Given Schleiermacher’s dense prose, I found it a lot easier to prepare for the podcast by “translating” his first two speeches into a more modern voice. As a result, here’s On Religion, the PowerPoint! (Well, the first two speeches, anyway.) If you want to review Schleiermacher’s basic arguments without having to wade through 18th century German translated into 19th century English, Continue Reading …
Heidegger on Schleiermacher’s Second Address
Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house. – Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951) Schleiermacher’s On Religion provided me a Continue Reading …
Be Reasonable, Do It My Way
All reasoning is in service of winning arguments? I knew it all along! It’s hard for me to express any skepticism of the study cited in this New York Times article without going all meta, so I’ll just let the article speak for itself: Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality. Continue Reading …
Schleiermacher as Romantic Vanguard
Watch on YouTube Many of the books discussed on PEL advance their thesis methodically. Not so with Schleiermacher’s On Religion. (Schleiermacher’s approach changed after he became a university professor, whereupon he became more systematic and less interesting.) Schleiermacher’s lack of structured argument may have resulted from his theological, as opposed to philosophical, training. But it’s also a function of his Continue Reading …
Comparing Kant with Schleiermacher on God and the Soul
Listen on YouTube On the Schleiermacher episode, we spent some time comparing On Religion to Kant’s religious arguments, particularly citing Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Kant did not try to prove God’s existence or the soul’s immortality. Rather, he postulated those concepts as helpful ways to help realize the summum bonum, the highest good. “Postulate” is defined as a “a hypothesis Continue Reading …
Capturing Schleiermacher’s Romantic Mood
Watch in YouTube Can modern film depict Schleiermacher’s nature-obsessed 18th century Romantic mood? Probably not, but let’s go. I thought I better understood Husserlian phenomenology after reading Sartre’s Nausea, which even in translation has some gripping prose. The clip above, from Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu (1979) exudes both the German Romantic aesthetic, and a phenomenological approach of sorts. Bonus points if you catch the Continue Reading …
Bertrand Russell’s Very Short Introduction to His Ontology
Watch in YouTube For those who can’t get enough Bertrand Russell, here’s an introduction to logical analysis from his History of Western Philosophy. In this concluding chapter, Russell explains his own philosophy, as inspired by Frege, so even critics of Russell-as-historian shouldn’t object. I was particularly taken with Russell’s ontology, via Einstein. Russell succinctly and I think fairly summarizes a Continue Reading …
Georg Cantor and Ever Larger Infinities
Watch on youtube. A big name-drop during the middle of the Russell episode was the sad story of Georg Cantor and his insanity-inducing continuum hypothesis. Anyone unaware of Cantor and his contributions might want to look at this clip from the Dangerous Knowledge BBC documentary. I thought it provided a good visual explanation of higher levels of infinity. But perhaps Continue Reading …
Debating Locke’s View of Slavery as War
Ta-nehisi Coates, a senior editor for The Atlantic, recently opened up a discussion on Locke’s Second Treatise, with respect to the discussion of slavery. A fairly intelligent debate thread followed in the comments section. Check it out if you found that section of PEL’s Locke episode interesting. Some of the better comments in the thread debated whether or not Locke was Continue Reading …
Žižek on Hegel on Identity
One public intellectual who has made much hay of Hegel’s continued relevance is Slavoj Žižek, who begins one of his jazz-session-like lectures on Hegel’s concept of identity here: Watch on youtube. It’s not clear to me whether Žižek is properly interpreting Hegel, mostly because I find both Žižek and early Hegel incomprehensible. Z’s been accused of mis-reading Hegel, and of Continue Reading …
Logicomix!
In the recent Frege episode, Mark related the famous anecdote of how Bertrand Russell, the man who “discovered” Frege, later confounded him by pointing out a paradox apparent within his logical system. As Wes recounted, Russell’s own attempt to ground mathematics in logic was also later frustrated by a young Kurt Gödel, whose early incompleteness theorems crippled the central purpose of Principia Continue Reading …
Montaigne, Mirror Neurons, and Men with Guns
Here’s an excerpt from a good series on Montaigne the Guardian UK ran last year, written by Sarah Bakewell, who just published a well received book on Montaigne: To take just one example of how we can derive wisdom from Montaigne: his Essays give us a wealth of anecdotes exploring ways of resolving violent confrontations. As a teenager in Bordeaux, Montaigne had Continue Reading …
Science Proves Heidegger (Partially) Correct?
Irony so overwhelming I want to tweet about it with a #Heidegger hashtag: A scientific study recently found empirical support for Heidegger’s concept of zuhanden, which was discussed in the Being and Time podcast.* Wired Science covered the story last year, but the study itself is short enough that you can get through it during a lunch break. To quote the summary Continue Reading …
The Wittgenstein Blues
This one’s self-explanatory. Nothing too weighty, but anyone who can work Wittgenstein into a catchy hook deserves all the exposure he can get: Watch on YouTube. -Daniel Horne
Dworkin on Defining the Good Life
Mark’s posts on Frithjof Bergmann help lay the groundwork for the upcoming episode on Montaigne and what constitutes the “good life.” Coincidentally, there’s a similarly-themed article by Ronald Dworkin in this month’s New York Review of Books. I may disagree with Mark’s conclusions, and maybe even some of his premises. But I better appreciate Mark’s approach after reading Dworkin’s essay. Nowhere Continue Reading …
When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong
A research physicist friend of mine who works at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a bit of a global warming skeptic. When I brought up all the scientific research on the subject, he said, somewhat dismissively, “Yes, but anyone who gets a PhD in climate science goes into it with an agenda. No one goes into particle physics just to Continue Reading …
Summarizing Schopenhauer in Under 600 Seconds
Here’s another documentary video clip on Schopenhauer, discussing his early disaffection from Christianity, and also some fun facts. For example, he always kept two statues in his study — one of Kant, and the other of Buddha. Watch in YouTube. This clip also paraphrases some amusing quotes from Volume II of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, highlighting Artie’s snarky Continue Reading …
David Foster Wallace on Wittgenstein
Slate Magazine recently posted a great article on the recently-departed author and essayist David Foster Wallace, focusing on how Wallace (correctly?) interpreted Wittgenstein’s early and late philosophy to cope with his allegedly crushing sense of solipsistic dread. I’m not sure I buy this thesis, but Wallace’s suicide implies something was clearly bothering him. Even so, I’d ascribe a more clinical Continue Reading …
Debating Individual vs. Environmental Forces in History (or, Lord Bragg Loses his Bearing!)
Among my favorite podcasts is the BBC Radio 4 show In Our Time. IOT is usually a genteel forum dedicated to discussing “the history of ideas.” Topics and tone range from Oxbridge middlebrow to Oxbridge highbrow, but I always walk away learning something. I almost swerved the car, however, when tempers flared on last week’s episode. IOT’s host, Lord Melvyn Bragg, Continue Reading …
Martial Arts Without the Mysticism
A trivial generalization about modern Western philosophy is that it splits between the more scientific “analytic” and more humanistic “continental” traditions.* A crass — but more true than false — characterization of these two traditions is that the analytic tradition attempts to solve problems, and the continental traditions…um…don’t. Similarly, one might roughly divide East Asian martial arts into those emphasizing mutual Continue Reading …