“To preach skepticism to us as a duty until ‘sufficient evidence’ for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law.” —William James
Search Results for: william james
Episode 179: William James’s Introspective Psychology (Part Two)
Continuing on Psychology, the Briefer Course (1892), completing “The Stream of Thought” and covering the chapter on “Habit.”
James thinks that psychologists focus too much on those parts of consciousness that get picked out by substantive words. He describes habit as part of a general natural pattern in which things that happen once tend to create pathways for themselves in surrounding material to allow the same thing to happen again more easily. Be careful what you do, because your organism is recording all of your bad behavior and corrupting your character!
Start with part one or get the ad-free, unbroken Citizen Edition. Please support PEL! Get a 2018 PEL Wall Calendar!
End song: “Drowning Mind (feedback overload)” by AMP, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #57.
Sponsors: Get up to $50 off a DNA kit at 23andme.com/pel. Visit MUBI.com/PEL for 30 days of free curated movies.
Episode 179: William James’s Introspective Psychology (Part One)
On The Principles of Psychology (1890) chapters 1 & 7, and Psychology, the Briefer Course (1892), the chapters on “The Stream of Thought,” “Habit,” and some of “The Self.”
Can we talk about the mind in a way that is both scientific and also does justice to our everyday experiences? James thought his method, which involved both introspection and physiology, yielded more accurate descriptions of the mind than associationism (the mind is made up of ideas) or spiritualism (the mind is a faculty of the soul). Consciousness is a stream, not a concatenation of ideas!
Don’t wait for part 2! Get the full, ad-free Citizen Edition now. Please support PEL.
Make sure to pick up a 2018 PEL Wall Calendar! Get up to $50 off a DNA kit at 23andme.com/pel. Visit MUBI.com/PEL for 30 days of free curated movies, and Squarespace.com for a free trial and 10% off with offer code EXAMINED.
Henri Bergson and William James on Vicious Intellectualism
“If I had not read Bergson,” William James wrote in A Pluralistic Universe, “I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper privately.” James had been engaged in a very long philosophical debate with the leading Idealists of his day, F.H. Bradley and Josiah Royce, when Bergson came to the rescue. James thought that Bergson supplied him with the Continue Reading …
Intro is fashionably late for September: Psychology by William James
The weather is getting colder, the nights are getting shorter and it’s back to NotSchool time for September. We’re starting out fashionably late this month with Psychology: The Briefer Course by William James (get the text here), written in 1892 as an abridgment of his monumental Principles of Psychology. (And all this was well before he became the name brand Continue Reading …
The Reincarnation of William James: Eugene Taylor, R.I.P.
Eugene Taylor was only 66 years of age when he passed away on January 30th, 2013. Taylor was a graduate of Southern Methodist University, Harvard Divinity School, and earned his Ph.D. at Boston University. Saybrook University was his academic base but he was also a research historian of psychology at Harvard Medical School, founder of the Cambridge Institute of Psychology Continue Reading …
Phi Fic #35 12 Stories by James Baldwin
Join us with Mark Linsenmeyer in a previous discussion on two short stories by James Baldwin: “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” and “Sonny’s Blues.” Both are included in the collection Going to meet the Man (1965).
Science, Secularism, and Religion, Part XXX: William Kingdon Clifford—The Ethics of Belief
Imagine a ship owner who sells tickets for transatlantic voyages. He is at the dock one day, bidding his ship farewell, when he remembers a warning he had received from his mechanics the week before, that the integrity of the ship’s hull was questionable and that it might not be seaworthy. But on some plausible grounds or other he forms Continue Reading …
Episode 180: More James’s Psychology: Self and Will (Part Two)
Concluding on William James’s Psychology, the Briefer Course (1892). We briefly cover emotions and spend the bulk of our time on will. James’s introspective method allows us to distinguish reflex or coerced actions from voluntary, free-seeming ones, and gives us the vocabulary to attribute moral virtue to those who have enough willpower to keep those inconvenient truths in mind (if you eat this, you’ll get fat!) that allow us to successfully resist temptation.
Listen to part one first, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition. Support PEL!
End song: “Join the Zoo/Live Again” by Craig Wedren; listen to him on Nakedly Examined Music #15.
Sponsor: Learn about PDF Pen software from smilesoftware.com/podcast.
You can still get a 2018 PEL Wall Calendar!
Episode 180: More James’s Psychology: Self and Will (Part One)
On Psychology, the Briefer Course (1892), chapters on “The Self,” “Will,” and “Emotions.”
Continuing from ep. 179, we talk about the “Me” (the part of me that I know) vs. the “I” (the part of me that knows), including personal identity. James thinks that emotions are just our experience of our own physiology. Finally, we tackle will, veering into ethics, free will, and more.
Don’t wait for part 2! Get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition now. Please support PEL!
Make sure to pick up a 2018 PEL Wall Calendar! Visit Squarespace.com for a free trial and 10% off with offer code EXAMINED.
PEL Special: Phi Fic on James Baldwin’s Fiction
On the short stories “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” (1960) and “Sonny’s Blues” (1957).
Mark joins the Phi Fic crew to supplement PEL ep. 162 by delving into Baldwin’s fiction, which is actually pretty similar to his biographical essays.
Phi Fic #12 Stories by James Baldwin
For this month’s reading we chose two short stories by James Baldwin: “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” and “Sonny’s Blues.” Both stories are included in the collection Going to meet the Man (1965). Unfortunately, Daniel had to be absent this time, but we did get Mark Linsenmayer to join us!
Hear more Phi Fic discussions at PhiFicPodcast.com.
Ep. 22: More James’s Pragmatism: Faith & Truth
Episode for Purchase: On William James’s “The Will to Believe,” and continuing our discussion on James’s conception of truth as described in his books Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. Does pragmatism give ground for religious belief, like if it feels good for me to believe in God, can that justify belief? Is belief in science or rationality itself a form of faith?
Spirituality Without Religion? (James and Flanagan)
In the same way that Owen Flanagan wants to naturalize Buddhism by stripping its hocus-pocus, William James focused his attention on personal religious experience rather than the “smells and bells” of traditional institutions. As biographer Robert Richardson puts it, “much of what one usually thinks of as religion James rejects at the start”. James says he has no interest in Continue Reading …
PREVIEW-Episode 22: More James’s Pragmatism: Is Faith Justified? What is Truth?
On William James’s “The Will to Believe,” and continuing our discussion on James’s conception of truth as described in his books Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. Does pragmatism give ground for religious belief, like if it feels good for me to believe in God, can that justify belief? Is belief in science or rationality itself a form of faith?
PREVIEW-Episode 20: Pragmatism – Peirce and James
On Pragmatism (1907) by William James and “The Fixation of Belief” (1877) and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878) by Charles Sanders Peirce. Is truth a primitive relation between our representations and things objectively in the world, or is it an analyzable process by which propositions “prove their worth” by being useful in some way, like by fitting well with other portions of our experience or being delicious?
Philosophy and Comedy
William James said of philosophy, “It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar.” The comedian evokes laughter by making the familiar seem strange, but the philosopher’s way of unsettling us can please in a similar way.
Why Substance Matters
What matters about matter is that it’s a certain kind of substance, which is to say that matter is refutable and problematic because it is taken as something underlying or standing below (sub-stance) the outward appearances, such as the hardness and heaviness of Johnson’s rock. In other words, “substance” is a metaphysical reality, not an empirical or phenomenal reality. Pragmatists like William James and Robert Pirsig both reject what the latter called “the metaphysics of substance.”
Ep. 20: Pragmatism
Episode for Purchase: On Pragmatism (1907) by William James and “The Fixation of Belief” (1877) and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878) by Charles Sanders Peirce. Is truth a primitive relation between our representations and things objectively in the world, or is it an analyzable process by which propositions “prove their worth” by being useful in some way, like by fitting well with other portions of our experience or being delicious?
Ep. 221: Functionalist Theories of Mind (Putnam, Armstrong) (Part One)
On Hilary Putnam’s “The Nature of Mental States” (1973).
What is the mind? Functionalist theories identify the mental not with the brain exactly, but with something the brain does. So some other creature without a brain (maybe a computer) might be able to do that same thing if it could duplicate the structure of what our brains do. Is this a satisfying account of the mind?
Don’t wait for part 2! Get the full, ad-free Citizen Edition now. Please support PEL!
Sponsors: Visit omnifocus.com for a free trial of a great to-do list manager. Visit the St. John’s College Graduate Institute: partiallyexaminedlife.com/sjcgi. Check out our new culture/entertainment podcast, Pretty Much Pop, at prettymuchpop.com.
To Be Re-Bourne: Breathing New Life into the Prophetic Philosophy of Randolph Bourne
Randolph Bourne died 100 years ago this December at the age of 32. While his legacy lives on, to properly pay homage to his work we can recover the spirit of his prophetic philosophy, which has too often been overlooked or misapprehended.
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XXXV: Justin L. Barrett—Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Part C
In our last two articles, we’ve explored one book in the exciting new field of cognitive science of religion. And we’ve seen how one of the findings in this area is that belief in God, or something like God, is natural to us, given the types of minds we have. Of course, this doesn’t show that one ought to believe Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XXXIV: Justin L. Barrett—Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Part B
In our last article, we explored some recent findings in the cognitive science of religion (CSR). We saw how current research suggests that belief in God, or something like God, comes naturally to most human beings, most of the time, in virtue of the types of brains we have. I’d like to explore Justin L. Barrett’s arguments on this front Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXXIII: Justin L. Barrett—Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Part A
“Belief in God is an almost inevitable consequence of the kind of minds we have.” —Justin L. Barrett
Episode 196: Guest Simon Blackburn on Truth (Part Two)
Continuing with Simon on his book On Truth (2018).
We move to part two of the book, where we get down to the procedures used to obtain truth in art, ethics, and science. Yes, truth is objective, but it’s not best described as correspondence, and in fact this elaboration of how truth is actually obtained is more enlightening than any abstract definition meant to cover all the different types of truth-seeking.
Listen to part one first, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition, and also Wes’s bonus conversation on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Please support PEL!
End song: “with you/for you” from the new cold/mess EP by Prateek Kuhad, interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #79.
Sponsors: Visit Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save at partiallyexaminedlife.com/savealife, and thegreatcoursesplus.com/PEL.
Episode 196: Guest Simon Blackburn on Truth (Part One)
The Cambridge/etc. prof joins Mark, Wes, and Dylan to discuss his book On Truth (2018).
What is truth? Simon’s view synthesizes deflationism and pragmatism to avoid relativism by fixing on the domain-specific procedures we actually engage in to establish the truth of a claim, whether in ethics, science, art, or whatever. A gift of clarity after two episodes threshing through the jungles of analytic philosophy!
Continued on part 2, or get the full, unbroken Citizen Edition, as well as Wes’s discussion on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.
Sponsors: Listen to the Hi-Phi Nation podcast at hiphination.org, and explore Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save at partiallyexaminedlife.com/savealife.
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XXXII: Alvin Plantinga and Reformed Epistemology
“Faith is not to be contrasted with knowledge: faith (at least in paradigmatic instances) is knowledge, knowledge of a certain special kind.” —Alvin Plantinga
Episode 194: Alfred Tarski on Truth (Part One)
On Tarski’s “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics” (1944), Hartry Field’s “Tarski’s Theory of Truth” (1972), and Donald Davidson’s “The Folly of Trying to Define Truth” (1977).
What is truth? Tarski gives a technical, metaphysically neutral definition for truth within a particular, well-defined language. So how does that apply to real languages? He thought he was defining truth (a semantic concept) in terms of more primitive (physical?) concepts, but Field and Davidson think that actually, truth as a general concept is indefinable, even though it’s still helpful for Tarski to have laid out the relations among various semantic concepts.
Help us keep more episodes ad-free by supporting us! You can get the Citizen Edition of this episode and not have to wait for part 2, and also soon listen to Wes’s discussion of Shakespeare’s Tempest!
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XV: A Fractured World: God, Humanity, and Nature
We come to the end of our series within a series, on Michael Allen Gillespie’s Theological Origins of Modernity. We’ve spent a lot of time on this text because it’s such good, rich material, and because it’s a fairly recent book with a genuinely novel perspective. For my part, I’m persuaded that nominalism goes a long way toward explaining the Continue Reading …
On Reactions to Our American Indian Episode
Yes, our episode 173 was not perfect. Maybe we can do a follow-up? Maybe you can help make that happen. Or maybe you think it was fine and we should all just move on.
Self-Contradiction: The Wisdom of Emerson Vs. Trump’s Whims
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” Does that mean the current POTUS is an Emersonian? Not quite!
Topic for #129: Is Religious Faith Rational?
Nathan Gilmour (Christian Humanist podcast) and Rob Dyer (God Complex Radio) joined Mark and Wes for a wide-ranging discussion on the reasonableness of religious belief, covering short articles by Alvin Plantinga, Antony Flew, Richard Swinburne, and others.
Topic for #127: John Dewey on Experience and Nature
We discussed “Experience and Nature” (1925) about how philosophy tends to illicitly separate experience from nature, mind from the world, claiming that the world of appearance is somehow divorced from underlying reality. No, Dewey counters: what we start with is concrete, gross experience, which is not experience of “sense data” or any other theoretical entity, but which is experience of tables, people, feelings, values, etc.
Parables as a Guide to Jesus the Philosopher, Part 6: Judgment
The philosopher Don Cupitt highlights that in the parables, “Jesus sharply criticizes and even ridicules ordinary people’s ideas of justice and equity.” Part of this radicalism, the Catholic Church teaches, is that “Jesus identifies with the poor of every kind and makes active love towards them the condition for entering the kingdom.” Another part is the irreverence which he displayed toward the claims over morality made by religious authorities, which has been characterized in the joke on the Good Samaritan parable: “You know why the priest didn’t cross the road to the wounded traveler? He could see that he had already been robbed.”
Cavell and Pirsig on Emerson’s Revolution
If we think of the rise of Protestantism as a movement away from institutional authority and toward the authority of individuals, then Emerson’s vision is just one more step in that trend.
Emersonian America
Emerson, philosophical mysticism, and Jamesian pragmatism all make the same basic assertion about the relation between concepts and the immediacy of lived experience.
Emerson on the Over-Soul
A walk through Emerson’s essay “The Over-Soul.” We learn a lot about how the Divine is supposed to affect us if we’re in the proper mood, but get no information about what it actually is.
Topic for #93: Free Will and Moral Responsibility (Strawson Father vs. Son)
Listen now to Tamler Sommers’s summary of the two Strawson articles. On 4/6, Mark, Wes, and Seth were joined by Tamler Sommers of the Very Bad Wizards podcast to discuss the following articles: 1. P.F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” (1960) 2. Galen Strawson’s “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility” (1994) 3. Gary Watson’s “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on Continue Reading …
Truth Without the Capital “T”
“Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. Â . . . The supreme task is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding Continue Reading …
Not School Goings-on
As the school year for many is just beginning, it’s an appropriate time for an update regarding the Not School discussion groups for the month of September. The Philosophy of Technology group will be reading selections from a book called What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly, which appears to be a somewhat optimistic reflection on the development of “technology” as Continue Reading …
Zen and the Art of Martin Heidegger?
The partially examined podcasters raised a series of very difficult questions in their recent discussion of Heidegger, particularly during a ten-minute stretch beginning about one hour and ten minutes into the 80th episode. These questions all seemed to pivot around one central problem: what does it mean to get right with Being? Should we take this as a kind of Continue Reading …
The Architecture of Compatibilism (Are We REALLY free?)
In our discussion on Jung, I brought up the issue of free will with respect to the existence of the unconscious, and I wanted to explore this a bit further: Compatibilism is the doctrine that free will and determinism are in some way compatible, but since these terms were designed to contradict each other, any claim to be a compatibilist Continue Reading …
Topic for #77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty
On 5/16 the regular foursome recorded a discussion of The Sense of Beauty (1896) by George Santayana. What is “the beautiful?” Do we have a “sense” by which we grasp it comparable to what Hume describes as the moral sense? Listen to the episode. Where most pre-Humean philosophers considered beauty an objective quality in objects that people then can grasp Continue Reading …
Not School Groups for May
We’ve come again to a new month, which means it’s time to figure out what you want to read next, and the best way to read is with company, so go join Not School (read about it!) to have some people to read with. There are a few proposals on the table, for instance one on Just War Theory, which Continue Reading …
Topic for #76: Deleuze/Guattari on What Philosophy Is
On Sunday, 4/21/13, we recorded our discussion on chapters 1-3 of What Is Philosophy? (1991). Go listen to the episode. Gilles Deleuze was a recent French philosopher (he died in 1995) who has probably been requested as much or more than any other figure by our listeners. His style is highly idiosyncratic: difficult somewhat in the manner of the other Continue Reading …
Quickie Not School Update: April Groups
April is on us, and if you’re not in Not School, you’re missing out on the big Spring Thing. Read here if you don’t know what this is. We seem to have established several stable groups, many of which are starting new books, so there’s plenty of opportunity for new people to jump on board. Check out the March update Continue Reading …
Not School Update: March Groups
We’re now into March, with the shortest month behind us and in general a lot of continuing momentum in our online discussion groups. However, there are still some golden opportunities for new people to join up right now to add some philosophy reading to their lives: 1. The Intro Readings in Philosophy group has started on a March odyssey, reading Continue Reading …
Presidential Pragmatism
In a recent column in The Stone, Harvey Cormier considers the political oomph of pragmatists through a nice presentation of some central thinking of William James. The occasion for the piece is a recent spate of writings characterizing Obama as “a pragmatist politician.” What I like best about Cormier’s article is his refutation, through James, of the lame but pervasive Continue Reading …
Nietzsche, Pragmatism and the Fact-Value Distinction
[From David Buchanan, frequent blog and Facebook contributor and participant in our ZAMM episode. See if that doesn’t make sense after reading this.] Richard Rorty opened one of his talks by pointing out that as Europeans see it, Pragmatism is just what the Americans could get out of Nietzsche. This joke suggests that there are many similarities but American Pragmatism Continue Reading …
Philosophical Mavericks: Pirsig, MacIntyre, Solomon, Bergmann
I made the point both on the episode and in a recent post that I thought MacIntyre to be a better model of the outsider philosopher than Pirsig. This is not a point I really want to hammer, as I like Pirsig and I don’t relish dissing someone that many of our listeners have a great appreciation for. So let Continue Reading …
Topic for #61: Nietzsche on Truth
Listen to the episode. We discussed Nietzsche’s conception of truth as presented in his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” written in 1873 but unpublished until after his death with guest Jessica Berry of Georgia State University, who published Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition just last year. This Nietzsche essay has been extremely influential for postmodernists, Continue Reading …
Meaning and Context
(Painting by Robert McCall) In his book Wittgenstein and William James,Russell Goodman makes a case that James influenced Wittgenstein’s thought and he does so by detailing their shared commitment to concrete experience and actual practice over intellect. (Wittgenstein was also positively influenced by James’s view of religion, especially by The Varieties of Religious Experience, but that’s another can of worms.) Continue Reading …
My Own Private Language?
Would it be reasonable to take Wittgenstein’s case against private language as his case in favor of public language? Or is that too simple? As I was listening to episode 56, a quote from William James from Pragmatismcame to mind: All human thinking gets discursified; we exchange ideas; we lend and borrow verifications, get them from one another by means Continue Reading …
More Voices on Buddhism and Science
If the dialogue between Buddhism and American intellectuals like Owen Flanagan is part of a fashionable trend, then it has to be one of the longest lasting fads in history. Henry David Thoreau published the Lotus Sutra in the first issue of The Dial in 1844. William James was absorbing Transcendentalist ideas at the family dinner table, where his godfather Continue Reading …
Some Questions on Buddhism and Science
Check out this video: Buddhism and Science: A Brief History from The Berkley Center. Often reading Buddhism into science and vice-versa can be very misleading. This talk by Thupten Jinpa is in dialogue with David Lopez’s excellent book, Buddhism and Science: A Guide For the Perplexed. Dr. Jinpa pretty much states the historical Tibetan relationship to science as it came Continue Reading …
Naturalized Phenomenology?
Here’s a conference-lecture by Dan Zahavi (of the “Center for Subjectivity Research” at the University of Copenhagen/Danish National Research Foundation) that asks whether it’s a good idea to try to “naturalize” phenomenology. Watch on YouTube. He distinguishes early on what Flanagan means by phenomenology (referring to Owen by name), i.e. reports on what things seem like to us, and what Continue Reading …
Topic for #52: Philosophy and Race (DuBois, MLK, Cornel West)
We PELers spent black history month actually reading black history, and on 2/28/12 spoke with Law Ware of Oklahoma State University about philosophy and race. Is there a philosophically viable concept of race at all? What are the potential sources of past and current oppression, and what general strategies seem promising to deal with them? Is “understanding” all one needs Continue Reading …
Pirsig as an American Pragmatist
Philosophology is to philosophy as art history is to painting, Pirsig says. He uses that ridiculous-sounding word to draw a distinction between comparative analysis and original thought, between critical examination and creative production. In the tradition of Emerson’s famous 1837 speech, “The American Scholar”, Pirsig is calling for creativity and originality. This is not to say that the critics and Continue Reading …
Pure Experience and Dynamic Quality
William James’ pure experience, the central idea in his radical empiricism,has been subject to misunderstanding and misinterpretation for 100 years. As I take Pirsig’s pre-intellectual experience (a.k.a. Quality or Dynamic Quality) to be more or less equivalent to James’s pure experience, any confusion would extend to Pirsig’s work. Objections that cut against James will make Pirsig bleed and vice versa. Continue Reading …
Topic for #50: Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
[Note: This article has been updated post-discussion; I didn’t want to create a new post when we’ve had all this great discussion on this one that I want people to continue. The episode itself should be up w/in the next day or two.] Mark, Seth, Dylan, and guest David Buchanan have recorded a conversation on Robert M. Pirsig’sZen and the Continue Reading …
Philosophy and Religion: What I’ve Learned Through Our Episodes
Given that the next episodes are about phenomenology and not about religion any more, I wanted to give a few parting thoughts to the topic of religion for the moment and refer new listeners to some old episodes they may not have been aware of. I’ve created a Podcast Topics page that includes a Philosophy of Religion section that I’ll Continue Reading …
Greg Ganssle (via Pale Blue Dot) on Dawkins’s “Fitness” Argument
Yale Professor Greg Ganssle provides in this Pale Blue Dot episode what is perhaps a more charitable response to the new atheists than we did. First, he points out something I hadn’t quite considered in this way before: We at PEL complain about how difficult and tedious it is (or would be) to write something fit for a peer reviewed Continue Reading …
Episodes Categorized by Topic
Updated 8/13/18 Given how many episodes we’ve done, even we lose track of where we’ve been. We aim (among other things) to present the equivalent of an introductory course in all the major areas of philosophy, and in some areas get you to an intermediate level. Here’s where I’ll periodically comment on our progress. Feel free to weigh in on Continue Reading …
New Atheist Episode Thoughts: Skepoet, Harris on Faith, Politics and Religion
A “University Lecturer living in South Korea” calling himself Skepoet responded here to our episode. He gives a nice quote from Julian Baggini and makes some salient points about our discussion. One of his comments was that we didn’t seem to find an argument in Harris to critique. Here’s the argument as I remember it that we were focusing on: Continue Reading …
Philosophical Exercises to Steel Against Criticism
We have had a great jump in viewers of late, not least because my bro-in-law Dan Colman finally let us put a self-glorifying post on his fantastic and widely read Open Culture blog, and also because I’ve started bombarding entire philosophy grad school departments with invitations to check us out. So welcome, all you new readers/listeners. However, with our increasing Continue Reading …
Pragmatism is a tool of the devil!
I can’t embed this video, as whoever posted it deauthorized that feature, probably so you have to go to the site and see the giant Google ads and things (I see a big ad for Estee Lauder myself) hovering next to the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvialpgl9Jg Here we see that even though William James gave an extensive defense of religion, apparently naughty Continue Reading …
Historical note about the Pragmatist Revival
This was news to me, that pragmatism was eclipsed by the 1940s until Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, though note that the video says they were eclipsed by positivism, i.e. the idea that philosophical statements need to be cashed out in terms of sense verifications, which is a species of a view we attributed on the podcast to William James, Continue Reading …
Later Pragmatists: Rorty on truth
Maybe the most famous current pragmatist is Richard Rorty. He doesn’t like William James’s redefinition of the word “truth,” but he thinks that virtually everything James said about it could be better applied to the word “justification.” Plus, you get to see subtitles in (I think) Dutch!
Later Pragmatists: Quine on mind
In our discussions on William James, we alluded to later pragmatists and the relationship of pragmatism to verificationism (logical positivism). Does being a pragmatist, who tries to reduce philosophical problems to problems of how we should most intelligently act in the face of world, mean that you have to discount claims that can’t be verified by empirical science? Here’s W.V.O. Continue Reading …
Mind Video #5: Daniel Dennett
Dan Dennett, who is not Santa Claus, has many clips on youtube, both as “new atheist” and as someone who wants to “deflate consciousness,” i.e. show to us through optical illusions and things that we don’t know as much of what’s going on in our minds as we think. Here he discusses the “Cartesian theater,” his starting point for argument Continue Reading …
David Chalmers on “Merely Verbal” Disputes
A talk by philosopher David Chalmers presenting a general framework to determine whether a dispute is “merely verbal.”
Pretty Much Pop #80: Reliving Groundhog Day (and Palm Springs, Russian Doll, etc.)
Happy Groundhog Day! The ’93 film has had dozens of imitators spanning various genres in recent years, but the idea goes back more than a century. Mark, Erica, Brian, and guest Ken Gerber touch on popular and obscure examples examples from film and TV to explore the philosophical themes and storytelling techniques.
For more, visit prettymuchpop.com. Hear bonus content for this episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop.
Sponsor: Get premium wireless service at $15/month from MintMobile.com/PRETTY.
Phi Fic#37 The Sound and the Fury
In this episode we struggle, spin and madly rub our eyes as we work through the puzzling and enigmatic beauty of William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”.
Saints & Simulators 18: #Gaia
The reason, perhaps, that Bostrom’s demonstration of the probability of God’s existence has received so little attention and notice (especially as compared to the stir and commotion caused by his demonstration of the probability that we live in a simulation, and despite the fact that both conclusions are entailed by the exact same line of argument) is because readers have failed to note the connection between Bostrom’s simulator and God.
Saints & Simulators 2: The #SimulationArgument
In the year 1999 CE, just on the cusp of a new millennium, the then Wachowski Brothers released “The Matrix,” one of the most influential, imitated, and widely discussed movies of its times. It was only four years later, in 2003 CE, that philosopher Nick Bostrom of Oxford University introduced an argument that it is not only possible we are living inside a computer simulation, it is actually significantly likely. Although it may have sounded like a high-concept science-fiction thriller, the argument drew upon well-established lines of logic and a widely held series of assumptions.
Combat & Classics #3: Interview with Professor Martin L. Cook
Join us for a discussion with Martin L. Cook, Distinguished Visiting Professor at United States Air Force Academy. Prior to that, Professor Cook was Admiral James B. Stockdale Professor of Professional Military Ethics at the College of Operational and Strategic Leadership at the U.S. Naval War College. He is also co-editor of The Journal of Military Ethics. Professor Cook was Continue Reading …
Topic for #43: Arguments for the Existence of God
On many episodes we’ve mentioned in passing, or given some author’s criticism of, the classic arguments for the existence of God: -The ontological argument, whereby some quality of the idea of God itself is supposed to necessitate that such a being exists. The most famous versions are by Descartes and St. Anselm. -The cosmological argument, which deduces from the fact Continue Reading …