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Polyarchy and Public Policy in the United States

November 16, 2015 by Billie Pritchett 2 Comments

Why doesn’t public policy reflect more the preferences of ordinary citizens? The answer is institutional.

“The Most Good You Can Do” (2015): A Review of Peter Singer’s New Book

July 9, 2015 by Billie Pritchett 16 Comments

Does doing the most good you can do just mean giving the most money to the world’s poor?

Art and Beauty: A Marital History

June 3, 2015 by Billie Pritchett 15 Comments

Art and beauty have a peculiar kind of relationship and have been uneasily coupled since perhaps the beginning of human history. But the two have always been separable, as the 20th century demonstrated. Art always occupies a particular time and space, but beauty resides somewhere in the excitement of our brains, and we as a species still crave art that excites in this way.

Natural Teleology as New Religion

May 19, 2015 by Billie Pritchett 20 Comments

Many public intellectuals espouse a view of Nature as tending toward truth and goodness, without much justification.

Saying goodbye to Spaceship Earth: A review of Sabine Höhler’s “Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960-1990”

May 4, 2015 by Billie Pritchett Leave a Comment

We’ve managed to bring the planet to the brink of catastrophe. Can we manage to pull it back?

Should the social sciences be like the natural sciences?

March 24, 2015 by Billie Pritchett 26 Comments

Should the social sciences be like the natural sciences? Wilhelm Dilthey didn’t think so; he contended that the concept of Verstehen is crucial in our interpretation of human thought and behavior. Whereas we look for explanations of phenomena in the natural sciences, Verstehen as applied to the social sciences means interpreting human behavior.

The event(s) of September 11

February 13, 2015 by Billie Pritchett 7 Comments

Two years after 9/11, several New Yorkers packed into a courtroom in order to hear a court case on the semantics of the word occurrence. The question was this: Was the attack on One and Two World Trade Center one event or two?

The Creation of a Superintelligence and the End of Inquiry

January 23, 2015 by Billie Pritchett 9 Comments

To construct a superintelligence, we would have to understand human intelligence at a deep level. It’s doubtful we’ll ever be able to do this.

Some Questions on Aesthetics and Art

November 17, 2014 by Billie Pritchett 18 Comments

It was not until I read Carroll’s book that I realized I was operating under a tacit assumption: Art ought to express something of the author’s emotions.

Can anarchism be defended?

November 10, 2014 by Billie Pritchett 14 Comments

The movement away from Anarchy is not to be confused with anarchism.

The Wild and the Good

October 30, 2014 by Billie Pritchett 3 Comments

Henry David Thoreau thought our biological nature explained both our savagery and our spirituality.

Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and the Ethics of Authenticity

September 26, 2014 by Billie Pritchett 5 Comments

Emerson’s ideal involves a background assumption about how human nature works.

Stories We Tell: A Review of Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent

August 29, 2014 by Billie Pritchett 5 Comments

Sandel’s attempt to understand America’s modern malaises relies on telling the wrong story of America’s competing visions and the way these visions evolved.

Free Will Worth Having

July 14, 2014 by Billie Pritchett 12 Comments

What are your thoughts on machines that can predict what you’re going to do in the next five minutes? Do you think that everything that happens now in the universe was causally determined by some event(s) that happened before it? When professional philosophers check people’s intuitions it looks as though sometimes people generally agree that we have free will even if Continue Reading …

Education and Schopenhauer’s “Thinking for Oneself”

June 11, 2014 by Billie Pritchett 8 Comments

In Arthur Schopenhauer’s essay “On Thinking for Oneself” (1851), he writes that there are few people who possess a natural love of learning and that they will only learn from others if they find something that triggers an innate interest inside themselves. Thinking must be kindled, like a fire by a draught; it must be sustained by some interest in the matter Continue Reading …

Discuss Free Will (John Searle, Sam Harris) with Not School

May 13, 2014 by Billie Pritchett Leave a Comment

In light of the most recent PEL episode, we folks in PEL’s Not School will be holding a discussion on free will this month through next month. Some of the conversation will be continuous with and complementary to the PEL guys’ discussion as well as perhaps raise other issues. For the remainder of this month, we’ll be reading John Searle’s Continue Reading …

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About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

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