PEL Special: Nightcap New Year’s Party to Welcome 2022

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1:28 Mark: every style, every home. Hey, this is your partially examined life Nightcap. It's the New year's party edition 2021. Recording this on. Let's say it's New Year's eve. It's actually the 17th of December for us, but hey, Happy New Year's, everybody.

1:47 Ad: Happy New Year's.

1:48 Wes: Happy New Year's.

1:50 Dylan: Should it be Happy New Year or Happy New Year's?

1:52 Ad: Ah, that's today's question.

1:55 Wes: Happy New Year.

1:56 Mark: But it's the New Year's.

1:57 Wes: Happy New Year's Day.

1:58 Mark: Possessive party. Yes.

2:00 Ad: I once looked this up and I can't remember the answer.

2:03 Mark: It's not just plural. It's New Year's Day.

2:06 Ad: Yeah, it's apostrophe.

2:07 Mark: Yes.

2:07 Ad: Yeah.

2:08 Mark: That's not New Year's Day because the

2:10 Dylan: day is possessed by the New Year. But when you wish somebody a Happy New Year. Go ahead, Mark.

2:20 Ad: You leave the day off because you're saying it on New Year's Eve. So it's an abbreviation, so it doesn't make any sense. So you just trail it because you're on the border between two days, temporal stages. So you have to leave it indeterminate. New Year's Day, New Year's Eve.

2:36 Mark: I think thanks to global warming and supply shortages, it's going to be happy Nude Year. We're all going to be running around with no garments.

2:44 Wes: Let's hope that's not the case.

2:46 Ad: I'm not sure that would be so happy. Except with strict qualification. They'd have to strict vetting. Who gets to do that?

2:56 Dylan: There was some video actually in the madison.com of the Madison Nude Bicycle Race. And I realized, you know what? I'm just good with people wearing clothes. It was just fine with me.

3:10 Wes: Are you guys the type that make New Year's resolutions?

3:13 Dylan: I don't make New Year's resolutions, but I do find that it's one of the occasions where I think about what I'm doing and taking stock.

3:22 Wes: Give yourself a grade for the year, Something like that.

3:25 Mark: This is a perfect segue for our agenda here. Yes. So this is what we're here to do. I mean, Dylan, you were answering the question, do you want to start us on sort of where you're at in your intellectual journey at this moment? Maybe how that's been affected. We could be open to how this has been affected by personal and professional changes over the last year. Obviously we have the pandemic and stuff like that.

3:46 Dylan: When I was thinking about this idea of taking stock is like usually where I'm at at the New Year, New Year's and birthday is usually where it happens for me, which I'm sure is terribly conventional and cliche for me. I just find my myself decidedly middle aged. I'm not old, I'm not young and I don't know what that means, but I know that I'm not old and I'm not young. And the thing that I wonder about is because I end up thinking about, I got all these books about different kinds of versions of self improvement, thinking about habits and health in different ways.

And I wonder sometimes, is that because I'm decidedly middle aged that it's that way or is it just that that's that way for everybody? You know, it's just the media markets, self improvement for all different categories of life and we are in different phases of that. But I am continuing to think about what habits I have and which ones I want to keep and which ones I want to get rid of.

4:44 Mark: Is this the year? I know at some point you, you were always pretty fit, but like you changed your habits in some way that like it was noticeable that you slimmed down from your already slim self to a mere st. Was that in this last year? Was that a pandemic related thing?

5:02 Dylan: Yes, it was primarily within this past year. I used the pandemic as a instigator for me on the score is that I decided that if I was going to get through the pandemic, what seemed to be like it was going to be a long haul, I was going to need to sort of tend to my mental well being. And one of the ways that I do that is tend to my physical well being. So I, more or less, for the past two years, have been working out like six days a week, probably averaging four and a half days a week. I'm fitter than I was when I was 30 years old. So that feels great.

I like that. But I guess it goes hand in hand with the fact that my life, my kids are all out of the house now. That's been a transition in my life. And I mean, for Mark, that's more recent for you than it is for me. My kids have been out of the house for three years, three and a half years now. But just figuring out what that new normal is. I have new time to do stuff that I used to not have.

6:04 Mark: Wes, do you have an overall narrative of sort of, I know you've had some job changes and, I don't know, stuff that. Or have you been running your halfway house for more than the last year? I thought this was mostly in the last year kind of thing. And subtext started and I've been running

6:19 Ad: this halfway house for five years, Mark.

Okay.

6:21 Mark: And I guess subtext has been around for a year and a half now, right? Am I totally wrong?

6:25 Ad: It's been almost. Well, in February will be two years since we really got going on recordings. Or January, and then, yeah, we started in August, releasing them a little over a year ago, In August of 2020, I graduated with a mental health counseling degree. I have a year and a half left in this house before I get an lmhc, before I get the actual license, because I have to get all these hours to get the license.

6:53 Mark: That was it. You got patients for the first time this year, like individual, right, that you're counseling?

6:58 Ad: Not exactly. I mean, I've been doing fieldwork and internships. I've had patients for quite a while now. But as far as my own, I have one private practice patient at this point, which I wasn't planning on doing. It's just because someone wanted to do that who I had already Been seeing through my internship. And so I wouldn't have started my private practice now because I'm overworked and I'm ready to be out of this house, but I'm stuck here for a year and a half. And so I'm taking time off from school, which I shouldn't have been doing because this year.

Yeah, this year has been horrific in terms of workload and all the crises I've had to deal with in my house. My father dying of COVID and just the effect of COVID It's just been bad. It's been very bad. So basically, I'm constantly thinking about quitting everything except for Pel and going to Costa Rica, basically, and living there because I feel like I'm constantly at the end of my rope. That's really the way it is. Yeah.

7:56 Mark: I don't know if you're just swaying, Seth, or you were agreeing about being at the end of your rope.

8:00 Wes: I'm agreeing about that. And Costa Rica. If I could drop everything and go there, I would do the same. Yeah. I mean, the mental health Crisis is real. 2020 was supposed to be the bad year, but this has been, mental health wise, much worse for me anyway. Right when we were supposed to return to the office, you know, I've been sitting on in the same chair, doing the same thing over Zoom for, well, teams and then Zoom for a year. They announced they were shutting the office. So it was like, psych. You know, we're trying to get the kid back in school so that she doesn't grow up with no social graces. And also for sanity, for hers and ours.

8:45 Mark: And her age right now is she'll

8:47 Wes: be two in February. So she's like, I'm sorry, did I say two? Yeah, I meant to say in two months she'll be two. She'll be four in February or four in two months. Sorry. She's Benjamin Buttons. She's actually growing younger. She made it to three and is headed back the other direction.

9:03 Mark: That is a way to let people know. Like, make people think they don't know you as well as they think. Like, oh, Your kid is 4 now? No, my kid is 2.

9:10 Ad: What?

9:10 Mark: What the hell is wrong with you?

9:12 Wes: Oh, she must be five. You know, she must be five now. Actually, she's nine. You know, like, it's always, I should

9:17 Mark: ask my dad, how old do you think I am? Do you remember exactly he.

9:21 Wes: Do you think he does?

9:22 Mark: He's 90. I'm exactly 40 years younger than he is, so he probably could figure it out. But I'll ask him.

9:29 Wes: My dad probably. He might not know. My mom would know, but she's getting to the point where she can't remember things as well as she used to. So yeah, it's a constant Covid crisis when you're dealing with kids in school and elderly parents and a spouse who owns 150 person Touch Business Spa. It's just been constant, constant drama. I did get off my earlier obsession this year with genocide and I'm trying to find a way to channel that energy positively. I have a thesis, but I may try to figure out how to work out with the pel community somehow or on the pel blog. But because it's so nihilistic, I'm holding it close to the chest for now. So I'd like to be positive and uplifting about the one Good thing is like Dylan, my commitment to exercise is in the form of walking. So I've been getting up at 5:36 o' clock and walking two or three miles a day with the dog and that's a great stabilizer.

10:29 Mark: Well, I will use my personal arc to maybe transition the conversation to our intellectual arcs and what we want to do with the podcast because some of what's been going on has gotten me to kind of review like where are my gaps? And some of that is I just offered a tutoring option a couple years ago. It's on the store and some people have done it as just a one off. Oh, it's really cool to, you know, meet the pel host. That's nice. Had three people in the last year. That one is every week. Every other week. You know, it's been a pretty steady thing for several months now.

And then a couple others are like now and again, but maybe once a month or you know, at least three or four times total and it's gotten me to look back at. Okay, so like reread some of the old text or at least re listen to the episodes that we've did there. So like to revisit Kant and the Pragmatists and Hume and etc. Etc. Another thing I think I probably announced on a nightcap that I had started writing a book in the spring. We've talked a long time about a pel book and for various reasons that is either not gone anywhere or the version that we're trying to sell now is like can you just take transcripts of what we've done?

And you know, we've kind of given up, long since given up on. The four of us are going to Actually write something together, something new. That was an ambition five years ago, seven years ago, but like never really seemed like it was going to work. But you know, I got excited about that. Then I got distracted myself by starting the Philosophy versus Improv, which is another project that excites me. It's like it doesn't require any prep, but it's something that is dangerous in a way that the other podcasts are a little more comfortable, a little more routine and there's just.

But in the last, before early November, I actually got hired to write a book. They're just paying me a flat fee to write this book called Philosophy Fourteens and it is based on, on an outline. It's this media group. They put out like a couple thousand books a year. They do market research. Where are their gaps?

12:30 Ad: They sent that.

12:31 Mark: They sent that to you?

12:32 Ad: Sent that proposal to me too.

12:35 Mark: They bugged me again. So I ended up responding and sort of had to write a little bit as an audition piece. And so it's going to be like,

12:42 Ad: what are they paying you to do?

12:43 Mark: I'm not going to announce that on the air. It is a flat fee and then I won't make any residuals. It was enough. It was enough for me to bother to do it. But it is a pretty constraining outline. Like I get to come up with what questions I'm going to ask, but it's like for each question that I ask, there's definite, very tight word counts and I have to write to a 12 year old level. So like it is an interesting challenge and it has to incorporate like world philosophy. It can't just be western stuff. So that's gotten me then listening to more.

13:15 Wes: What's going to be the bigger challenge? Doing that? Incorporating world philosophy or writing like a 12 year old?

13:20 Mark: The latter. Writing for 12 year olds. Yeah, because it's really hard to explain anything in, you know, a hundred words or whatever, if that's like how long you have for a section. But as far as the non Western thing, one of the things I've been doing is just looking more to the Peter Adamson's his own History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The main feed that covers Islamic philosophy, some North African stuff. But then he had started another feed with Indian and then African philosophy. And so that is something that I had rediscovered when we had the Stephen Phillips episode earlier this year.

And I got all into, you know that there is a canon in there too. Like there's a reason that St. John's has their Eastern classics program. And so now I feel like I've discovered this new canon and gotten the outlines of it in a way that I didn't have even a year ago. And it's made me really want to learn more and fill in those gaps and be as thorough about that as we have been about everything else. I'm not going to necessarily push that on on Wes, but that is something that is definitely in my interest now, and I feel like it is foolish and willfully ignorant to just shut the door on that and just have no interest in what half the world has done.

Is that a good transition into what do we want to do with this year with the podcast?

14:38 Wes: It's a transition.

14:40 Dylan: I would be up for doing some more Eastern stuff, so I'm open to it for sure. I would like to do a couple things more on philosophy of science and sort of related topics. I just haven't completely been able to get it together for what the reading list would be. The big one for me that I want to make sure that we do is something about quantum interpretation. I mentioned it before. I've been reading this book, it's called QBism for Quantum Bayesianism, and I have a friend who's been writing a big article about one of the founders of it and been interacting with him a lot. And there's some interesting developments in quantum interpretation that I think would be really rich on the podcast and some nice links, especially with QBism, with pragmatism as informing that interpretation. If there was anything that was explicitly on my list that I'd like to do this year, it'd be that.

15:37 Mark: Well, it was very nice that we were able to in the last year revisit philosophy of science finally. And I know in the last couple nightcaps we suggested some addenda that we could have to that, and what you're talking about is certainly part of that. Other folks, things that were exciting about this last year that we covered that you want to do more of, or new directions that you've been thinking about.

15:57 Ad: Early modern philosophy and German idealism has always been the most appealing to me, in part because they're sort of adjacent to the advent of modern science. Even though I'm not like contemporary analytic, I don't know. Contemporary philosophy in its analytic and continental versions is often, I find it disappointing, either too dry or too speculative and literary. But with someone like Hegel, I don't know, it's just a sweet spot for me. It's speculative but rigorous at the same time, which is what I like. And I don't know if I have a good explanation of it, but someone like Malebranche, we just did. Who you guys did not seem to be all that enthusiastic about, at least when you started, before you got into it. So, yeah, I just knew. Picking up a text like that, I know immediately, yeah, this is the sweet spot. So I would definitely be up for more of that early modern German idealism.

16:46 Mark: You didn't find, like, Badiou was rigorous in that way, even though he has fake math language.

16:52 Ad: Yeah, no, I see someone as like Badiou as when we had our discussions. I enjoyed it and I got something out of it. Or even on the second reading with the note taking. That's always a more sympathetic read for me because I'm trying to decipher it. Basically. I'm often just trying to translate it into plain English. Right. Any text you do that with, it's an interesting problem and it can be rewarding to do it. And you can discover things regardless of what's in the original text. You can make discoveries. Right. You could treat it as an investigation and you make your own discoveries.

So it was enjoyable in that sense. It's like the same thing with someone like Judith Butler. Even though I don't have the highest opinion of that. Let's leave Butler aside, because I have a lower opinion. But with Badiou, I'm not a fan of that approach. I don't find it clever and literary. I don't find it aesthetically pleasing. I don't find it profound. It doesn't get the rigor or the grand systematizing. Maybe it's the grandiose ass quality of a Hegel, for instance. Sometimes I think people are trying to reproduce that, but they don't know how.

So it doesn't work.

17:52 Mark: Do you feel like it's different if it's something that is in some sense part of the canon, part of history? Like, for me, even though I personally don't really like reading Derrida, but I feel like that is somebody that was at some point canonized in a way that maybe Badiou and Judith Butler will be, but they're not quite old enough. Badiou is pretty old himself. But just in terms of when they were famous, that I feel like there are characters like Derrida and Lyotard and Marcuse and stuff that, like, I'm more interested in doing them than a contemporary figure. And the only reason that I said yes to Badiou is because so many people assured me that, oh, he is actually going to be regarded that way. It's just. I just Am not on the cutting edge of things, and I might not know that, but him and Deleuze, like, they really are the real deal as far as people of today.

18:42 Ad: I mean, I think we have to do them because they are big names and we should investigate. And even someone like Derrida, I'm highly prejudiced against and based on what I've read, and I think he's a charlatan and even kind of feel the same way about Lacan. But even if they are charlatans, it's not to say that there aren't ideas that are important. And the other thing is I always have to bracket that and say, all right, you're probably being intemperate. Since I am an intemperate person in general, I just assume that I'm being intemperate and closed minded and that I could change my mind. So I reluctantly crack open the text. If I'm forced to do it by this podcast, you know, that's not the worst thing. And then I can do a real evaluation instead of just act on my prejudices.

19:23 Wes: I think I've figured out why Wes likes the era of philosophy that he does. So the beginning of philosophy, what we have is fragments. So from one half sentence, thousands of books of interpretation and meanings may be drawn. At the other end, in contemporary, we have people who do nothing but just vomit out and books and words and blogs and videos and webinars and TED talks constantly. And you're trying to distill all of that nonsense into one useful, meaningful idea. And then somewhere during the period of German idealism, you had just the right amount of words with just the right amount of ideas coming out of them.

20:00 Ad: It's the Goldilocks zone.

20:02 Wes: It's the Goldilocks zone. I have to say, the Hegel thing really opened my eyes this year. I mean, it really, truly does feel like, at least as far as the key philosophical themes go, German idealism checks pretty much all the boxes, like freedom, consciousness, knowledge, you know, ontology, you get it all. But I do also think there's something to be said for this is maybe where I guess Wes and I disagree. I think there are questions to be asked about cultural and gendered perspectives around are we asking those questions from a place that isn't necessarily shared by everybody else?

And if that's so, is it possible for philosophy to open up? Or is philosophy predominantly a European and male enterprise? I do think those are legitimate questions. I also think that German idealism is going to come up a little short when it comes to political philosophy, or at least unsatisfying when it comes to political philosophy, in the same way that Spinoza would. But I've had this book on my shelf for probably going on 30 years now. I told you about how my dog destroyed my peach copy of the Phenomenology of Spirit. But Langer, Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key.

I don't even really know exactly what it's about. It's one of these things that's just kind of always preyed upon me. And I would like to see if we could find some time at some point to look into it. She was a student of Whitehead, but it's more about symbolism and semiotics and reason. So, anyway, I would like to get to that at some point.

21:35 Mark: Dylan, have you gotten to the point where you have any strong feelings about contemporary continental philosophy? Do you feel more comfortable at all in the area now that we've done several readings? Rather than, like, I just have no idea who it. You always have a disclaimer at the beginning of those episodes that, like, I wasn't aware that this was even a person. And now I do.

21:55 Dylan: I do have those. So, like, yeah, Badiou. And it was an example of someone I'd never heard of. My undergraduate education had a strong streak of postmodernism in it, and so I had read some bit of Derrida. And so I find it okay. I find myself often not having a lot of patience for it. Like when I read the Badiou, this sort of popular book, it was interesting without being hard. And so I was like, okay, that's fine. And then when we read the articles where he would just go on these tears, I don't know, I just found it less compelling and interesting.

I try to take Wes as my inspiration and read with a charitable mind. Malebranche is a perfect example where I found myself much more charitable when I started getting into it. I do find myself having to be more decisive about forcing myself to engage with varieties of things and not just want to stick with things I'm interested in. And that's probably part of being middle aged. But Wes was saying early modernism and German idealism is a sweet spot for him. And one way I would take that is that he likes thinking about the things. He likes the presentation.

He finds the resonance and the take on the ambiguities and the nuance and the challenges in both the ways in which the questions are engaged as well as the direction of the answers, all enlivening and in the right mix. And I agree with SETH I was surprised when I was going through the Hegel, how much that I liked it in ways that I didn't expect. But if I'm honest with myself, it's because of how much of it points towards emergence and pragmatism. And even though it seems maybe weird to think of, maybe it's weird to think of pragmatism and idealism having a lot in common, but maybe they have a lot in common.

23:50 Ad: Yeah, they do.

23:52 Dylan: So maybe my lack of patience has to do with wanting to think about things that involve, for me, understanding and thinking about how we figure things out. And that's one thing that I thought that I liked about Hegel. Hegel was a lot in the stuff that we read. I liked how it was about not just thinking about how we figure things out. And I have patience for metaphysics that engages that, but not just for the metaphysics that feels like it's for metaphysics sake, I'll put it that way.

24:22 Mark: So the stuff like Aristotle's categories would be metaphysics for metaphysics sake, which that's a good example of something. So there's an episode that Peter Adamson had about some Indian thinker that had a similar list to Aristotle's categories. And actually I even used that as like. But he had the category inherence. Aristotle didn't have inherence. And I sort of trying to explain why that would be the case. And so I feel like just in the same way that I'm sort of not natively interested in something like Aristotle's categories, then I'm not going to be natively interested in what, you know, somebody in India is saying about that either.

But if I let myself get interested then like, isn't it awesome then to read what Aristotle thought and to read what somebody who just came up with something similar out of sheer synchronicity thousands of miles away? That all seems like it's just a matter of surrendering yourself really insofar as you are able to. Whatever it is we're going to read, to see this as a, as an opportunity, as an open door to a whole intellectual culture. And I don't just mean non Western, I'm just, even if it's like a contemporary person, like what are the contemporary debates?

So like that's another thing. Are we going to try to keep having guests and talk about their current books? That this was something that whenever this comes up recently Wes has voted against because like, why wouldn't we want to just cover a classic? And I totally see that, but I also See, like when we had the St. John's guy that came about, natural

25:43 Ad: kinds, Stewart Umphrey, or as some like to call him, God, so we called

25:49 Mark: him in school, that was a glimpse into a whole sort of debate that I just didn't know anything about and I still don't feel comfortable with. But that is a nice thing to do at least twice a year to open ourselves up to that kind of. Like, what is contemporary philosophy actually doing? They're not studying Malebranche. We're doing nothing but good things in taking in more of the history of philosophy, like Malebranche, like Avicenna, like, whatever, to inform how we're going to understand these modern people. But it still is not the same as, like, getting idea into what a professor has to sift through in current journals on a regular basis.

26:25 Ad: So I don't mind doing. I mean, if it's a really good. And not just for the public. Right. If it's not just a popularization, then it's. It's an actual work of philosophy that we think is probably good, you know, even if it's contemporary. I'm all for that. And then the question is, do we want to treat that as an interview? Have them on to talk about the work that they happen to be popularizing, you know, that they happen to be doing a press junket for right now, so that they expect to be interviewed? Yeah. So I guess there's a few different issues there, but I'm a little wary of just doing. Having people on for interviews. I don't think it works very well for press junkets and then not interested in popularizations or something that's just very obviously very political. So that's my view on that. We could do it without having them on as a guest, too.

27:11 Mark: Yeah, like what we do with Badiou, we didn't really consider seriously inviting him. I don't know, Seth, are you hearing from the people or from your own explorations? Like stuff that's currently going on? Okay, that's a shaking of the head.

27:24 Wes: No, I mean, I enjoy having guests for the most part. I'm less excited about professors as I am other kinds, just because, like you said, you know, people who are out on their book tour or whatever, it has a tendency to just be monologue and it's not quite the give and take. But you know how we get these notifications from the blog about approving or. I saw some kind of social media tick or something like that, and somebody was talking about the policing episode with Phil that just came across my feed recently.

27:54 Mark: Was that in the new server?

27:56 Dylan: Which.

27:56 Wes: Oh, Discord. Yeah, maybe it was. Maybe that's where it was.

27:59 Mark: Yeah, Discord. Yes. I was just looking through that today. Yeah. We should remind people now that for all supporters, we have a Discord server. So this is yet another reason to sign up to support us, if you don't already do. So besides getting these nightcaps on a regular basis. Yeah, that is another place to reach out to us.

28:14 Wes: My point is, is that having a subject matter expert on who isn't a professor doesn't have an axe to grind, you know, kind of fits well with our vibe. I think it's fun because you learn a lot. But of course, it's very hard to know in advance what the person's going to be like. And like, I don't have any great desire to have Badiou on. Like, I don't need to get to know the guy or have the.

28:38 Mark: Or Zizek or any of those other.

28:40 Wes: Part of me wants to have Zizek on.

28:42 Ad: He didn't respond to me when I followed up with him.

28:45 Wes: So just so I can see up close and personal. I want the experience, so to speak. I wish I could have been on stage somewhere, seen him.

28:54 Ad: Do you like being interrupted and guess you have experience with that with me, but.

28:59 Wes: Oh, yeah, no, I'm sure I wouldn't even bother talking. I just would want to see the gesticulations and the spittle up close and personal. But I mean, if that's the criteria, then can we have Kate Beckinsale or Kristen Bell or somebody like that on? That would be a preference of mine.

29:15 Mark: Have more celebrities back on. We haven't even tried that in quite a long time.

29:19 Ad: Chief Anne.

29:21 Mark: I guess. I guess now that I have that, I have pretty much popped that I try to get, you know, even for that. I haven't tried too hard to get celebrities for that. But that's. That's where I would put them, actually, as a mean joke. I don't know if it's a mean joke yet or it's a nice thing. But, you know, if we don't want these contemporary people pumping their books on this podcast, I started offering them guest spots on philosophy versus improv. And if they're willing to go through that nonsense that we do on that show, then that's.

29:47 Ad: They're cool and they really.

29:50 Mark: You can hear. Jenny Hansen, that we've had on this show, was our first professor guest on that, and she did great. It was a delight. And we've had since then a guy named Thi Nguyen, who will be a guest with us for John Dewey on Art as Experience eventually, whenever we get around to doing that book. He's the guy that I long tagged for that. He has written a book on philosophy and video games, but has never insisted about talking about that book on any of the. Anyway. And, yeah, I want to try to get more professors to do that nonsense.

30:19 Ad: What happened to the guy who wrote Bill and Ted?

30:22 Mark: He was on pretty much pop.

30:23 Ad: Oh, he was. Okay. I didn't know that. Okay. How'd that go?

30:26 Mark: It was good. Yeah. I mean, we were talking because he wrote his book about Buddhism, and so that was a great example of, like. I think it was pitched as a book for us to talk about, but it was a comedy book about Buddhism. There's no way that they would have fit on this show at all. But it was. It was okay for the other one and using it to talk about the Bill and Ted movies and whatever else.

30:46 Ad: And he's a real fan of Pel.

30:49 Mark: No, I think it was his press person hooked us up.

30:52 Ad: Press person. Okay.

30:53 Mark: Yeah. I think it's one of those. They're a blessing and a curse.

30:56 Ad: Makes it way less exciting to me.

30:58 Mark: Having those business people interested in us is a blessing and a curse.

31:02 Dylan: I put it all in the category of what makes for a good guest. So the problem of being a public philosopher, public intellectual, and bringing them on to talk about a book, I think Wes is right. It sort of sets them up for failure, even on the terms of our podcast, because it just makes it hard to have a conversation that isn't really us asking them about things they thought about in their book and them responding and become a kind of Q and A. And that's a perfectly respectable format. It's just not the one that we like. We're looking to have a conversation so those occasions, I think, can be more successful if we end up talking about some third thing that maybe is resonant with whatever they're doing, but is the thing we're focused on in the conversation rather than them in their book.

And similarly, with celebrity guests, the bottom line there is we're looking to have somebody engage with us and with some text and have a give and take, interleaved conversation about it. And that means that they're capable of having a conversation that involves give and take and listening and contributing their own part and having their role in it not dominating, but also not disappearing, and also needs them to be in a position where they have some interesting things to say about it. And I think you can have that with celebrity guests. I think it's totally possible.

I just think the question is how you find the ones that hit that sweet spot. That's the biggest problem.

32:30 Wes: Yeah. It feels like also for all the year end conversations that we've had, I don't know when we started doing them before we had nightcaps. We have the same conversation every year. How did the guests go? What makes a good guest? Should we have guests?

32:44 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, sure.

32:45 Wes: So I imagine that things will be more or less the same as they always have been next year, unless somebody cares to assert their will, impose their will upon the group.

32:55 Mark: I'm feeling less, since I have these other outlets now within the podcast network, less likely to use this as a way to experiment and meet new people and get into area. You know, there's enough unquestionably legitimate philosophy to cover.

33:10 Wes: I don't know, man. I think we're pretty much done.

33:14 Mark: I do. Yeah. I mean, Wes, you mentioned the areas you're particularly attracted to, and Dylan mentioned pragmatism in particular. I mean, it's surprising how little attention we've given to pragmatism over the years that we had a couple of initial episodes on it. We eventually did a little rorty, but like, for something that is such a major force, we've really given surprise. Like, there's been another William James one at least, plus that Dewey one I just mentioned on our radar for a while. For me, it kind of blends into the late 19th century, early 20th century.

That might be the sweet spot for me. So, you know, I always liked phenomenology, but the more I learn about, like Henri Bergson and I just mentioned wanting to do more Husserl, but Merleau Ponty, you know, doing more. So we're getting into the 30s and 40s with folks like that. But, you know, there's so much from that area, Whitehead, that I just want to make sure we periodically go back and check off another thing from that box. I feel like we have checked off German idealism very thoroughly. Like, I still am open to doing some more Kant, but what else?

Even in that area, Wes, did you mean literally that you wanted to do more German idealism or do Holderlin or something or.

34:22 Ad: Well, eventually we can do more Hegel.

34:24 Dylan: Sure.

34:25 Mark: Hegel on politics, Hegel on.

34:27 Ad: Yeah, there's more stuff to do. Yeah. And we could do some of those other figures. I think it would be fun to do. Especially the guys who are criticizing Kant right afterwards, the guys leading up to Fichte.

34:38 Mark: Anyway, someone just mentioned on Twitter today they were shocked that we'd never done any Novalis. I was like, nobody's ever requested Novalis ever.

34:49 Dylan: Isn't Novalis a drug?

34:51 Mark: So I looked it over. I'm not even sure if that's the proper pronunciation, but He's a German 18th century poet, a philosopher of early German Romanticism. So this is, I guess, an area that's at least adjacent to the. What you're talking about. But we've never actually done somebody who's officially a romantic. Like, that's why I had us do Herder a few years ago as another aesthetics episode. But even Herder was not quite a romantic. Like, at least there was not that ecstatic union with the thing that just Nietzsche hated, you know, that all these guys were reacting to. Like, I feel. So maybe Novalis is the guy. I don't know.

35:27 Ad: We should do Goethe and Schlegel and. Who's that aesthetics guy we always talk about?

35:33 Mark: Schiller.

35:34 Ad: Schiller, Yeah. I think those would come before Novalis, right?

35:38 Mark: I don't know. I don't know enough about the. About the area. But we've also talked recently. You know, I think Erasmus is going to. We're going to hit very soon. That was just one. In writing that book that, along with this outline they sent me, was like, here's a list of philosophers you should include, or we suggest you include. And Erasmus was on the list. I'm like, really? Erasmus is one of the foundational philosophers that everybody should have read. I don't know. Did you guys do him in St.

36:03 Ad: John's no, but he is a critical figure in the. I mean, my mom was into him, so I knew all about him. But he's a critical figure in the Northern Enlightenment. Right.

36:13 Mark: I thought he was around the time of Machiavelli. Kind of like the only thing I ever looked at him to consider is when we read Machiavelli, then Erasmus had written something, maybe afterward, considerably, but responding like, here's my version of how to be a good head of state. But it was just so bland and Christian compared to what we saw in Machiavelli, that I was like, I don't need to have that.

36:33 Ad: Yeah, not Enlightenment, but Renaissance.

36:36 Wes: Yeah.

36:37 Ad: So the Northern Renaissance.

36:38 Dylan: There's a university in. I think it's Rotterdam. Erasmus University.

36:43 Ad: Are you saying you already looked a bit at this and you found it boring or.

36:46 Mark: Oh, no. Well, the one that we're in praise of, Folly is what everybody says you should read. And that's the one That I think we should read. You know, it's like, you know, the fact that we got around to doing Pascal's Wager, that was a great thing to have finally hit. It's not something that when I started doing philosophy, that was on my top 20 of things to read. But, like, he is in the canon somewhere, so why not?

37:08 Ad: I grew up hearing my mom mention Erasmus, talk about Erasmus. But yeah, that's the sum of my knowledge.

37:14 Mark: And she was into all sorts of like, sort of liberal theologians. Not that Erasmus counts as that, but like, that is the intellectual climate she was into. Right.

37:23 Ad: No, I mean, what do you mean? Who else?

37:25 Mark: Oh, gosh, I don't know. When we were doing our Gadamer and Ricoeur, there were other names of modern Ricoeur, like Christians, that you were like, oh, yeah, that guy and that guy. And it's all lost to me right now.

37:37 Ad: I don't remember that. But my mom, she got a master's degree in Irish literature in Dublin, which is why she took us there. She took us to England when I was a kid and then to Ireland. So Samuel Beckett was the person she wrote her master's thesis on, who's like, I don't know, how do you classify him? Absurdist or. Anyway, very avant garde experimental playwright, very hard to read. And then she tried to get a PhD in English while subjecting me, in my sister to terrible poverty doing that, and then finally gave up. So all of my interest came from her.

I was surrounded by books, Plato this, Plato that. To the point where we'd get in these massive. When I was old enough to finally read Plato and talk to her about it, we just get in these massive arguments. When I was a teenager, that's what I'd get in fights with my mom about yelling matches about Plato and other stuff like that. So that's an example of, you know, she had her hobby horses, people she would mention all the time. And Erasmus, for some reason, was one of them.

38:38 Mark: Seth, is there some area that really you find that where your heart lies, that you would love us to spend more time in or circle back to? I mean, I know you've expressed interest whenever we do like a specifically Jewish philosopher, which there have only been like a few of them, the Buber and stuff, and Spinoza and Maimonides, But I didn't know if that was like an area that you were, you know, you felt like we'd underserved.

39:01 Dylan: So.

39:02 Wes: Yeah, I mean, Spinoza doesn't really count as Jewish as far as philosophy goes.

39:06 Seth: Sure.

39:06 Wes: It's not that there are Jewish philosophers that interest me so much as I'm interested in the Jewish way of thinking with respect to what is known as rabbinical or biblical interpretation, and how that cashes out in terms of theology and philosophy versus the Western way. But I guess mainstream Western way. I probably would have said phenomenology a long time ago when we first started this podcast. I feel like I could probably never get tired of doing aesthetics, which is a complete reversal for me because it was never an area of interest to me before, but now I find it much more interesting. You know, I still am not 100% sure that we've given process philosophy a fair shake, but that's not a. It's not like that's an area. That's just a dude, right?

39:51 Mark: Well, it's, I think, Bergson, who's actually fun to read. So going back to him for another swipe.

39:57 Ad: Unlike Whitehead.

39:58 Mark: And Whitehead, who is not so fun to read.

40:01 Ad: Not fun to read at all.

40:03 Wes: And Bergson was kind of a polymath too, right? I mean, didn't he write pretty widely and do lots of different things?

40:09 Mark: I don't remember. I mean, my overall impression is that he was like William James in that. Yeah, there's some super competence and smarts there, but also a breeziness about the style, about the whole presentation, a popularization, something, you know, they had groupies. That makes it a little less fancy than reading Whitehead.

40:29 Ad: We should do more existentialism as well. That's an interest you and I share, Mark. Right?

40:33 Mark: It is, but I feel like, because we both share that, we did a lot of it pretty early, and so I don't like. What in particular are we missing?

40:41 Ad: I don't know. I don't have anything off the top of my head, but there's a million things that we're missing. Sure. It's an endless number of books.

40:49 Mark: Well, actually, somebody just requested. Actually, one of the guys I tutor said you should do some Miguel de Unamuno. So he's a Christian existentialist that we've never hit. So there are streams within that. There are distinct figures in that. It's not just a matter of reading more. Sartre.

41:05 Dylan: What about doing another novel or two?

41:08 Ad: Yeah, we should.

41:09 Dylan: Even an existential novel. Maybe we could hit two birds with one stone.

41:13 Ad: I'll tell you what. Why don't we do Ulysses?

41:18 Mark: Didn't I just see something about. Oh, oh, somebody. They pitched us a new illustrated version of it, I think. Like, do you guys want to cover the new illustrated version of Ulysses? And I think it was a really elaborate. And I think I asked you guys, do you want free copies of that? Like, so maybe we should.

41:35 Ad: How did I miss that?

41:37 Mark: Adding pictures to that book might make it better, might make it more.

41:41 Ad: Have you tried to read it?

41:43 Mark: I did it as an audiobook. I don't think I quite finished it. I got pretty far.

41:48 Ad: But you did write your own stream of consciousness novel, so I. I did that. You should have some sympathy.

41:55 Mark: I read Portrait of an Artist as a young man. I think it was. Had some influence on me.

42:00 Wes: I'll read it if it's a graphic novel.

42:04 Mark: Well, and there was another thing we had. They even sent us, I have on my shelf Moby Dick. I don't know if it's Moby Dick and philosophy, but I think one of our fans wrote a whole book about Moby Dick as philosophy. And so we talked for a while. That's another one. I tried to listen to that as an audiobook. I never actually finished it. It was so long. But I got at least halfway in.

42:23 Ad: I read that book, actually. It's a short one, right?

42:26 Mark: That old Moby Dick. That's just a short one.

42:28 Ad: No, Moby Dick is.

42:29 Dylan: Moby Dick is philosophy.

42:31 Ad: I think I talked to the author. I think the author had gotten in touch with me. It's short, it's good, it's interesting. You saying you didn't get through it?

42:41 Mark: No, it was the book Moby Dick. I have never. I've never gotten through it.

42:45 Ad: Oh. Oh.

42:46 Mark: Did you long since read that?

42:47 Ad: I think that would definitely. That's like a perfect fit for us in a way.

42:51 Dylan: I'd do Moby Dick.

42:52 Mark: Well, it's not a perfect fit as far as reading something in two weeks. So that has been the thing with novels. Is that like with Dostoevsky, it was fine, but we had to pick it five months before we were actually going to do it. So if you guys like this idea, then we have now picked it. I don't know, Seth, do you agree to reading Moby Dick or listening to the audiobook?

43:13 Wes: Don't put me on the spot. Okay, I'm open to the idea, but I'm not going to agree on this in this format. I got to take a look and see. It's not the type of fiction I'm really super excited about reading right now, but looks like we might as well. Hey, Heart of Darkness. Moby Dick. What's the other one?

43:29 Mark: We don't have to do Heart of Darkness. Wes did that on subtext already. We're off the hook.

43:34 Ad: Two for Heart of Darkness, then Apocalypse Now. Yeah.

43:38 Dylan: How about Demons? Dostoevsky?

43:40 Wes: I think so there's something more.

43:42 Mark: Russians.

43:43 Wes: I don't want to sign up to read like an entire novel by Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, but it kind of feels like that's something like that really should be done, like almost and much more so. The audiobook of that is only 93 hours long. Something like that.

44:00 Ad: Moby Dick is an explicitly philosophical novel. What you're saying, are you talking about philosophical content wise?

44:07 Wes: Yeah.

44:07 Ad: It's also beautifully written.

44:09 Mark: He vexes me.

44:11 Ad: He's a better writer. Writer. Like as a literary artist, he's frankly better than Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

44:18 Wes: But in translation he's not as fun as, you know.

44:22 Seth: Right.

44:22 Wes: Well, I don't know. All right.

44:24 Mark: I don't want to get hung up on in the party here since we're wrapping up on specifics, but just let's, as usual, sort of reach out to the listenership. That's what we're open to. I guess another thing is I sort of let the thing about plays, those audio plays were very fun and now we even know more people that we could do them with. I wasn't sure what the next philosophical play to do. I don't want to do freaking Shakespeare. We have now, you know, reading all of King Lear as an out loud too much to face up to the pressure of people actually performing that well. And how many versions of that are available? But I don't know. I feel like we did enough Ancient.

44:59 Ad: What about like Iceman Cometh or something like that or Death of a Salesman or any of any of those type of things?

45:06 Mark: I do not know. We'll keep it open and we want to.

45:10 Wes: Yeah.

45:10 Mark: So I guess I want to leave you guys with the challenge to add both of Peter Adamson's feeds to your podcast app and browse around. They're very short. You can listen to them at double speed probably and get everything that you need because he talks really slowly and just use that as a very low cost way to check out do I want to hear what these medieval or pre Socratic or ancient Indian thinkers think on this thing? Like, if I'm not the only one coming in with some of these interests, that would help.

45:46 Ad: The problem is he reads a script into the microphone, right?

45:51 Mark: Yeah. That's why you got to just crank it up to double speed.

45:53 Ad: Has he gotten above like 1000 BC yet or where is.

46:01 Wes: I mean, I listened to probably the first 50 episodes of that podcast I don't remember. And it was just the pace of progress. I love the idea, but the pace of progress. I like, I couldn't take the journey with him. Like, maybe now that he's got a few more years in the bag and there's like, you could pick and choose, but I just. I couldn't take the journey with him, particularly when he got into the medieval Islamic stuff, and I was just like, my eyes were glazing over it. I can't. I mean, I can't take that stuff.

46:28 Ad: For me, that's just like the Bermuda Triangle of philosophy. That's where my interest just goes to die, disappear without a trace.

46:36 Mark: All right, well, I don't feel bad about this because I've praised Peter. We've had him on the show, and he won't listen to our show either. So if you guys won't listen to his show, that's fine.

46:46 Wes: This is not a criticism. It's a preference, not a criticism. I think this project's great. I don't want to be on the journey with him. I love the fact that he's creating a resource that I can use, but I don't want to take the journey with him.

46:58 Mark: One distinction that listening to that has made clear to me is the distinction between actual philosophical traditions, you know, written philosophy, like in India and China, versus ethnophilosophy, which is like what we did for our Native American philosophy episode, that some people didn't like that. We did that because it was like, okay, this is largely an oral culture. What were the sort of folk beliefs? And can we get a philosophy out of that? In some ways, that's what you have to do if you want to, like, read about non Egyptian, ancient African philosophy or something like that.

But it also. There are scholarly debates over whether we should be doing that, whether that actually makes that area sort of. If you're looking for more representation from the area or whatever, then you should actually look at what people who have all the information, in other words, people now who are plugged in, in that area, are doing rather than. We don't necessarily. We're not going to do one on ancient Celtic mythology. So why would we do ancient African or a Native American tribe, their mythology.

48:01 Ad: Yeah, this is my objection. It's like, yeah, I don't want to do, you know, mysticism and religion. I don't want to get heavily into that in this podcast. Like, that's just not what I'm interested in. So it's not about it being Eastern or this or that. It's just that would never was my interest. And those to me are two entirely different interests.

48:16 Mark: That's what I want to open your mind up though, about Indian philosophy in particular, is that they were doing something that is as rich as what was going on in ancient Greece after the Vedas, after the Bhagavad Gita that we covered.

48:27 Ad: Okay.

48:27 Mark: That we at least touched on in this one episode and that it sort of opened up a new world. Anyway, yeah, we would love to hear what you folks think about this and we will get you a real episode, a normal episode on the Malebranche coming up very soon. Thanks everybody for being with us for the last year.

48:45 Wes: Happy New Year, everybody.

48:47 Dylan: Happy New Year.

48:48 Ad: Happy New Year.

48:49 Mark: Good night.

48:51 Wes: Good night.

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