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Mark, Seth, Dylan, and Wes reflect on the changing state of podcasting and public philosophy over the last decade, how our goals and interests have changed since we started we started. Why don't colleges pay their faculty to educate the public through regular, broadcasted conversations like ours? If you think we're snarky, take a look at actual philosophy faculty! Should we continue to do more literature, poetry, and other topics that are not strictly philosophy? Also, the stalled state of the PEL book. Thanks so much to each and every Partially Examined Life listener for making it worth our time to do this!
End song: "High Rollin' Cult" by Mark Lint with Erica Spyres, celebrating a new attempt to capture the fun of the beginning of PEL: Pretty Much Pop. I encourage you to support that effort at patreon.com/prettymuchpop.
Folks new to PEL may want to listen to any other PEL episode before listening to this discussion.
congrats fellas hope your hobby hasn’t become too much like another thing on the to do list or worse another job, thanks for sticking with it, if you do branch out perhaps just stick with the philo of literature or philo of film, etc
like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81zkZ7ZbkzA
cheers
Congrats!
On your proposed book’s format, I enjoyed the structure of Negri on Negri (https://www.amazon.com/Negri-conversation-Anne-Dufourmentelle/dp/041596895X) that had him address important topics in his life from A-Z. He often veered off the subjects but the structure seemed to work well, and it didn’t read like an interview.
I think it was Wes who pointed out that it is people coming to a text fresh. Rather than people lecturing what they already know and they specialise in. This is a big part of the attraction I think – it makes it much more dynamic.
Your podcast is great and has had a big impact on how I think about the world. It has impressed upon me the maturity and depth of thought available in older texts. We live in a culture that is so obsessed with the present. I think this is reinforced by an assumption that because wisdom accumulates over time, only the most recent art, science and philosophy need to be taken seriously. Your show has shown me how much we have to learn from older texts.
Also I’ll just add that one reason your podcast works and that it has been able to keep going is that you all are talented at this. Give yourselves credit!
I live the show and agree that what makes it special is the way you all come to a text together and let the text lead or at least focus the discussion. I have also enjoyed the rare freeform episodes like the one on politics following the 2016 election (though I did not enjoy the free speech one nearly as much). I feel like the show could benefit from more freeform discussions on particular topics that could help broaden out the various discussions you’ve had on the show. A few times you’ve done short series of episodes on topics like the current on on consciousness / philosophy of mind, or one from very early on ethics. Though you throughout compare the differences in thought, I find myself wanting episodes that will wrap things up further where you can give yourselves room to draw conclusions about these topics and to discuss and justify your personal stances on them. Considering how much ground you have covered in philosophy, I think broad discussions on different branches of philosophy like metaphysics, ethics, politcal philopshy and so on would be very interesting. Congrats on a great 10 years and I wish you many more!
I would love to hear you guys discuss more philosophy of science (which is something that really does cash-out in the real world since we all have to contend with scientific institutions and their influences) and some more bleeding-edge metaphysics and its interaction with science. (Causality, cosmology, eternalism, interpretations of quantum mechanics, etc…)
Also, if you wanted to talk more about logic, I think that would be wonderful. I have a bunch of tabs open in my web browser with articles about multi-valued logic, paraconsistancy, Jaina seven-valued logic, modal arguments, etc… I would love to have you guys discuss those topics.
Regarding poetry, literature and other things which are a bit outside your wheelhouse. I think you should give it a shot. It could be a spinoff, but I suspect that if you read secondary material and are willing to make fools of yourselves occasionally, you will provide a lot of value. (I’m a Very Bad Wizards listener and they have convinced me to read a bunch of stuff I wouldn’t have, same as you.) You would likely get better over time. As someone who binged your first 100 or so episodes when I first discovered you a few years back, let me tell you that you have improved tremendously over time. No reason why you can’t get better at poetry or some other stuff.
Also, some philosophy of religion would be great. Read some theists and talk about their arguments. Sure, they are wrong in the end, but not all their arguments are terrible and given the number of religious people in the world, their arguments really matter a lot.
Oh, and the philosophy of mind stuff is great.
In summary, congratulations. You’re great. Now get back to the podcast mines and get me some banter!
Thanks! This discussion emboldened Dylan to propose a quantum mechanics related episode that’ll hopefully happen this fall.
Andy Pickering’s Constructing Quarks book might be a nice way in for the non-physicist members of the crew.
his Mangle book is a classic now in STS (science&tech studies)
http://www.philsci.univ.kiev.ua/UKR/courses/asp/asp-lit/%5BAndrew_Pickering%5D_The_Mangle_of_Practice_Time,_A(BookFi.org).pdf
Oh, also, please talk about anthropic arguments. Seriously, I can’t take a step in the Internet without running into an anthropic argument these days. Fine tuning, quantum suicide, doomsday argument, that weird sleeping beauty puzzle thing… It’s freakin everywhere and I would love to hear a thorough discussion of it.
Congratulations guys.
It’s the humour as much as the depth that has kept me returning for a decade.
I suspect that many listeners, like me, really wanted to do undergrad philosophy but studied something more likely to result in paid employment.
Anyway the podcast has partially inspired me to pursue a postgrad in bioethics.
Here’s to another 10 years.
You guys talked a lot about using your format for a podcast., but for things other than philosophy and the lack of podcasts already doing this.
A couple of podcast from the Ringer fit the bill.
The Rewatchables: they basically rewatch a decently old movie and then talk about it. The movie is the text.
Binge Mode: they basically watch a TV show and then do recaps of the episode and discussion of it. Binge Mode is kinda in-between a precognition and a normal episode.
The only other thing I could think of was sports shows. Most sports shows are going to lightly cover a broad base of topics, but after a big game (say the super bowl) the whole show is basically going to be a discussion and dissection of the game. Basically game becomes the text.
You guys also talked specifically about doing this for economics. As an econ major I wish that this existed.
Thanks. I was pretty sure that was more our ignorance talking than the lack of other sharp free-form-analysis-type podcasts out there.
This is a terrific podcast – and very much ‘the pub’ after the seminar. Working off the set readings makes for a really great format – but above all it is the chemistry between you guys and the joy laughter you bring to the study of these great works that make the whole project so successful. As an earlier poster has written: ‘Give yourselves some credit’ and ‘here’s to another ten years!
Finally, more on the philosophy of science would be great – the edition on Heisenberg was excellent.
I found your podcast because I’m reading Elizabeth Anderson’s paper What Is the Point Of Equality and other papers, and saw that you had a podcast with her. I really enjoyed the discussion, all three of them.
In this podcast you ask why there aren’t more programs like yours.
I’ve been writing about older books at Emptywheel.net for some time now, It’s difficult to do this effectively. Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism, or a book on the intellectual history of the Frankfurt school is a slow process, and selecting the areas to describe is even harder. Foucault is even harder. Few if any of my readers are familiar with the texts, and often the very ideas are foreign. To do a podcast on these books would be equally difficult. Perhaps the reason is that we aren’tn used to talking about these ideas at the length they require.
Showing their relevance is also a chore. Emptywheel is primarily a national security blog run by Marcy Wheeler. Readers are politically alert, and see things through a political lens. Few people know much about the history of economics, or the historical forces at work in anti-Semitism, no one had ever heard of Pierre Bourdieu, and as far as I could see, no one had read The Great Transformation. I think many of my readers are so engaged in the miseries of the slow decline of the US that they can’t see why they should work on these old ideas.
1. I enjoyed the level of agitation in Episode 192 over what an education ought to look like in our present moment, and I would love to hear you continue chasing that beast. As a high school humanities teacher, I try to apply Great Books/liberal education methods in my classroom as often as possible. I agree that the university cannot be counted on to provide a similar experience, and I see my practice (in a middle class MA town that expects high college admission rates) as a worthy scene of action. However, there are myriad obstacles – I will not enumerate them here – that leave me regretfully questioning the project’s relevance.
2. What are the group’s thoughts on speculative realism/OOO? Graham Harman, Ian Bogost, Timothy Morton ,et. al.?
You are definitely not the first to suggest OOO. We’ll have to get around to it. Do you have a specific, manageable reading list for it, like should it just be one book or three articles?
Harman’s “Object-Oriented Ontology” is definitely a manageable read. Even then, you can discard all but the chapter on Indirect Relations and real vs. sensual objects. (The chapter on aesthetics is a wonderful commercial for Ortega y Gasset. The chapter on politics is a long application of OOO to Shelby Foote’s account of the American Civil War. The rest is mostly situating the branch in broader intellectual history and promoting fellow travelers.)
Morton’s Hyperobjects is a pretty wild-eyed application of flat ontology frameworks to global warming and ecological disaster – worth looking at but probably not systematic enough for PEL, at least on a first pass with the topic. I’m just breaking the spine on Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology, so no comment yet, there.
Thanks, Tim!