The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
A Philosophy Podcast and Philosophy Blog
On Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). Is gender socially constructed, and if so, how?
Butler describes gender not as an essential quality of a person, but as “performed,” as habits of acting in certain ways in accordance with customs. Her idea of social construction is so totalizing that even biological sex itself is constructed. With guest Jennifer Hansen.
End song: “I’m a Boy” by Lys Guillorn as interviewed for Nakedly Examined Music #44.
On Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949): “The Woman in Love” and “Myths” with guest Jennifer Hansen. We explore the maladies of love, try to figure how B’s picture relates to modern romance and what her positive prescription for good love is, and use the recent film A Marriage Story as a case study.
End song: “Easier than Leaving” by Michaela Anne, interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #114.
On the Platonic dialogue written around 380 BCE about an encounter between Socrates and one of the leading Sophists of his day.
What is virtue (“the political art” according to Protagoras), and can it be taught? What are the relations of the various virtues to each other? Do they really amount ultimately to one and the same thing, i.e., wisdom? In this entertaining dialogue, Socrates and Protagoras swap positions, and Socrates seems to parody the Sophists’ style.
End song: “Make It Clear” by Feelies; Mark interviewed Glenn Mercer on Nakedly Examined Music #41.
On Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949): the intro, conclusion, “Woman’s Situation and Character” and parts of “Lived Experience,” with guest Jennifer Hansen.
According to Beauvoir, Woman is historically conceived of by society (and herself) as “Other,” as not a Subject who creates and makes decisions. Her life is predetermined, revolving around marriage and child-bearing, and is so deformed by this situation.
End song: “Wrong Side of Gone” by Beth Kille as discussed on Nakedly Examined Music #13.
On René Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637), an overview of his work that distills his method, outlines his famous Meditations, presents a provisional (Stoic) ethics, and considers whether he wants to be a public intellectual. This is all meant as a preface to scientific publications on geometry, optics, and meteors.
End song: “My Real Fantasy” By Joe Louis Walker, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #110.
On Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1993) with guest Lynda Olman.
What’s the “modern” ideology of science, and is there something we should critique about it? Latour wants us to think about science not abstractly through the eternal truths it supposedly discovers, but through the concrete practices of scientists. He investigates the Modern Constitution by which science and politics are kept conceptually separate, a myth that he claims we’ve never fully bought into.
End song: “Mono No Aware” by Guy Sigsworth, as discussed on Nakedly Examined Music #109.
On René Descartes’s Rules for Direction of the Mind (1628).
Is there a careful way to approach problems that will ensure that you’ll always be right? What if you just never assert anything you can’t be sure of? This is Descartes’s strategy, modeled on mathematics. We likewise carefully move step-by-step through this text.
End song: “Perfect Design” by Ian Moore, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #94.
On Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections” (1994), Charles Mills’s “But What Are You Really?, The Metaphysics of Race” (1998), and Neven Sesardic’s “Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept” (2010). With guest Coleman Hughes.
End song: “Tired Skin” by Alejandro Escovedo, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #60.
On Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What (1999) and Peter Berger’s “Religion and World Construction” (1967).
Guest Coleman Hughes from Dilemma joins us to survey the types of social construction arguments: the “culture wars” (e.g., race, gender) and the “science wars” (scientific findings are not read off the world but emerge from history). Something can be constructed, yet still be an objective truth we have to deal with.
End song: “The ConstruKction of Light, Part 1” by King Crimson; listen to Mark with Trey Gunn on Nakedly Examined Music #21.
On Sir Francis Bacon’s New Organon (1620).
Bacon claims to have developed a new toolset that will open up nature to inquiry in a way that wasn’t possible for ancient and modern natural philosophy. Mark, Wes, and Dylan consider how much what Bacon describes resembles modern scientific method, talk through Bacon’s “four idols” that interfere with impartial inquiry, and consider how Bacon’s method fits in with his larger political-ethical-religious views.
End song: “Stuck in a Cave” by Chrome Cranks; hear Mark talk to Peter Aaron on Nakedly Examined Music #93.
On Simone Weil’s essays “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” (1939) and “Analysis of Oppression” (1934).
How do circumstances oppress and dehumanize us? Weil describes the mechanisms that keep people at war and maintain oppression even through revolutions as inherent to the logic of power. With guest Corey Mohler.
End song: “Throw Down the Sword” from Wishbone Ash; hear Andy Powell on Nakedly Examined Music #51.
On Soren Kierkegaard’s essay “The Present Age” (1846) and Hubert Dreyfus’s “Nihilism on the Information Highway: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age” (2004).
What’s wrong with our society? Kierkegaard saw the advent of the press and gossip culture as engendering a systematic passivity and shallowness in his fellows, and Dreyfus thinks this is an even more apt description of the Internet Age. With guest John Ganz.
End song: “Wry Observer” by Aaron David Gleason, as discussed on Nakedly Examined Music #71.
The climax and denouement of our summer philosophy of mind series: Ned Block visits to fill in the gaps about functionalism and attributing consciousness to machines. We discuss two essays from Blockheads (2019): Brian McLaughlin’s “Could an Android be Sentient?” and Michael Tye’s “Homunculi Heads and Silicon Chips: The Importance of History to Phenomenology.”
End song: “Your So Dark Sleep/Goodbye” by The Black Watch, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #102.
On Ned Block’s “Troubles with Functionalism” (1978) and David Chalmers’s “Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia” (1995).
If mental states are functional states, there couldn’t be zombies. Yet Block claims that there could be zombies: for example, a functional duplicate of you whose components are actually citizens of China obeying algorithmic rules. Even if the resulting system acts like you, it obviously isn’t conscious.
Chalmers argues that you’d then need to explain the experiences of a creature half way between you and the zombie, but you can’t, so Block’s argument doesn’t work and functionalism is left standing. What do you think? Do you hate weird thought experiments like these?
End song: “Machine” by Helen Money as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #101.
On Hilary Putnam’s “The Nature of Mental States” (1973) and David M. Armstrong’s “The Causal Theory of the Mind” (1981).
What is the mind? Functionalist theories identify the mental not with the brain exactly, but with something the brain does. So some other creature without a brain (maybe a computer) might be able to do that same thing if it could duplicate the structure of what our brains do. Is this a satisfying account of the mind?
End song: “Pain Makes You Beautiful” by Jeff Heiskell’s JudyBats, as featured on Nakedly Examined Music #5.
Mark, Seth, Dylan, and Wes reflect on the changing state of podcasting and public philosophy over the last decade, how our goals and interests have changed since we started we started. Why don’t colleges pay their faculty to educate the public through regular, broadcasted conversations like ours? If you think we’re snarky, take a look at actual philosophy faculty! Should we continue to do more topics that are not strictly philosophy? Also, the stalled state of the PEL book.
End song: “High Rollin’ Cult” by Mark Lint with Erica Spyres, celebrating Pretty Much Pop. Listen now to the latest episodes, including our interview with Yakov Smirnoff, at patreon.com/prettymuchpop.
What counts as binge watching? Why do we do it? Is it bad for us? Mark, Erica, and Brian, the hosts of this still-not-formally launched new entertainment podcast for the PEL Network, think about what we get out of binge watching, whether it’s bad for us, what kind of shows taste better in bulk than others, and much more.
This presentation includes a bit of the bonus content that you’d hear, along with PMP #3 with Yakov Smirnoff, were you to sign up RIGHT NOW at episode 1, and if you go pledge a little support on patreon.com/prettymuchpop. One and all can hear the first episode free there and also at prettymuchpop.com.
On Ned Block’s “The Harder Problem of Consciousness” (2002) and David Papineau’s “Could There Be a Science of Consciousness?” (2003).
What would give us sufficient reason to believe that a non-human was conscious? Block thinks this is a harder problem that we might suspect. We can’t know for sure exactly what consciousness in us is, so we can’t know for sure what such a being might require (a brain? certain patterns of behavior?) for them to be enough like us that we could safely apply our own experience of our own conscious states to them. Papineau diagnoses this as a fundamental vagueness in the concepts we use to describe our conscious states.
This conversation continues from ep. 218, with guest Gregory Miller from the Panpsycast still with us.
End song: “Mindreader” by Phil Judd as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #98.
On “Consciousness and Its Place in Nature” by David Chalmers (2003), with special guest Gregory Miller from the Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast.
Can we explain human experience using the terms of brain physiology? Chalmers thinks not, and lays out the arguments against this and the range of positions philosophers have taken in response to these objections.
End song: “Georgia Hard” by Robbie Fulks, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #36.
What is pop culture? Does it make sense to distinguish it from high culture, or can something be both?
Hear in advance of the actual release the new pop culture podcast hosted by Mark, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt.
Get involved from the start at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This episode is available there FREE for one and all, and there’s already bonus content up there for PMP supporters.
