July at PEL took up some basic questions about knowledge, reason, and their limits. C.S. Lewis argued for Christianity on the basis of morality found in human experience, and the Hegel discussions returned to the conflict between faith and Enlightenment reason. From there, Peirce challenged the idea that we have immediate knowledge even of ourselves, while Galen Strawson’s argument for panpsychism raised a question about what a physical account of the world can include.
The rest of the network covered a lot of ground. Survivor and Toy Story got the Pretty Much Pop treatment; Philosophy vs. Improv talked clowning, play, and what it means to do philosophy; and (sub)TEXT looked at the mummy (and The Mummy) through the lens of colonialism and the Western image of the East. Nakedly Examined Music featured Bruce Soord and Josh Joplin. July also brought Chris Sunami’s Free Your Mind and the first installment of Under Examination, a new PEL blog series about the arguments that tend to come and go online too quickly for careful treatment. Below is a full list of everything published across the network in July, in order of occurrence, with snippets and links to the entries.
Ep. 395: C.S. Lewis Argues for Christianity (Part One)
July 6, 2026
Lewis tries to argue to a general audience that Christianity provides a unique and optimal response to the human condition. Specifically, he begins by arguing (like Kant) that we are all aware that we have moral standards that are not derived from experience, but that are used to judge experience…
Closereads: Hegel on Faith vs. The Enlightenment, aka PEL ep. 394 (Part Three)
July 12, 2026
On Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, sec. 551-559. We get a little more info on how The Enlightenment supposedly (mis)characterizes faith, and then conversely how faith sees The Enlightenment. The main point concerns idolatry: On the Enlightenment view of faith, the faithful wrongly reduce God to material images and objects…
Pretty Much Pop #225: Survivor the Constant (with Wes!)
July 12, 2026
Survivor has remained a top-rated show since its debut in 2000, and some of us (Sarahlyn and our guest Wes Alwan) have stuck with it throughout, Mark just watched when it came out and had to catch up, and some of us (Lawrence and Al) had not previously been on board at all…
PvI#120: Mark and Mary in the Struggle Club
July 12, 2026
Your wise and authoritative hosts explore forms of respectful address, what counts as good philosophy, the holodeck full-contact Fantasy Island experience, status in economic transactions, Trek not War, default improv scenarios, fear of playfulness, philosophy or improv as education vs. doing philosophy or improv, and more…
Ep. 395: C.S. Lewis Argues for Christianity (Part Two)
July 12, 2026
Continuing from part one on Mere Christianity (1952), starting with book 2, “What Christians Believe.” Lewis argues that the problem of evil, far from showing that there is no good God, shows that we are endowed with that moral sense that judges the world to be evil, which was Lewis’ proof for God…
NEM#256: Bruce Soord (Pineapple Thief): Heartbreaking Prog by Ear
July 17, 2026
Bruce started as guitarist for the ’90s for Vulgar Unicorn and started Pineapple Thief as a solo project in 1999, though it quickly became a full band (and has for the last several albums been a true 4-way collaboration featuring King Crimson/Porcupine Tree drummer Gavin Harrison). He’s released 16 studio albums with Pineapple Thief and four solo albums (plus a collaboration album with Jonas Renske from Katatonia)…
Ep. 396: Peirce on Knowledge (Part One)
July 19, 2026
Are there some instances of knowledge that are immediate and intuitive? These would be cognitions that are not caused by another cognition but caused directly by the things that they are of, like if perception is intuitive, then I’m directly perceiving the physical object in front of me. Peirce first asks if we can know that a given perception is like this, and his answer is negative…
PvI#121: Meat Suit Dolls w/ Maddie Mutations
July 21, 2026
The LA-based clown, multimedia performance artist, and doll stylist (see maddiemutations.com; she also goes by the name Maddie Forrest) joins Mary and Mark to talk about her Doll Court show, clown types and the role of the fool, failing on stage, cities as women, silly villains, and more.
PMP#226: Toy Story Played Out
July 22, 2026
In light of Toy Story 5, the gang (Mark, Lawrence, Sarahlyn and Al) consider the Pixar franchise that started in 1995. We consider the premise whereby your toys are loyal slaves that come to life whenever unobserved, the critique of screen-play in the new film, the use of nostalgia in the films, the repetition and/or escalation throughout the series, the horror-adjacency of living dolls, the emotional manipulation, and whether enough is enough…
Closereads: Galen Strawson on Panpsychism (Part One)
July 27, 2026
On “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism” (2008). Strawson argues that physicalism should not just be taken as matter in motion. Instead, the physical is a broader category that includes not just chairs and molecules, but also “my experience of red.”
Ep. 396: Peirce on Knowledge (Part Two)
July 27, 2026
Continuing from part one on “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man” and “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.” We start by looking more closely at the idea that all mental causation is a form of reasoning, i.e. inference. Peirce sees these as valid deductive (or inductive or abductive) arguments even if they are not sound, i.e. if the premises are false…
Free Your Mind
July 28, 2026
Christopher Sunami, the editor of the 2024 Partially Examined Life book, is back with a brand-new work of original philosophy–emphasis on original. He describes it as if Plato’s Symposium was set in a secret Black fraternity, and if the topics on the table included race, religion, artificial intelligence and new ways forward out of the world’s many current existential crises…
NEM#257: Josh Joplin Doesn’t Look Back… Until Now
July 28, 2026
With his roots in folk, Josh released three rock albums in the ’90s before his big hit “Camera One,” from Useful Music (2001), which is getting a Silver Anniversary rework/reissue (The intro music for this episode is the newly recorded version). He has released seven albums since then, typically as The Josh Joplin Group, but sometimes as Among the Oak & Ash…
(sub)TEXT: Curses and Colonizers in “The Mummy” (1999)
July 29, 2026
As a cinematic monster, the mummy seems less an embodiment of revenge against colonial forces than a figure invented by colonialism itself. On the one hand, the mummy represents mystery, romance, magic, and the East. His wrappings suggest to the imagination that he’s not just dead but wounded—ripped from a lost time and a broken narrative. Conveniently for the colonizer’s psyche, the mummy actually longs for someone to violate his tomb and wake him…
Under Examination I
July 29, 2026
The news moves fast. Most of it passes by before we can get a full view. Pandemics, wars, and the economy demand our attention. Other considerations, like celebrity gossip and political operatives yelling from our screens, just don’t. That’s the media and social media landscape in pressing and trivial form. But what about the stuff in-between? Here, we slow down and indulge our desire to chime in on the debates of the day, no matter how partial our examination…
There’s more to come in August!
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