How Is Quantum Field Theory Possible? Which is a Kantian analysis of quantum field theory with a lot of Leibniz in it. It's super interesting, but it's a lot of work.

52:12 Mark: It seems like it might be comparable to getting a handle on these current analytic philosophy of mind debates. It's not the same skills. We're not doing math, but it seems like it's similarly difficult to enter into that realm of discourse. And it's all very recent. It's not St. John's the classical canon, that we can refer to, like, we've had a good time and, you know, I'm sure we'll do more like Aristotle's metaphysics and Lucretius atomism. We're doing cosmology at least some of the time more classically. But to actually really get up to date with what scientists think now seems very difficult.

52:48 Dylan: One of the challenges is that there's a lot of really interesting stuff that, that you want to talk about, say, in interpretations of quantum mechanics, that what you're going to buy is learning stuff about the problems themselves, the measurements and the mathematical account alongside the interpretation. And despite what I've said before about that, it's not just about philosophy.

53:16 Mark: I mean, does that fall into the category, like, for you, Seth, that similarly to the stuff with philosophy of mind, learning between the different quantum models of reality or whatever isn't actually going to change how you live your life, how you treat anybody? And so, and I guess as we go to Wes too. Wes, you're saying that you prefer the social and political stuff ultimately to metaphysics. Are you both equally uninterested in what Dylan's describing here?

53:40 Seth: That's a good point. I mean, there's something at stake to some extent with the Quantum understanding and trying to get a better grasp on the science behind the macro and the micro. That would inform conversations around things such as free will and in some sense could also inform the discussion or, you know, understanding of consciousness. And it has virtue at an explanatory level that could inform, I think, questions that are more interesting, so to speak, without trying to denigrate that. Just not questions that are more interesting, but questions which have more moral weight, let's say. Whereas I don't think the way in which I've seen the consciousness conversation play itself out, that it's the same thing.

54:29 Mark: Did you want to take that at all, Wes, or should we just keep going?

54:32 Wes: You're asking if I'm interested in the philosophy of science stuff? Yeah, yeah, always. St. John's is a dual major in history of science and philosophy.

54:41 Mark: Well, I also noticed they have the Eastern Classics program. So this is another thing. If we're talking about general areas of

54:47 Wes: philosophy that I can say I'm definitively not interested. So send me your hate mail for being a white supremacist. Send it to me.

54:57 Mark: So I'm interested why that might be. Whenever we get into that area, it ends up being something like, directly about virtue traditions. Like, it totally connects to Aristotle. I understand not wanting to necessarily do Indian cosmology in great detail, like, or their version of logic. Like, they have their own version of analytic philosophy that is just as boring and tedious, except it's 2000 years old and in Sanskrit. And so it's like, oh, this seems like an academic exercise. I'm not sure what I'm getting out of this or how much of the details of the Buddhist worldview have been worked out.

And if I don't buy the basics of Buddhism, then it's kind of like studying Middle Ages philosophers and their really detailed theological stuff. So I could see dismissing some non Western stuff for reasons like that. But the stuff that we've actually done in here for the most part has, you know, like Confucius. Like, I feel like our Confucius episode was just as valuable as anything else we've ever done. Our Daoism episode. Like, those connect directly to even how I think about the world and treating people. I don't know. Even though it's a totally different historical tradition, to me, those particular episodes have seemed very much tied in with everything else.

And I refer to them just as much as I do to anything else in the past.

56:07 Wes: I mean, I agree about those episodes.

56:09 Mark: Dylan and Seth, do you have a strong desire to do more non Western or you feel like we've been doing once a year is just right.

56:17 Seth: It's the same thing that I think I said on the last episode that we did, which was there's not an equivalent rationalist tradition in the east that whatever you're talking about or studying ultimately has to be cashed out in practice as opposed to some kind of solipsistic conceptual journey. And so insofar as that's the case, it doesn't lend itself well to our Western approach and our format of what are the nuggets? And how can this inform our life? And if it has something to say, like. Well, the inform is to say that every day you should get up and be moderate and do this sort of thing over and over and over again.

We can't have a meaningful conversation about it. I shouldn't say we can't have a meaningful conversation about it. I should just say that ultimately it's not a debate about the merits of the arguments. And then whether we think that has application to our lives, it's much more assertive or propositional. And then it becomes a question of is this a maxim that you could regulate your daily habits by, and what would that look like? And our format just doesn't lend itself well to that kind of conversation.

57:26 Mark: Yes, despite all the pitches, we get to talk about mindfulness, books and applications, self help applications of Eastern philosophy. What we did with Ryan is probably Ryan Holiday is as far into that area as I can see us getting. Or with Robert Wright on Buddhism and meditation.

57:44 Seth: Yeah, maybe that's the next spin off podcast. Hey, everybody, here's what I've been practicing for the last week.

57:51 Mark: You know, start your own waking up meditation app.

57:54 Seth: Seth, you know what? If I do, it would just be to get my sorry ass into the, into the practice of it. Like, oh, well, maybe if I have to talk to people about it, I would actually do it. Maybe I could have a podcast that would just be me exploring all of the Buddhist books that my wife has scattered around our house.

58:14 Mark: Call it my Buddhist floor trash.

58:20 Seth: Yes, something like that.

58:22 Mark: All right, well, certainly we could go on for days and days about what we want to read more of, what we want to read less of. This is an ongoing conversation. We're very happy to have the audience get to listen to some of these preferences that we have, some of these thoughts we're having, and we would love, of course, to hear from you if you, you want to email us@pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com we always write down your suggestions. And eventually if enough other people make those suggestions, we start thinking harder about them.

58:51 Wes: So.

58:51 Mark: And just also about the overall. Well, I don't know if any listener suggestions are going to affect the overall slant of the show given the strong preferences that we've developed over time. But we're happy to have you participate. And in fact, if we're not doing what you want to do, I just to circle back to what we were talking about, the beginning, please start your own show. Please. I want some grad students who are studying non Western philosophies who like Partial Examined Life to start the Eastern classics version of the Partial Examined Life. We'll add you to our podcast network. We would love to have somebody else do some of this work for us. So you are welcome to join our extended, extended family, maybe let's say that. Anybody else have any other closings?

59:36 Dylan: Thanks for listening to us for 10 years. We wouldn't be able to be doing this unless we had people who listen to us. It's great.

59:45 Seth: Agreed. Thank you so much. Particularly if you listen to this thing.

59:50 Mark: Yeah. All the way to the end of this discussion. You're very tolerant of our personalities and our bullshit. If you, if you did that. And I want to thank you guys for following me on this march. I'm starting to get a little more mellow about it and hopefully the readings will stop being quite as long. So that's going to be my summer New Year's resolution. How about that? The closing song is going to be a mini song. It is the song that I wrote for the end of the first pretty much pop episode, featuring my co host for that, Erica Spyres doing the violin and harmony vocals. I just thought it was a nice expression of the risk taking and excitement that goes with starting a new podcast or even continuing with one that's been going for 10 years. Hope you like it. Good night, everybody.

1:00:32 Seth: Good night.

1:00:32 Dylan: Good night.

1:00:33 Wes: Good night.

1:00:37 Mark: We're a high road cult horse ready to bolt and we're alienating today

1:00:49 Seth: all,

1:00:49 Mark: all the folks that are kin and the new ones come in are as strange, just as strange as they seem after all the disaster and tedious work let's sit on our couches and play Captain Kirk Exploring terrain that we should recognize Everything's twisted, grayed out, magnified. We're rolling for stardom all buttons unmashed to turn all that binging to cash, cash, cash, cash Come listen, come on to the new culture have a laugh, have a poke and prepare to be all.