The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
A Philosophy Podcast and Philosophy Blog
Mark and Bill do impressions of people you don’t know. The is-ought distinction is bravely explored. Does pretending to be cavemen help? Magic business is afoot. Childhood speaks.
Mark philosophizes at partiallyexaminedlife.com.
Bill improvises (and teaches) at chicagoimprovstudio.com.
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For our final 2021 installment on G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, we give you a second episode originally posted in 2011, where Mark and Seth continue from ep. 35 with guest Tom McDonald to cover the rest of chapter 4, focusing on sections 178-230.
We cover the famous “master and slave” parable, plus stoicism, skepticism, and the “unhappy consciousness” (i.e. Christianity).
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Emma-Jean is a trumpeter, singer, multi-instrumentalist, and techie who runs her own label. She’s had five releases since 2016. We discuss “Say Something” (and listen at the end to “Spectre” from Yellow (2021), “Open – Remix feat. Blu” (a 2020 single), and “Um” from Um Yang (2020). Intro: “Baro Bop” from Walrus (2016). For more see emmajeanthackray.com.
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With the recent theatrical release of The Green Knight, Mark and Brian along with Den of Geek’s David Crow and the very British Al Baker consider the range of cinematic Arthuriana, including Excalibur (1981), Camelot (1967), King Arthur (2004), King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017), First Knight (1995), Sword of the Valiant (1983), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1973), and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).
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p>Why is lying wrong? Scene conceptions clash. It is hard to lie in a pretend scene, because the pretending is already a lie. You can lie inside-out or outside-in.
Mark philosophizes at partiallyexaminedlife.com.
Bill improvises (and teaches) at chicagoimprovstudio.com.
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Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” is subtitled a “Story of Wall St.,” yet there is almost nothing in it of the bustle of city life, and entirely nothing in it of the hustle of the trading floor. The story’s walls block out the streets, serving on the one hand as a container for a colorful assortment of human Xerox machines, on the other as a blank projection screen for the reveries of a man who seems to quietly rebel against the very concept of imitation. Can we continue to live and work, if we strongly prefer to do nothing that is derivative? What happens to our aspirations, if we come to fully appreciate the gravity of fate? Could we continue to tell our own stories, if we were liberated from all idiosyncrasies of character? Wes & Erin analyze.
We re-introduce an episode from ten years ago that’s long been behind our paywall on G.F.W. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Ch. 4A, “Self-Consciousness,” which features guest Tom McDonald.
We’ve removed the “review” section of the old episode (the first half), because it’s duplicative of our recent three-episode run on this book. The discussion thus picks up in the book right where ep. 277 leaves off.
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Does it make sense to try to have everyone get what they “deserve”? We act out the desert machine but yet get no predictable cake.
Judgebot 5000 enters our lives. Is this our first really good episode? Maybe.
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Melvin has played bass on over 200 albums since 1980 in the worlds of jazz, rock, and hip-hop, and has numerous songwriting credits, playing with Defunkt, Arto Lindsay, Henry Rollins, Bernie Worrell, Vernon Reid, etc.
We discuss his solo tune featuring Kokayi “Get Some” from 4+1 Equals 5 for May 25 (2021), the title track from The Terror End Of Beauty (2018) by his trio Harriet Tubman, and “Howard Beach Memoirs” by Power Tools (with Bill Frisell and Ronald Shannon Jackson) from Strange Meeting (1987). We end by listening to “Canto por Odudua” by Melvin Gibbs’ Elevated Entity from Ancients Speak (2009) Intro: “Melvin’s Tune” from Defunkt (1980). More at music.melvin-gibbs.com.
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Continuing on The Phenomenology of Spirit, ch. 3, “Force and the Understanding.”
We start off by considering the players in force: the thing exerting the force and the thing receiving. By arguing that these are not so different, Hegel moves to arguing that knowledge and the world are likewise not sharply distinguished.
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We try to be boring. Bill tries to make a discovery amidst the canards. Mark tries to be a good meta-dupe. With our first celebrity guest, the final judge is unveiled!
Mark philosophizes at partiallyexaminedlife.com.
Bill improvises (and teaches) at chicagoimprovstudio.com.
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The story begins and ends with two variations on the meaning of the title. On the one hand, to give another turn of the screw is to ratchet up the horror of a good ghost story, in this case by involving children in it. On the other, it’s to treat the cause of that horror as if it were just another of life’s many obstacles, to be overcome both by screwing one’s courage to the sticking place, and by suppressing awareness of what is revoltingly unnatural in it. Whose screw turns out to be looser—the audience that enjoys such stories (and sometimes believes them), or the teller who manufactures them? Wes & Erin analyze Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.”
On The Phenomenology of Spirit, ch. 3, “Force and the Understanding.”
What is “force” as physics describes it? And scientific law? Do these terms denote objects in the world, or models for how we describe the world?
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“Queering” doesn’t just mean adding LGBTQ+ representation to games; it’s disruption of norms through added player freedom.
Mark and guest co-host Tyler engage game designer Naomi Clark on sandbox games, character creation, how games train us, glitches, speed runs, and more, touching on The Sims, The Last of Us, Cyberbpunk, Mass Effect, and her own games like Sissyfight 2000 and the card game Consentacle.
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Two scenes reveal our underlying definitions. How will we overcome the lag between our words? How many beats in an heirloom beet if an heirloom hair-looms beets?
Mark philosophizes at partiallyexaminedlife.com.
Bill improvises (and teaches) at chicagoimprovstudio.com.
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Chris started in the Scottish electronic band Finitribe in the early ’80s and then moved to Chicago in 1988, doing stints in Revolting Cocks, Ministry, Pigface, et al, before embarking on a 23-album solo career.
We discuss “A Phantom Marriage” from The Birthday Poems (2021) feat. Monica Queen, the title track from Bloodhounds (2018), “De Testimony” by Finitribe from Let the Tribe Grow (1986), plus we listen to “God Gets Religion” by Cocksure from Operation C.O.C.K.S.U.R.E. (2020). Intro: “Stowaway” from Whiplash Boychild (1991). For more see chrisconnelly.com and thebirthdaypoems.com.
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Focusing on The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), ch. 2 “Perception.”
Hegel’s critique of the adequacy of perceptual knowledge has metaphysical aspects: The relation of substance to properties, properties to each other, and things to other things and to the perceiver all create difficulties that call for more active participation by the mind.
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Is death something to be feared? What’s next? What are the DETAILS? Do not adjust your listening device; that sound you hear is improvisation.
Mark philosophizes at partiallyexaminedlife.com.
Bill improvises (and teaches) at chicagoimprovstudio.com.
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Gone with the Wind— adjusted for inflation, the highest-grossing film in American history— has undergone several critical reappraisals in the 82 years since its production and release. Certainly the film romanticizes the Antebellum South and the Confederacy while glossing over the evils of slavery and stereotyping many of its black characters. Yet it may also provide a sharp critique or even satirization of its white characters— the ambivalent, arrogant, and deluded plantation owners who fail to acknowledge that their so-called “fairy-tale kingdoms” are built on the backs of slaves. What can we make of Rhett Butler’s characterization of the Confederate “Cause” as the “Cause of Living in the Past”? And why does even the modern, adaptable Scarlett O’Hara remain in thrall to a childhood dream that, like the “gallantry” of the Old South, was nothing more than a fantasy? Wes & Erin anazlye.
On The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), ch. 1 “Sense Certainty” and ch. 2 “Perception.”
We walk through the first step in considering Hegel’s dialectical analysis of theories of knowledge. Sense-certainty claims that we have direct access to sensory particulars which can act as foundational. But can we really refer or point to a particular thing without bringing some universal concepts to bear, like “this” (which can refer to any number of things), as well as “here”, “now” and even “I”?
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