There was some discussion in the recent podcast about how an ethics can be derived from Martin Buber 's I and Thou. Recently one philosopher has pointed to Buber's work as at least an historical antecedent to his theory. The third chapter of Stephen Darwall's 2006 book, The Second-Person Standpoint, opens with the following quote from Buber: When one says You, the I of the... 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 and Continue Reading …
Robert Stern on Moral Obligation
One question, but by no means the only question, that we can ask ourselves when reading the great philosophers of the past is what can they tells us about contemporary debates? A recent attempt to show the fruitfulness of bringing history to bear on a contemporary debate is Robert Stern's Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard (hereafter UMO). In UMO Stern Continue Reading …
Zizek and Pop Culture in Philosophy Today
PEL's last episode focused on Karl Marx via The German Ideology. Possibly one of the most famous/infamous Marxists of our time is Slavoj Zizek. Some have called him too extreme to be taken seriously, while others have praised him for his brilliance. A recent article in U.K. based paper The Guardian sheds some light on this interesting character and also discusses an upcoming Continue Reading …
Santa Fe Institute MOOC on Complexity
The Santa Fe Institute has jumped into the massive open online course game, launching "Introduction to Complexity" run by Melanie Mitchell, a professor of computer science at Portland State University and author of Complexity: A Guided Tour. The Santa Fe Institute has done lots of interesting work over the years in complexity, chaos, and emergent systems. One thing I've always Continue Reading …
The Great Divide: Concerning the Battle Between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
[Editor's Note: We're happy here to present a first blog post for us by Rian Mitch (submitted in response to our recent call for more bloggers). Rian was one of the voices on our Deleuze Not School discussion, whom we met when he took us to task via email for our slipshod treatment of Derrida on ep. 51. He consequently has been leading a Derrida Not School group.] A Continue Reading …
Ian Hacking on Probability & Inference
The most recent brough-ha-ha from one of Mark's posts seems to center on rationality and philosophy, but underlying all the stuff in the "new rationality" is understanding the process of updating our current knowledge with new information through Bayes Theorem (LW calls the process belief updating or bayesian updating). Bayes Theorem is both very useful and very interesting Continue Reading …
Is Quine “Literature” Because He Reads All Smooth and Silky?
After our posts about philosophical literature it seemed appropriate to refer to this post from the NY Times on philosophy itself as literature by Jim Holt. An excerpt: Now let me narrow my query: Does anybody read analytic philosophy for pleasure? Is this kind of philosophy literature? Here you might say, “Certainly not!” Or you might say, “What the heck is analytic Continue Reading …
Daniel Little (UnderstandingSociety) on “Marketing Wittgenstein”
A good new-to-me web find today is The UnderstandingSociety blog from U. of Michigan-Dearborn's Daniel Little, who writes about philsoophy from a sociological perspective. This is very relevant to our recent discussion of fame among philosophers on our Lucy Lawless episode, and in this article, Little reflects on why it might be that Wittgenstein is so famous, given, as I've Continue Reading …
Some Sour Fruits of Popular Science
A friend of the podcast pointed me to today's column in the NYTimes Gray Matter by Alisa Quart about a backlash against neuroscience, particularly popular accounts of it throughout mainstream media from Malcom Gladwell on tipping points to Chris Mooney on the "republican brain" to Eben Alexander on the neuroscience of heaven. These all follow the general theme of Continue Reading …
Assessing Irony
I saw this Opinionator article from Christy Wampole in the New York Times: "How to Live Without Irony." It condemns the ironic lifestyle of Generation Y as terminally inauthentic, avoiding real commitments, making us (them) incapable of dealing with the world at hand and with each other. Central to Wampole's critique is a standard "I don't understand the younger generation" Continue Reading …
Civics via Schoolhouse Rock
During our recording on the Federalist Papers, we mentioned at some point Schoolhouse Rock, a PBS television series that ran regularly when I was a child. For anyone who doesn't know, it was a cartoon with skits and songs about grammar, science, civics, American History and some other topics. In addition to state and federal civics classes in junior high and high school (do Continue Reading …
Red State, Blue State, One State, Two States
Steven Pinker of Harvard recently posted an article on The Stone at the New York Times called "Why Are States So Red and Blue?" His summary of his thesis: The North and coasts are extensions of Europe and continued the government-driven civilizing process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that emerged in Continue Reading …
Dyson on Philosophy
Freeman Dyson has a review of Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist? in the early November issue of The New York Review of Books. Dyson is an esteemed physicist who, as a young man, cinched the link between accounts of quantum electrodynamics given separately by Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itiro Tomonanga in the late 1940s. He probably should've been included in Continue Reading …
The Upside of Fandom
A recent blog post at New York Magazine's Vulture blog queries whether fandom is inherently pathological. This seems a fair question to ask after some of the more amusing anecdotes revealed on the Lucy Lawless episode: [Fandom is], by definition, a bit different from hobbies like cooking or learning an instrument in that fandom is in the service of someone else’s creativity 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 …
Idle and Motorized Speculations
Two friends of mine have recently started blogs, though of different stripes. One is by Gary Borjesson called Idle Speculations. Gary and I met on the faculty at St. John's, and, like me, is on leave right now. Gary's book on dogs, friendship, and philosophy, Willing Dogs & Reluctant Masters: On Friendship and Dogs, has just been published. His blog, just a few entries long, Continue Reading …
Pseudo-Philosophy on Same-Sex Marriage
In last Monday's Austin Daily Herald (that's Austin, MN), Mr. Wallace Alcorn, Ph.D., historian of religion and Bible expositor, wrote this a priori argument against same-sex marriage, where he argues that it is "ontologically impossible." Here's the argument: Nothing has meaning, much less existence, if it does not have properties that belong to the universe of the thing. With Continue Reading …
Iris Murdoch on Philosophy and Literature
In Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, Iris Murdoch claimed that "[a]rt is far and away the most educational thing we have..." Here she is discussing this notion, among many others, with the philosopher Bryan Magee. Part One: Watch on YouTube. Continue Reading …
Literature and Philosophy: Antagonists or Partners?
Can literature be philosophical? Can philosophy be considered literature? What are the roles of literature and philosophy in relation to "truth?" Why should philosophers be interested in literature? While trying to come up with something to post in relation to the recent PEL discussion on Cormac McCarthy’s "No Country for Old Men" I came across an interesting discussion over Continue Reading …
The Value of Writing (Non-Fiction)
In a recent article in The Atlantic, Peg Tyre documents the remarkable turnaround in student performance at an underperforming high school when the curriculum was altered to put a focus on analytic writing. Analytic writing, it turns out, is a marker of critical thinking: if you can craft clear and coherent written sentences, paragraphs and essays it generally means you have Continue Reading …
Universal Salvation: One Hell of a Question
In the recent Candide episode we saw how Voltaire satirized Leibniz’s solution to the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil is still a popular topic in contemporary philosophy of religion. One twist on the traditional problem of evil comes from philosopher and theologian, Marilyn McCord Adams, who suggests that for Christians the principal problem of evil is the compatibility of Continue Reading …
Seth’s Interview with Dan Mullin
Dan Mullin is a philosophy grad student and part-time teacher who runs a blog called The Unemployed Philosopher's Blog. His mission statement is to challenge the view that a philosophical education isn't of much value for employment. As he says: My name is Daniel Mullin and I’m a philosophy grad student and part-time teacher. The other part of the time, I’m unemployed Continue Reading …
Sailing Philosophy
Every August for the past ten years my family and I have spent a couple of weeks on a smallish lake in northwest Michigan. I say small, but it's about 1800 acres, plenty big for most purposes, if tiny compared to the big water of Lake Michigan just five miles away. Most every afternoon the breeze picks up and I take a good sail on our Laser. Sometimes it's peaceful and the Continue Reading …
Bertrand Russell on Aristotle’s Politics
http://youtu.be/tsNmIid70HU Listen on YouTube. Like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate. Even so, Bertrand Russell's prose is entertaining enough to make this audio chapter on Aristotle's Politics a worthwhile supplement to Continue Reading …
Eco Locating Meaning
Every now and then you find something that is, on the one hand, unexpected. The thought of it hadn't occurred to you, neither as a fact found through the memes of popular culture nor as an extrapolation from your current knowledge. On the other hand, the discovery isn't so much a surprise as simply new information that really just fits in with all the rest. My most recent such Continue Reading …
“You Didn’t Build That.” Political Ethics Summary in the Wash Post
In this Washington Post editorial on Ezra Klein's Wonkblog by Dylan Matthews, we get an attempt to connect philosophy to current political discourse, with the conclusion "...which is perhaps why, in general, politicians don’t spend a lot of time listening to philosophers." The issue is desert, as in "do rich people deserve to keep their money?" Matthews characterizes the Continue Reading …
Cilliers on Slowness
A PEL fan pointed us to the work of the recently deceased philosopher Paul Cilliers from South Africa, particularly to a short paper he wrote for "On the Importance of a Certain Slowness." (published as a chapter in Worldviews, Science, and Us: Philosophy and Complexity ). In the essay, Cilliers points to the various "slow" movements that have been cropping up around the Continue Reading …
Understanding It Doesn’t Make it Less Freaky
Dennis Overbye has a nice article this week in the NYTimes on the recently published explanation of the Pioneer Anomaly. As he explains, The story starts with the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes, which went past Jupiter and Saturn in the late 1970s and now are on their way out of the solar system. In the 1980s it became apparent that a mysterious force was slowing them down a Continue Reading …
Wisdom Studies
It is oft said (at least when exercising etymology muscles) that philosophy is "love of wisdom." Just like other mind-related topics such as emotion and creativity, wisdom is getting the scientific treatment. One of our listeners pointed us to a book by Stephen S. Hall titled Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience which surveys a variety of answers to the question of what Continue Reading …
Jim Holt Considering Why the World Exists
Jim Holt has a new book out with the provocative title Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story, featuring encounters with the mathematician Roger Penrose, author John Updike, physicist Steven Weinberg, philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, and theologian Richard Swinburne, among others. David Ulin at the L.A. Times summarizes: That question — "Why is there something Continue Reading …
The Guardian on Raymond Tallis
Stuart Kelly at the Guardian gives an interesting review of Raymond Tallis's new book, In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections, which features such essays as "An Introduction to Incontinental Philosophy." Kelley stresses Tallis's essay in this collection on time: Tallis's express wish is to redeem time from physics – he might also have said, to rescue it from Continue Reading …
Gregory Sadler on Emotivism
Last post showed a piece of theological propaganda that distorted what emotivism is. This introductory ethics lecture by Gregory Sadler of Marist College uses a more academically respectable approach, to make essentially the same point, which is that emotivism and relativsm are essentially the same thing as subjectivism, which amounts to giving up on ethics altogether. Watch Continue Reading …
Graphing the History of Philosophy
This is a crazy cool interactive visualization of the relative influence and importance of philosophers. This guy simonraper (that's his handle anyway) did a data pull from Wikipedia determining what philosophers are identified as having influenced other philosophers and used a graphing platform to visually map it. If you are interested in his methodology, go read the Continue Reading …
Living Ironically: The Upshot
With a few comments on my last post to spur me on, here are some hopefully final thoughts on the ironic life for the moment. Irony is one of the characteristic social modes for Americans of at least the Generation X (that would be mine, i.e. 40ish) and younger. I can't speak for how pervasive it is demographically in terms of race, class, or education: I certainly read R. Continue Reading …
Tripe, Sklep, and the Unexpected (Dave Barry to Michael Brodsky)
Just because I brought it up on the episode, I call the new readers' attention to a book I wrote in 1993, Tripe. You can get it for free here. I also blogged in 2010 about the first few chapters. I had a few purposes in writing this, one of which was to explore the thesis that what makes something funny is the unexpected. As mentioned on the episode, one of my early Continue Reading …
Deeply Funny?
(Image: Tom Motley when he's all spiffed up.) It is a little known fact, even among our philosophically sophisticated readers, that Heidegger argued for the supremacy of German humor. Because German jokes have the most precise underlying structure, he argued, German humor would rule the earth for a thousand years. (Sorry if you've already heard some version of that old Continue Reading …
Borat on Display
In the episode we spent some time discussing Sacha Baron Cohen's humor of duping people (I don't know whether he does this in his current movie, which sounds like it has more scripted elements), which I generally think is great, while Dylan and Seth found it hard to sit through given the duping of the innocent. This scene from his TV show is pretty typical: Watch on Continue Reading …
Alain de Botton Wants to Make Ethical Porn
In a press release (cited here in the New Statesman) from his School of Life, Alain de Botton claims he's going to take on our cultural obsession with unethical porn and create some that accords with our moral sensibilities and the good life. This is, of course, hilarious and there have been some requisitely wicked reactions like here (HuffPo has nothing on the Guardian's Continue Reading …
Sean Wilson’s Wittgenstein Forum
At some point after our Tractatus episodes came out, Sean Wilson, a political science professor at Wright State University, contacted me to find out when we'd be doing the Investigations so as to coordinate something between us and his discussion group. Some years later now, I've checked out his forum: "Wittgenstein's Aftermath: Life in the Post-Analytic World, Given by the Continue Reading …
Racism Among Historic Philosophers
As mentioned on the race episode, I thumbed through a book edited by Andrew Valls called Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy,which includes essays on Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Marx, and Nietzsche. To give Valls's words on the last of these, since I mentioned it in the discussion: ...James Winchester examines Continue Reading …
Flanagan on Buddhist Eudaimonia
So just what is the good life, according to Buddhism, according to Flanagan, according to this post I'm writing right now? (...According to the inner, private language that my attempts to write are meant to reflect, according to the reality as perceived which my inner words are attempting to express, according to the reality itself to which my reality as perceived is meant to Continue Reading …
Is It Really Philosophy? (Are You an Ass for Asking?)
In this post brought to my attention by our commenter DMF in light of our race episode, Kristie Dotson of Michigan State University attacks the question that one might ask when reading DuBois, for instance: Is this really philosophy? The question, how is this paper philosophy, is a poorly formulated question. At best, when asked in good faith, the question could in fact be one Continue Reading …
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 …
PEL Mentions in the Onion and Elsewhere
Yes, we have a Google alert on ourselves. Go write about us and we will try to give you a linkback or even go read/listen to you, etc. (When Colin Marshall did this, I hooked him up with a gig writing for openculture, where one of his posts just got picked up by The New Yorker, Slate, and Andrew Sullivan's blog. Go, Colin!) Here are some recent PEL mentions on the wide scary Continue Reading …
Beauty and Science (Or Fighting Over the Love)
I subscribe to a number of thick writing journals filled with short stories, essays, and poetry. I am generally behind in reading them, though once I sit down and do so I never regret it. Tin House's recent 50th anniversary issue devoted to "Beauty" falls in this category and is apropos of Wes' recent comments on philosophers and science envy. Two of the essays reflect on Continue Reading …
55 Online Philosophy Courses (via OpenCulture)
Openculture.com has expanded its listing of philosophy courses. If you listen through one of them, I'd be happy to pass on your review of it through this blog. -Mark Linsenmayer Continue Reading …
All the Pirsig You Can Eat
There's enough material floating around on Robert Pirsig to keep you busy for a while no matter what your level of interest might be. If you're in a seriously philosophical mood, there are two at least two Doctoral dissertations, a gidebook,a textbook and a Master's thesis. There are also options if you want to discuss Pirsig's work or even if you're interested in exploring all 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 Continue Reading …
David Ray Griffin on Whitehead on Concsiousness
By crankular demand, I'm putting aside by irritation at hearing the name "Whitehead" to read this article on Whitehead's theory of consciousness--Consciousness as a Subjective Form: Whitehead’s Nonreductionist Naturalism by David Ray Griffin--and see if it helps fill in the gaps in Pirsig's account of experience. Griffin's CV describes him as a "Professor of Philosophy of Continue Reading …