PEL 2026 Kickoff Nightcap

0:00 Mark: Welcome, welcome, welcome. It's our partially examined life 2026 kickoff, or 2025 retrospective, something like that. It's a nightcap recording, but whereas those are usually restricted to Partially Examined Life supporters, this one is going out on the public feed to say thank you to everybody for being faithful listeners. Or. Or maybe this is the first episode you're ever hearing. Don't make this the first episode you're ever hearing. That's not. You're going to be disappointed. I'm Mark.

0:30 Seth: Oh, we're introducing ourselves.

0:31 Mark: Why not?

0:32 Seth: Okay. I'm Seth.

0:34 Wes: I'm Wes. I'm not sure why we're introducing ourselves.

0:40 Dylan: I'm Dylan.

0:41 Mark: See, now people know the voices. If this is the first one they're ever hearing. They ignored my warning. The thing that I had said maybe we should do today is pretend that we have very limited time left recording this podcast. So this is not what should we do next? This is. If you only could record five more episodes, what are the five topics that you really wanted to do before you just left the world of philosophy, before you became senile?

1:07 Wes: Whatever the reason, I think we've done them all.

1:10 Dylan: Well, that's a different condition than I thought, but that's okay.

1:13 Wes: Yeah, I don't know how to implement that one. It's too much pressure.

1:17 Dylan: Yeah, that's a version of the. If I could only bring five philosophy books to a desert island, which ones would I bring?

1:23 Mark: Yes, yes, your bucket list.

1:26 Wes: I mean, if that were the case, it would only be things we've already read. That's the problem. So I have things I want to read, but all the things that I would bring to the desert island. I wouldn't bring some random book to a desert island. Like some book. I don't know what's in. Oh, this is disappointing.

1:44 Mark: You're going to be in purgatory, and you have to only have things you haven't read before.

1:49 Wes: I'll just bring the Hegel's Phenomenology, and then I can be both disappointed and intrigued for a thousand years, because I

1:59 Mark: think that actually leads to one thing. I'll just throw out one of mine, which is I want to actually do some of the second half of Being and Time. I've heard descriptions of. We use. We refer to the they. I'm sure that since the book seems a little synoptic. I don't know if I forget if that's the correct word, but you know, where each part of it is sort of a. Is a prismatic reflection of the rest of the book. In other words, he finished the book and then probably went back to the beginning and changed things. So there's mentions of these things, his ex so called Existentialism in the first half that we have looked at, but I've never actually read his second half.

So yeah, that bringing for Hegel's Phenomenology is not out of the question even though we have read part of it. So that is one thing that I think we could realistically do on the podcast. But I've also thought about teaching a class maybe next fall where we just actually go through the whole book. I think there might be a lot of interest in that.

2:50 Dylan: Hegel or Being and Time.

2:52 Mark: Being and Time. Phenomenology Being and Time. I mean if that turned like into a hit as far as classes, I think doing Hegel's Phenomenology would be on my bucket list for doing that as well. But that is not on my five.

3:04 Dylan: Both of those are great courses to do. Just going through those books. That would be a great class to have.

3:10 Seth: Agreed.

3:11 Wes: I remember enjoying the Being part of Being and Time that we read. But I've decided that Hegel is one of the. One of the few philosophers that I'm allowing myself to just straightforwardly dislike. Hegel or Heidegger. Sorry, Heidegger. Sorry, Seth.

3:26 Seth: I don't own him.

3:27 Wes: Probably because of the whole romanticization of a certain type of past, I guess.

3:31 Seth: I listen to our old episodes kind of in the background as I'm doing things sometimes. And yesterday I actually listened to one of our Levinas episodes the second one time in the other. I think it was just listening to us talking about that in contrast to. As a response to Heidegger made me feel like if I was going to obsess about one of the two of them again, I'd probably obsess about Levinas instead of Heidegger.

3:56 Mark: Yeah, that was not on my list, but I have downloaded Totality and Infinity into our lit folder, so we should do something with that at some point.

4:04 Seth: Yeah, well, I think Being and Time and Phenomenology of Spirit are both great choices for something maybe a little less systematic and architectonic. How about Bergson's Matter and Memory? I continue to say that the role of memory and the way that memory functions and the philosophical conceptions of consciousness is severely underappreciated or underplayed by philosophers. And I don't know that Bergson addresses that or solves it, but I'm very curious to see what he has. There's not a Ton of philosophical literature, specifically on memory, I think. And so that's one that's of interest to me.

4:46 Mark: And he's always so pleasant to read. That was in my top 10, but I knew you would bring it up, so I didn't feel that I had to put it in the top five.

4:54 Seth: I have one wild card. The other one you probably know too.

4:57 Dylan: I been wanting to do more pragmatism. And the one that I've never read we've had on for a while is Susan Haack's Evidence and Inquiry.

5:08 Mark: We had that at the top of our list for a while.

5:10 Dylan: We did.

5:10 Wes: My recommendation was it that I invited

5:13 Mark: her on and she didn't want to come on. Or maybe it didn't get that far.

5:17 Wes: Yeah, you did. And she didn't want to come on. But I had actually talked to her on the phone at one point when I was thinking about going back to grad school philosophy. She's basically implied that I should not do that because she also has a law degree.

5:30 Dylan: She said, go become a lawyer.

5:32 Mark: Pretty much just like she didn't.

5:36 Wes: Yeah, not everyone can be successful like her.

5:39 Dylan: But yeah, yeah, you think you want this, but you actually don't want this.

5:44 Mark: Is that our advice to. We still occasionally get.

5:47 Wes: That's not my advice to young people. My advice to young people is to go for it. And you know, if you don't succeed, you can always just go into tech and still be rich by the time you're 50 something. So if you invest properly. So there's really no. There's no downside to trying to do your dream and then selling out later on.

6:04 Mark: You got to do something young and irresponsible when you were young. So going to grad school, if you can afford it, if you can get them to give you the four digit salary that you get for taing and you could live on that for a little while, that's okay.

6:20 Wes: My first recommendation is Axel Honneth's The Struggle for Recognition, which actually from what I understand is a major work of critical theory that for some reason I hadn't really heard of. But I came across it when I was trying to think about the role of identity. And the recognition is kind of my thing, as you all know. And I keep bringing it up all the time and thumos and all that stuff. And I went back and looked at a Fukuyama episode because I was trying to think about the role in politics and authoritarianism and right, Freud's group psychology was on that track as well with the concept of identification.

But I did a little research using AI to get a list of readings related to the same topic, and I was surprised how deep that list went. But this was one of them. And the other part of that I had been thinking about different flavors of recognition because some of it, we recognize rights, we recognize infants in a way by mirroring them. We give children recognition for a nice little drawing. We give adults recognition for their accomplishments. And see, these are all very, very different but related. And it seems like Honneth might get into some of those distinctions.

7:35 Mark: Well, a notable philosopher has said on the wiki page, actually three times, it looks like this is a typo that they put all the editorial review quotes three times in here. Honneth's book casts a flood of light on what has been an area of darkness, the place where the philosophical tradition and modern politics meet and interweave. Since neither is really comprehensible without the other, the work is essential reading for those who would understand either. It is a path breaking study which ought to be at the center of the debate for many years to come. First, do you think that's a real quote or you think that's like an AI generated piece of.

8:07 Wes: That's on a Wikipedia.

8:09 Mark: It's on the Amazon page. It's actually Charles Taylor.

8:11 Wes: I'm bothered by the fact that he said flood of light rather than floodlight, because flood of light just sounds like a mixed metaphor that someone is using instead of saying using the accepted sedimented to use a Heideggerian word, sedimented phrase, which you're allowed to have the mixed metaphor with a floodlight. But.

8:31 Mark: So our review of the quote is not good. But the quote really likes this book which came out in 1996. I see. And it's Honneth H O N N E T H. I had never actually heard of this guy.

8:45 Wes: Well, since you're saying Charles Taylor, maybe we can just go back in the other direction around the circle and I'll just say Charles Taylor is the sources of the self, which people have asked for a million times. And it's another book about identity and it's in the critical theory category. I have a lot of critical theory books on this list, even though it's not my favorite thing. Exactly. But it isn't and it isn't. So yeah, this is a book I think that we'll probably talk about our ennui in the modern world. And the thin something like a concept of the thin versus the thick self. I actually don't know very much about

9:18 Mark: it, but I have this fat Making Sources of the Self book, which I got in college, sort of just by the look of it, when I was getting into Hegel and kind of wanted to. It just seemed more historical and things that I was looking for at the time, I was looking for kind of that metaphysical. The phenomena of what you count as yourself. But at this point, I mean other than it's just a fat book. I see in our literature folder right now we have Sources of Self. Someone downloaded the Ethics of Authenticity. I think that might be the shorter book that maybe was a more concrete thing that we were going to. Was actually in the lineup at some point. I don't know. And also multiculturalism.

9:57 Wes: If you look at lists of the top ethics books of all time, this is usually near the top.

10:02 Mark: And do you remember what the story with this multiculturalism book? Did you put that in there or Multiculturalism Examining the politics of recognition. That sure sounds like something you would put in there, Wes. But I don't know if it's. If it's positive about multiculturalism.

10:16 Wes: Which folder is this in?

10:17 Mark: It's just in literature. Charles Taylor.

10:19 Wes: I probably did those downloads, but I probably was doing them on your behalf at that point.

10:24 Mark: Anyway, Charles Taylor is great and we should do something on him soon. Yeah, so we're going in reverse. Dylan, you have another one then?

10:30 Dylan: The rest of my list is not so desert island Y. I still have been wanting to do Quantum Mechanics and I am the one who keeps not putting together the list for it. But I've been reading two back to back biographies. One of Newton which I just finished and I've been almost done with an intellectual biography of Feynman and it makes me want to do quantum mechanics again. In quantum field theory we got a

10:56 Wes: suggestion from a listener to do. He's suggesting Mach's the Science of Mechanics as influential on quantum mechanics. So that's not mechanics episode. So. Yeah, but that is. That is another one and that's not one of mine. No, no. I just want to say it is on my longer list that we'd have to get to Mach at some point.

11:16 Seth: But.

11:16 Wes: Yeah, go ahead.

11:17 Dylan: Yeah, it's sort of in that. In between time and philosophy of science and just prior to quantum mechanics. I mean there's all this sort of transitional stuff, but I'm most interested in us doing quantum mechanics and leading into field theory. Thinking about from a metaphysical point of view, the main thing that you have there is you have just these fundamental examples of things coming from nothing. Radiation just by itself ought to cause everybody who thinks about things as being things and nothing comes from something as a big, interesting thing to think about. Do you go from having one thing to having two things and it just happens?

11:57 Wes: It's messed up, man.

11:58 Mark: I could certainly picture having a whole string of sort of modern metaphysics, quantum mechanics. What are the actual. Not this fudging around with possible worlds and God as a metaphysical question, but, like, what are. What do actual scientists think at this point in time? Is string theory still a thing? I have such a.

12:20 Dylan: Well, is that what is. Is that what you really want? You want what actual scientists think?

12:24 Mark: No, I want philosophers who are observing this kind of thing.

12:26 Seth: I don't.

12:27 Wes: I don't.

12:27 Dylan: Yeah, that's. That's what you want.

12:28 Mark: I don't want the math.

12:30 Wes: Yeah, no.

12:32 Mark: I started doing at some point a quantum mechanics online course, and it was just all math. And I just. I can't stay with this. This is not. I don't have the patience for this.

12:43 Wes: We get into it at St. John's a bit.

12:46 Dylan: Well, at least the Schrodinger equation.

12:48 Wes: Yeah. When I was there, we did some quantum mechanics papers that involved a lot of derivatives.

12:53 Dylan: The derivatives will show up in the Schrodinger equation. And then there was also doing the Bell's inequality. I don't know if it was doing it when you. If they did the Bell's inequality when you were there.

13:03 Wes: Pretty sure we did.

13:04 Dylan: But yeah, the other one that was on my. That I've been reading, I'm almost done with it. And this is more of a category, but it's called the Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton. So he's sort of a popular. He has popular philosophy books. It's a combination of a survey of architecture, but also thinking about how architecture and spaces affect us, how they matter. So it's aesthetics. It's a little bit of psychology. We could do the book. But having an episode on architecture and sort of the philosophy and aesthetics and psychology of architecture, I think would be interesting. It would depend upon the right book.

13:44 Mark: What you got.

13:45 Seth: Seth MacTaggart's Unreality of Time also been on the top 10 list for a long time. Again, another what I consider to be neglected subject. So maybe there's a theme here. If we did the being part of being in time. You want to do the time part. Just another topic that seems like we couldn't spend enough time on it. I think it would also dovetail nicely with any of the quantum physics stuff or quantum mechanics stuff, because isn't the project of the apologist, philosopher to rationalize a view of time or consciousness. Freedom. Right. We have to make sure we can explain it through quantum mechanics.

Oh, there's the indeterminacy that means freedom. Oh, the photons or whatever can talk to each other simultaneously over great distances. Ah. Time travel is possible. You know, like the. There's always some desire to leverage science, leverage physics to explain those kinds of things. So feels like that would be a nice bookend or a nice compliment to anything we did in the physics space. But also it's just. Isn't that the absolute canonical work on the subject? I mean, like, it's one of those, like if we're at the point where we've done the greatest hits of the biggest names and we're onto the tier 2 only in reference to the canon, not a judgment, just like what the canon considers tier 2 philosophers, then unreality of Time is like kind of one of those.

It's up there with any of the other significant works. I think so.

15:18 Mark: Right. That's early 20th century. You'd think that things in this area we'd want to read as recently as possible.

15:25 Wes: There's a huge literature on it.

15:27 Mark: Oh yeah.

15:27 Wes: I listened to an interview on new books in philosophy with someone who's just written a book in this area and it was apparent that, yeah, a lot has happened and it's a big specialty

15:36 Dylan: now in philosophy of time.

15:38 Wes: Philosophy of time. And right when we say something exists, do things in the past in a sense exist or have they ceased to exist?

15:46 Mark: And it seemed with MacTaggart in particular, I had started researching an episode on this that we could do his Unreality of Time, which is quite short. And then there were many articles that respond to that. So doing a. Like we did on the knowledge one Knowledge is justified, true belief. And the main guy whose name escapes me.

16:03 Seth: Gettier.

16:04 Mark: A. Yes. Gettier Responding to that. That we'd have a similarly structured thing. I have really good memories of my undergrad Philosophy of Space and Time class. That was the only thing I took in this area by Lawrence Sklar, who I see passed away in 2024. I guess I vaguely remember something coming out about that. But yeah, just the fact that we haven't really done even an Einstein inclusive look at time. I think we could do multiple things on that. And you know, as part of this overall cutting edge science.

16:36 Seth: Not.

16:37 Mark: I mean, it's not cutting edge if it's for the last century plus, but you know, modern physics. Yeah. I'll throw out another one just in a totally different direction. So another really nice memory I had from my undergrad days was my great Books of the Far east class. Right. This is why we did Chuang Tzu so early in our run here. And I still really want to do something in the area of Chan Buddhism. So Zen is the Japanese version. And actually the. Maybe we'll do this in close read sometime soon. The Zen text that we read, I don't have it in front of me, but seemed entirely to me devoid.

I'm sure there's great philosophical Zen texts. The one that we read in that class was something that was very devoid of philosophical interest in that it was almost a comedy piece where, you know, the. The student says something and the. And the teacher, like just smacks him, then says enlightenment. You know, that. That it was this kind of. So I have to revisit that text to see what the philosophical point of that is. But that seems more of a. A little bit of a conceptual art shtick. Whereas the Chan Buddhism, the. So the Zen before, while it was still in China, before it went to Japan, I recall.

And again, I have. I don't. I. I looked in preparation for this. Who are the big Chan Buddhists? And there are many of them, so there's not like one figure that jumps out. So in fact, I. I want to ask audience members who are perhaps way more into this than I am, which Chan Buddhist you would recommend that we read? But I just recall that being in the same way that Chuang Tzu, I find, was a deep well. For me, this is sort of the final piece in that Eastern puzzle that we've been very, very slowly working our way through. That is important to me.

I like, you know, this past Egyptian philosophy was fun.

18:18 Wes: Sure.

18:18 Mark: We're going to do other non Western things, or there was even one on Aztec philosophy on another philosophy podcast recently that a guest came on had just written a book on Aztec philosophy. You know, these are things I'm curious about, but not that I have a deep burning desert island sort of desire to read, but the Chan Buddhism is definitely in that category. Something is still tucked close to my heart.

18:41 Seth: It's again in the process of re. Listening to old episodes for some reason. My. My feed on the. My podcast app started over from the beginning, and I didn't realize how early on we'd had that episode with Eric that was like 13 or something like that. It was really early on. But, you know, I think actually we've done a pretty decent job of kind of a broad overview of like these major traditions. You know, the Confucian, Buddhism, Zen and so forth. But they're so old. And the one where we did on the old Zen, Chinese text, you know, it's. It's like that philosophy or that thought tradition was being developed at the same time as they were developing their language.

Right. So the texts are still sort of semi pictographic. And you know, we were talking about how that makes it really, really challenging. But you have these thousands of years of the development and there are all these foundational texts that are part of it. Like we got kind of like the broad survey of what, what's the framework for X, but like something we haven't done that could be really interesting. Or there's lots and lots of canonical texts in like the Buddhist or, you know, some of the other traditions. Like when we read the one we read with Stephen Phillips, the comma, do you remember which.

19:59 Mark: The epistemological, the arguments for God on Indian stuff. That was with Phillips. Yep.

20:05 Seth: Well, I thought there was also. It was also epistemological. I mean, it was all about knowledge, argument forms. Yeah, there's like 26 or 28 of those canonical sutras that cover different topics. Buddhist psychology is something we haven't really looked deeply into. That could be interesting. Those traditions are so long and so deep and there's so many little factions because they're semi religious. So you get those kind of like warring sects. So a lot of places we could go.

20:32 Mark: I recall discussing with Eric Douglas, our first guest there, you know, what we should do in what area. And Dogen had been recommended and he was like, that's like starting Western philosophy with Kant. Like Dogen is, you know, 1200s or something like that and is so far, you know, you got to read the ancient stuff and then work up to this that it's a revolution to. Yeah, so there's definitely whole, you know, apart from the 20th century, 24 current stuff, the Kyoto school and things like that, you know, people that have actually read Western people in China and Japan that have read Western philosophy but connect that to their traditions. Totally different thing.

21:08 Wes: I'm going to recommend the Emotions by Jack Katz. He's actually a sociologist, but he's kind of an old school sociologist, so it's almost like phenomenology. So for instance, he also wrote a book called the Seductions of Crime, which I really absolutely love, but I've mentioned that and I probably had us read a little bit of it. I don't know.

21:27 Seth: No, you mentioned it and then I went out and got it and read it. Oh, okay, like 10 years ago or whatever it was. 15 years ago, 12 years ago.

21:35 Wes: Love that book. He wants to tell us what crying is, for instance, what are we doing? What does it mean when we cry? And I think he thinks it has something to do with our inability to express something in language, but it also involves an encounter with the sacred somehow. And likewise, he'll do that sort of thing for other sorts of everyday things in our life, like a road rage encounter, for instance. He'll analyze that. Or what's going on psychologically and murder. But it. But it verges into the sociological. I mean, it's definitely sociological, but verging into the deep philosophical account. So it. It really joins together, you know, it really connects everyday elements of our life to these deeper reflections.

22:20 Mark: So that's Jack Katz, K A T Z. How Emotions Work is the name of the book from 1999.

22:27 Wes: I was going on Memory.

22:28 Mark: But yeah, I'm realizing when we are. If we're doing this, go to the beginning, go to the end. I didn't get my second one, which is Merleau-Ponty, Structure of Behavior. So this is his book before Phenomenology of Spirit. I've now dipped into phenomenology.

22:41 Wes: Phenomenology of.

22:43 Mark: That's a perception.

22:44 Wes: Sorry, body or perception.

22:46 Mark: Yes, Phenomenology of Perception. I've now dipped into that more. I included that in my Continental course and made myself read a good chunk of it for that. Another book that I wouldn't mind just sort of doing beginning to end at some point. But the structured behavior, I've never. I own it, but I've never even crack it. And supposedly I remember some analytic philosopher that we had on saying, like, oh, yeah, this was part of his. Was fundamental. Oh, Owen Flanagan on For an early Buddhism episode that we did. But he is an analytic philosopher, philosopher of mind. And said, well, you know, maybe he got. Maybe Merleau-Ponty got a little strange for him since he's not a continental guy with phenomenology, perception. But Structure of Behavior was like, yes, everybody reads that and is foundational in some way. So I have a deep curiosity about that book. Dylan, you got another one?

23:36 Dylan: I'd like to do another novel. Moby Dick is the one that keeps coming up to my mind to do that one. But there are other novels that we could do.

23:44 Seth: That's interesting. I'm totally on board with you with that. With one exception. Dylan, no more Cormac McCarthy. It's too.

23:56 Wes: We're not gonna do Blood Meridian.

23:57 Seth: Too brutal and violent for Me, I just can't.

23:59 Mark: Did we not already do Blood? Did you guys. Didn't you do Blood Meridian?

24:03 Wes: We did do Blood Meridian, but we also did No Country for Old Men.

24:08 Seth: We did No Country for Old Men also.

24:10 Mark: Well, there's his later book, Return to Blood Meridian, where there's, like, the cast reunion. The judge gets back together.

24:17 Seth: Blood Meridian 2, colon, the Reckoning. More Blood, more blood, bloodier meridian, I guess.

24:26 Wes: You know, if you're gonna do a sequel, it'll all be about the judge. You just call it the Judge.

24:30 Seth: The Judge.

24:31 Mark: I feel like we have a. Given that Wes has his subtext show to do a novel on here, it has to be a really philosophical one. Like our, you know, Dostoevsky one was great. Like, that was exactly what. And everybody says Moby Dick is. Yes. Yeah. I've only ever gotten through half of it. I've. I've. You know, I got stopped like everybody else on the whale anatomy part, but I. I would go back and finish it. And I think we even had somebody send us. Do all of us have the paper copy of the Moby Dick and philosophy book that one of our listeners sent us that he had written? I have it. I'm saying I do not.

25:07 Seth: No, I don't remember that.

25:09 Wes: I probably have it somewhere. I did receive it. Yeah. And I think I read some of it.

25:12 Seth: If you don't want a whale, but you want the same philosophical framework, you could do like Heart of Darkness.

25:18 Wes: We did that on subtext.

25:20 Seth: Did you?

25:20 Wes: You know? Yeah, but we can do it. You know, just because we did it on subtext doesn't mean we can't do it, pal. As well.

25:26 Dylan: Heart of Darkness has the advantage of being, I think, 10 times shorter.

25:30 Seth: Yeah, that's kind of what I was aiming at.

25:33 Wes: If you don't want to read novel to the shortest novel. We did Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse now as a twofer, which was really. I mean, we did two episodes in a row, one on each, and it worked out really well.

25:45 Mark: Well, and somebody even offered us a substantial amount of money to do David Foster Wallace, which got me to listen through the entire Infinite Jest audiobook. But you guys. You guys vetoed doing that. I don't remember.

25:58 Wes: Veto.

25:58 Mark: Seth, in particular, vetoed wanting to read that.

26:02 Seth: This is a case where I can say it's not figurative, but it's actually literally. You could not pay me to read that book again.

26:10 Wes: Why?

26:11 Seth: Or try to. I made it to, like, I don't even remember what page I stopped on, like, 333 or 222, something like that. But I just. It was just unbearable. Absolutely unbearable to me.

26:25 Wes: I got through, like, the first 80 pages of it. I've actually met a fan who's so fanatical about that book and really wishes we'd do it.

26:32 Seth: Hey, man, if you want to schedule it for some time when I'm not around, then by all means. I just.

26:39 Mark: You haven't read this Dylan.

26:40 Seth: I love. And listen, I love David Foster Wallace, but I just can't handle. I don't like Pynchon either. And unfortunately, I just had this confluence of things. Two nights ago, I think it was Shannon and I watched one battle after another.

26:54 Wes: Yeah, I loved. I loved that.

26:56 Seth: I didn't know what it was and I didn't know who made it or whatever. I just. I had been avoiding it because I'm not a DiCaprio fan. And I thought it was maybe another DiCaprio Scorsese collaboration. But we were watching it and I was just like. And then I was like, who did this movie? And it's Paul Thomas Anderson. And I was like, oh. And then, you know, he did Infinite Jest, which was just. It's like, Paul Thomas Anderson plus Thomas Pynchon.

27:24 Mark: Paul Thomas Anderson did not do Infinite Jest. What are you talking about?

27:28 Wes: No, he did a Pynchon, Inherent Vice.

27:31 Seth: Sorry, sorry, Inherent Vice. Sorry.

27:32 Mark: Infinite, which is a much worse movie. I'm not gonna. We just did a whole Paul Thomas Anderson pretty much pop. So I'll. My. My thoughts are on that.

27:41 Wes: But he's made a bunch of great movies, so.

27:45 Seth: Well, it depends on how you define bunch.

27:47 Wes: Including Punch Drunk Love, which is with Adam Sandler, which is one of my favorites.

27:51 Seth: One might say a handful. Anyway, it was just. When he goes wrong. It was just. Anyway, I'm just getting pt. I'm traumatized right now just even talking about the whole experience. So, yes, Infinite Jest.

28:10 Wes: Let's talk about the books that would traumatize us if we crack them.

28:15 Mark: I'm Pynchon curious, but I have never read a whole Pynchon book my sister got me.

28:21 Wes: So it's really. That's the way it's pronounced. It's not pshon.

28:24 Seth: I never heard it any other way, but I don't know.

28:27 Wes: I've never heard anyone say it out loud.

28:31 Mark: Well, I managed to work in a Infinite Jest reference with content on it on the pretty much pop holiday romance movies episode that just came out. So I'll just refer people to that. That was my payoff for having sat through that book. Is one comment that I made on that slay the show. Are we back to Wes?

28:51 Wes: Yeah. Speaking of trauma, let's read something by Jonathan Lear, psychoanalyst and philosopher who passed away recently. There's a bunch of different things we could do. Two of them involve irony. One of the books is called Therapeutic Action, an earnest plea for irony. It is, of course, connected to ancient philosophy and Plato and Socrates. But he's thinking of what's therapeutic about psychoanalysis as involving an expansion of people's capacity for irony, which, after all, may just put what we mean by Socratic self knowledge. Right. So irony is in that playful distance we can take from ourselves. Which is not to say that we abandon earnestness, but we're certainly not the serious men.

29:36 Mark: Yeah, Lear was. Was great the episode we had on him before. I know that he's kind of central to your thinking. That overlap in psychoanalysis and classics. Seth, do you got another one?

29:48 Seth: Yep. So my last one here is after our me becoming the champion of pessimism. And then we finally got around to reading Cioran and being severely disappointed, not because it wasn't entertaining, but because it just philosophically wasn't very rich. I was like, okay, after Schopenhauer, who's our philosopher of pessimism that actually gives some meat we could chew on. Or some guy named Peter Wessel Zapffe, Danish, kind of born towards the. Basically lived from 1890 to 1990, and he wrote just kind of two big works. One is called on the Tragic, which is kind of the more systematic discussion of his philosophy.

And then an essay which we probably read, called the Last Messiah. Basically the idea that human self consciousness is not a mistake. That's the way I characterize it. But it takes us out of the natural order and then it kind of gives us. I thought this would resonate more with Wes because he would understand it, but it basically, like, we get this sort of like existential slash psychological condition where we feel ourselves discomforted and out of place, and we try to resolve that. We try to figure out through various coping strategies. But, like, ultimately, those coping strategies are things that we use because we aren't recognizing and addressing kind of the core issue, which is we're just out of phase and out of place.

So sounds like there'd be a lot more interesting stuff to talk about than we had in some of the other things we were looking at.

31:22 Mark: I was ready after we finished our Kierkegaard. And then we added one by somebody else who distinguished between the mystery and the problem. Here's your pop quiz. Existentialist Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel. All right, I got it before you guys did. I was ready to launch us into a bunch more from that era, and then Wes said, I need us to stop for now. Yeah, it was. It was too much.

31:53 Wes: Yeah, we should keep mixing it up. I'm not sure that there's any category that I want to do a huge sequence on, unless we're reading one book and sure want to get through the whole book.

32:02 Mark: I have two more still on my list. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism. Speaking of things from approximately that time period. I forget what year this came out, but this is part of a. A big book of James that I have, and I had read the beginning of it, and I was fascinated by it, read it on my own. It seems like he developed more as a philosopher after Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth and the one on Faith that we read that it seemed more interesting and rigorous. That's definitely a bucket list. 1. Whether we can do it on PEL or on close reads or something.

I've only read a couple of them. It's a very fat book that I have a very fat blue book that have been intrigued by and have never really spent a lot of time with other than when I initially got it. And then my last one. Actually, I'm very torn here because what I actually have on the list, and then I have another one in my top 10. So I'll just tell you both of them. One of which we got a. An email recently from someone who has put out a book about pragmatism, process metaphysics, and education. Right. Seth, you pointed that out, said, hey, we should.

Should do this. We should have this guy on. And I responded to him and said, well, I don't really want to do your book. Do you want to be guest expert us with us to do one of the things he mentioned as one of their source material, Whitehead's Process and Reality.

33:23 Dylan: Oh, boy.

33:24 Wes: Yeah, I know. We've had enough Whitehead.

33:28 Mark: Have. Have we? I mean, we had a little tiny

33:30 Seth: taste, but yeah, I. I feel I'm kind of with Mark on this one. I know we touch. Touched on it, but there are people we've done where I'm like, okay, I've bathed in those waters. I'm dried off. I don't need to do it again. I'm not sure I've spent all the time I need to spend on Whitehead or at least process event ontology or process ontology. It feels like it's like the minority opposition in the cabinet constantly Screaming for attention and probably has some good ideas, but somehow is just out of step with the broader society. But maybe they actually are right. Maybe we really should do this. I don't know. I don't know. I would like to do some more of that too.

34:05 Mark: I know at some point I found a book by one of his students, a woman doing a search on this. I'm not finding the name of it, but it was like, okay, instead of reading Whitehead directly, let's read one of his students layout in more understandable terms some important part of his thought. But I've lost that reference. It was probably in Slack and we'll never, you know, since we don't have Slack Pro and we don't. We don't retain our archive. And I never added it to our list anyway. That's at least just a private interest. The one that was actually on my list is another one left over that I read as an undergrad before I really knew too much about philosophy.

It is a book called Structuralism by Jean Piaget. So Piaget, people know from psychology the stages of childhood development. And just Googling him right now, I see that he wrote a philosophy book on the illusions of philosophy that criticizing philosophy for not being based on scientific data, which is not overall a point of view that I am particularly down with. I think there's plenty of reasons to study philosophy. That's not. I would be hard pressed to find a book like that that is actually by somebody who's read a lot of philosophy as opposed to just some scientist who has some gut reaction against this thing that he thinks is.

Is a bunch of nonsense. But this book, Structuralism, it's a skinny little book that I still own. And it was positing something. It was again, right when I read Hegel's Phenomenology, some of it for the first time. But probably there's something that there's similar structures on every level of analysis. So that you could. On the physical level, on the biological level, on the. I don't even know what the other. What the other levels he's concerned with. But it was at least a cosmological principle that fascinated me at the time. Before I had read a lot of philosophy.

And I'm sort of wondering, you know, whether we do this on pel time or I do this on my own time at some point. Was there actually something to that book or is it just a bunch of nonsense? So maybe people that have read it more recently can chime in and tell me if it's worth our time Anything out of. Out of your.

36:09 Dylan: Your.

36:11 Mark: Anything that's come to mind as we've been talking about all this. Other future possibilities.

36:17 Wes: Well, we should do Making It Explicit by Brandom.

36:20 Mark: Brandom. Yep.

36:21 Wes: Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness. Someone recommended Barry Strood or Stroud. The Skepticism and the Possibility of Knowledge. Or. Or there's a bunch of different things we could do, but yeah, I'm a fan of skepticism and he's making an argument for it, so.

36:35 Mark: And there are plenty more things in the history of philosophy that I'd still like us to do, but they're not just on my bucket desert island list. You know, I want to do some Islamic philosophy, for instance. You know that period of time.

36:48 Wes: I thought you guys had sworn off medieval philosophy forever.

36:51 Seth: No, no, I. I have.

36:52 Mark: Well, I think Seth has sworn off that, so maybe we'll have to do a little bits of this in close reads in the near future. There's the. Not the incomprehensibility of the philosophers. The. Anyway, Averroes, ibn Rushd, is the big sort of gap that we have. So I want to do a little bit. And I think Al. Well, we read some Al Kindi. Wes. We did that little stoic thing. I also had. Yeah, more Dewey. Dewey is great. We have not given enough time to Dewey in our. In our lives. We still want to do Derrida. I had Lyotard on my list for a long time. You know, so actual postmodernism, I don't know if we've actually done. I mean, it's a much scoffed at little branch of philosophy. Probably some. Something that we've done has officially goes into that category.

37:38 Seth: Did we read a little bit of Derrida? And then we did that book on Lacan, who falls into that? And we've read Saussure.

37:44 Mark: Lacan counts as postmodern.

37:46 Wes: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. He's post structuralist, and it's often categorized with postmodernism.

37:51 Mark: Okay.

37:52 Wes: We should do some people in between Kant and the German idealists, like Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy Essay on a New Theory of the Human Capacity for Representation. And then also Jacobi, I think it's pronounced. So on the doctrine of Spinoza. And then he wrote something called David Hume on Faith or Idealism and Realism. I want to get into some of the critiques concerning the thing in itself, and I want to understand how these kind of led into the other. The later German idealists.

38:23 Seth: Actually, now that you mention that, Wes, it makes me think, have we ever read Deleuze and Guattari.

38:29 Mark: Yeah, we did one thing by them. Yes. Actually this was on my extended list was the sort of the foundational work by Deleuze. Liz. I'm really interested in doing more of him over time.

38:39 Seth: Yeah. Anti Oedipus Thousand Plateaus. What is philosophy? They have quite a few.

38:43 Dylan: We did what is philosophy?

38:45 Seth: Did we do what is philosophy?

38:46 Mark: Well, maybe you weren't on there. I don't know.

38:48 Wes: I wasn't on that one. I think Seth probably was.

38:51 Mark: Yes. We had kind of a goofy guess for that. That one.

38:55 Seth: I think it's. Deleuze has a couple books on Spinoza.

38:59 Mark: He was definitely interested in Spinoza. Yep.

39:01 Seth: So you could kill a couple of birds with one stone there.

39:04 Mark: So one of the early not school groups was on a thousand plateaus. So I have read a bit of that. So Difference in Repetition. That's the one. His 1994 book by himself that I think is supposed to be sort of the essential one. So that. Yeah, that was in my top 10 interesting guy. I don't know if Guattari. Yeah, Wes and I read something by Guattari by himself for on so Tall Terry. Everybody Wants to be a Fascist for close reads. That was kind of fun but didn't make me want to read more of that necessarily. We were also very disappointed. I had long on my list more Horkheimer and Adorno and we read the beginning of his what is enlightened there?

What is Enlightenment? Essay from the beginning of the book that we read before and that was quite disappointing. Did not want me make me want to read a lot more of that. I'd had more Adorno on aesthetics. I mean maybe I should still have that on. There's always more things in aesthetics, particularly the Dewey book Art as Experience. That's been high on my list for a long time. Let's wrap it up. This is the end of our agreed upon time. Hope you stick with us. There's lots more to come. We would love to get your ideas. Email us peltiallyexaminedlife.com Happy New 2026.

40:16 Dylan: Happy New Year.

40:17 Wes: Happy New Year.

40:18 Seth: Happy New Year, everybody.