Seth reviews Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “The Philosopher’s Zone” and reveals surprising statistics about how philosophical Australians really are.
The Thinkers from Down Under
Steven Nadler on Spinoza and Religious Fundamentalism
Steven Nadler of the University of Wisconsin gives a lecture re. Spinoza on religion: Watch this on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIYOC6RQ_LY Around 6 minutes in, he discusses the claim that Spinoza is a pantheist.
Spinoza and Leibniz: Anthony Quinton and Bryan Magee
We talked a bit on Ep 24 about Spinoza’s relationship to Leibniz, and here’s the first of a series of videos that gives more detail on that relationship: To watch this on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmbGbo-oyKc McGee’s introduction for the first three minutes or so just repeats biographical information we gave on the podcast. Quinton focuses on the metaphysics of the two Continue Reading …
Karen Armstrong on the “Ground Zero Mosque” and Sufism
Via Open Culture, religion scholar Karen Armstrong (whom Mark has discussed several times — and who’s book The Case for God may be the text for a future episode) comes out in favor of the “Ground Zero Mosque,” noting that it would be a Sufi Mosque. “We all need a good dose of Sufi-ism,” she says, and quotes Ibn Arabi, a Continue Reading …
Our new blog feed (that you should subscribe to)
People who only check our our podcast via iTunes and bookmark this page can ignore this message (unless you’d like to have blog content delivered to you instead…). If you previously subscribed to the Partially Examined Life via e-mail, or use a feed reader, or have this feed streaming to your site: The blog feed address has now changed. It Continue Reading …
PREVIEW-Episode 24: Spinoza on God and Metaphysics
Discussing Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), books 1 and 2. God is everything, therefore the world is God as apprehended through some particular attributes, namely insofar as one of his aspects is infinite space (extension, i.e. matter) and insofar as one of his aspects is mind (our minds being chunks or “modes” of the big God mind).
Revaluation of Values
“You know, the very baddest things are dying, and getting killed, and getting eaten, and getting cooked. And kindergarten, that is the next baddest thing.” -My niece, Izzy, age 5, worrying about her future
Experimental Philosophy
At the New York Times’ Room for Debate some philosophy professors are discussing the following question: As philosophy departments have come under attack for being costly and impractical, do experimental methods, called “x-phi” by its proponents, offer new horizons for old problems? Or are they immaterial and a waste of time? Most of the participants note that Philosophy’s use of evidence Continue Reading …
Armstrong on Approaching Religious Texts
This clip actually addresses my concern about the political vs. the philosophical. It describes Armstrong’s intellectual evolution from skeptic to sympathetic historian. -Mark
The Philosopher’s Annual
Philosopher’s Annual selects what it takes to be the ten best philosophy in a given year and makes them available online. Leiter has a list of forthcoming 2009 selections, including two that look interesting to me: Selim Berker (Harvard), “The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience”, Philosophy & Public Affairs 37:4, 293-329 James Dreier (Brown), “Relativism (and Expressivism) and the Problem of Disagreement”, Continue Reading …
A New Atheist on the “Ground Zero Mosque”
Sam Harris makes it clear that his atheism is in fact motivated less by reason and more by spleen: Should a 15-story mosque and Islamic cultural center be built two blocks from the site of the worst jihadist atrocity in living memory? Put this way, the question nearly answers itself. He compares it to building a shrine to Satan or a 9/11 Continue Reading …
Armstrong on Dawkins and Harris
This is a follow up to my last post, which you should look at the comments on for some good comments by Wes. I’ve now read the part in Armstrong where she addresses Dawkins directly (from p. 304 of “The Case for God”): For Dawkins, religious faith rests on the idea that “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence, who deliberately Continue Reading …
Armstrong and Dawkins
Continuing my independent (i.e. not directly for the podcast) reading into the atheism debate: Nearly done with the Karen Armstrong book. This is a good bit of secondary literature, with short summaries of the views re. God of a really impressively wide range of historical figures. Her overall view is that of apophatic, or negative theology, which is to say Continue Reading …
The Imagination: The Handmaiden of Tautology
Leiter approves of a recent “very successful” post on the New York Times’ philosophy blog about “reclaiming the imagination.” His wrath has been appeased … for now. Here’s the gist of the piece: Imagination has survival value because it allows one to choose the best plan by running through possible consequences. This is meant to be a response to the Continue Reading …
Speaking of John Galt
McSweeney’s does Rand: After all, we’ve managed to raise a bright, self-reliant girl who achieves her goals by means of incentive and ratiocination and never—or very rarely—through the corrupt syllogism of force. We know, despite what you and a number of other parents we’ve met have said—as they carried their whimpering little social parasites away—that Johanna’s defiant, quasi-bellicose nature only Continue Reading …
The PhD, Visualized
By: Wes Apparently getting a PhD is like trying to impregnate the nothingness beyond the periphery of a vast epistemological cosmos with … a multi-colored logo-phallus.
Sexting Montaigne (et. al.) – Pyrrhonian Skepticism and the Philosophical Tradition
By: Wes Alwan There’s a new bio of Montaigne out, How to Live: a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, reviewed here: Because Montaigne’s great question was Socrates’s question—“how to live?”—she arranges her portrait of him around the answers he offered. … Familiarly, the key to Montaigne is his scepticism. It is the scepticism of Pyrrho, Continue Reading …
The Partially Examined Latency Period: Saying things about what we believe and stuff
By: Wes As a follow-up to Seth’s post on teaching philosophy to children, I wanted to mention a New York Times article published in April on this subject: The Examined Life, Age 8. Second graders at a charter school in Springfiled, Mass. are being taught some philosophy via classic children’s books like Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree (you’ll notice that Amazon Continue Reading …
Should children be exposed to Philosophy?
The Philosophy Shop in the UK has a program to teach children philosophy – Seth asks whether that’s a useful and good thing.
Favorite Philosophy Blogs?
As I’ve been checking out various philosophy podcasts, it struck me that I’ve neglected looking into online philosophy blogs. There’s good reason for this, of course: if I’m at a computer (or iPhone or whatever) reading philosophy, I’m probably doing research for one of our episodes. If podcasting weren’t such a new medium, and you all had ready access to Continue Reading …
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