Podcast Episode (Citizen) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

Episode 200: Kant/Mendelssohn/Foucault on Enlightenment (Citizen Edition)

October 8, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 8 Comments

On “What Is Enlightenment” by Immanuel Kant (1784), “On Enlightening the Mind” by Moses Mendelssohn (1784), and “What Is Enlightenment” by Michael Foucault (1984).

At the end of the historical period known as the Enlightenment, a Berlin newspaper asked what exactly that is, and Kant and Mendelssohn responded. Both were concerned with whether too much enlightenment among the public can cause social unrest, and so whether there should be freedom of speech and opinion. Foucault thinks that we’re not yet Enlightened, that it’s an ongoing process of critique.

Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/pel-live to help us plan the 10-year anniversary live event!

End song: “Holy Fool” by Love and Rockets. Listen to singer Daniel Ash on Nakedly Examined Music #35.

(sub)Text #4: Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (Citizens Only)

October 7, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Wes Alwan is joined by Tracy Morgan and Louis Scuderi to discuss Freud’s classic 1917 essay. Read it online.

Listen to more (sub)Text.

Episode 199: Guest Elizabeth Anderson on Private Government (Citizen Edition)

September 17, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 12 Comments

The U. of Michigan prof joins us to discuss Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) (2017) and “What Is the Point of Equality?” (1999).

What is a government? Liz argues that this includes companies, and that we should thus apply political science concepts in evaluating their power. Her egalitarianism involves everyone retaining a minimum level of inalienable autonomy, and we should resist encroachments on this not just by the state but from employers as well.

End song: “Straight Job” by Rod Picott. Hear him on Nakedly Examined Music #80.

Episode 198 Follow-Up: More on Plato’s “Parmenides” (Citizens Only)

September 13, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

Mark and Seth continue our conversation from ep. 198 by going through the arguments in the second half of the dialogue.

This puzzling section is largely a monologue by the character Parmenides, with the stated aim of showing the implications from first, the assumption that the One exists, and then that the One does not exist. But is this really Parmenides’s One or the Platonic Form of Oneness? Can these be the same thing?

Episode 198: Plato’s Forms in the “Parmenides” (Citizen Edition)

September 2, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 5 Comments

On the most peculiar Platonic dialogue, from ca. 350 BCE.

Are properties real things in the world, or just in the mind? Plato is known for claiming that these “Forms” are real, though otherworldly. Here, though, using Parmenides as a character talking to a young Socrates, Plato seems to provide objections here to his own theory. What’s the deal?

End song: “Young and Lovely” by Jherek Bischoff. Hear him on Nakedly Examined Music #65.

(sub)Text #3: Spielberg’s “AI: Artificial Intelligence”: What Is It to Be Human? (Citizens Only)

September 2, 2018 by Wes Alwan 5 Comments

Wes discusses the Steven Spielberg film with philosophy professor David Kyle Johnson. What is there to fear in artificial intelligence? How does this shed light on what it means to be fully human?

Episode 197: Parmenides on What There Is (Citizen Edition)

August 20, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 13 Comments

On the fragments referred to as “On Nature” from ca. 475 BCE, featuring guest Peter Adamson from the History of Philosophy without Any Gaps podcast.

End song: “Circle” by Gareth Mitchell, as discussed on Nakedly Examined Music #4.

(sub)Text #2: Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five”: Is There Such a Thing as a War Story? (Citizens Only)

August 9, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 4 Comments

Episode 2 of Wes’s new podcasting endeavor, featuring Mary from the Phi Fic podcast, who’s also the managing editor of the PEL blog.

Listen to more (sub)Text.

Episode 196: Guest Simon Blackburn on Truth (Citizen Edition)

August 5, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 5 Comments

The Cambridge/etc. prof joins Mark, Wes, and Dylan to discuss his book On Truth (2018).

What is truth? Simon’s view synthesizes deflationism and pragmatism to avoid relativism by fixing on the domain-specific procedures we actually engage in to establish the truth of a claim, whether in ethics, science, art, or whatever. A gift of clarity after two episodes threshing through the jungles of analytic philosophy!

End song: “with you/for you” from the new cold/mess EP by Prateek Kuhad, interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #79.

Episode 195: Truth-The Austin/Strawson Debate (Citizen Edition)

July 22, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

On two articles in the “ordinary language” tradition of philosophy called “Truth” from 1950 by J.L. Austin and P.F. Strawson.

Is truth a property of particular speech acts, or of the propositions expressed through speech acts? Does truth mean correspondence with the facts, or does the word “fact” make this definition totally uninformative? Does saying “is true” add any information content to a sentence over and above just stating that sentence?

End song: “Troof” by Shawn Phillips, as interviewed for Nakedly Examined Music #77.

(sub)Text #1: Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”: Poesis as Revenge Forsaken (Citizens Only)

July 19, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 7 Comments

A new, Wes-driven endeavor! He and Bill Youmans discuss the 1611 play about revenge, forgiveness, and authorship. Or maybe it’s about exploitation, or how we react to changes in status, or perhaps how a liberal education can give you magical powers! Listen and decide for yourself! And tell Wes if you like this kind of thing so he’ll do more.

Episode 194: Alfred Tarski on Truth (Citizen Edition)

July 8, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

On Tarski’s “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics” (1944), Hartry Field’s “Tarski’s Theory of Truth” (1972), and Donald Davidson’s “The Folly of Trying to Define Truth” (1977).

What is truth? Tarski gives a technical, metaphysically neutral definition for truth within a particular, well-defined language. So how does that apply to real languages? He thought he was defining truth (a semantic concept) in terms of more primitive (physical?) concepts, but Field and Davidson think that actually, truth as a general concept is indefinable, even though it’s still helpful for Tarski to have laid out the relations among various semantic concepts.

End song: “In Vino Vertias” by Sunspot; Mark interviewed Mike Huberty on Nakedly Examined Music #64.

Episode 193 Follow-Up: Strauss and Rorty on Liberal Education and Democracy (Citizens Only)

July 1, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

Wes and Dylan discuss Leo Strauss’s “Mass Education and Democracy” (1967) and Richard Rorty’s “Democracy and Philosophy” (2007). Must philosophical training, or liberal education more generally, necessarily be restricted a privileged minority? PEL Citizens get to find out!

Episode 193: The Theory and Practice of Liberal Education w/ Pano Kanelos (Citizen Edition)

June 25, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 10 Comments

The president of St. John’s College, Annapolis joins us to discuss Jacob Klein’s “The Idea of a Liberal Education” (1960) and “On Liberal Education” (1965), plus Sidney Hook’s “A Critical Appraisal of the St. John’s College Curriculum” (1946) and Martha Nussbaum’s “Undemocratic Vistas” (1987).

What constitutes a liberal education? Should we all read the Western canon? Klein (and our guest) think that we need to wonder at the familiar, to explore the ancestry of our current concepts in order to avoid their sedimentation.

End song: “Preservation Hill” by The Bevis Frond; Mark interviewed Nick Saloman on Nakedly Examined Music #75.

Episode 192 Follow-Up: More “Closing of the American Mind” (Citizens Only)

June 18, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 5 Comments

Mark, Seth, and Wes, continue on Bloom, getting into The Instruments of Last Manhood, i.e., the influence of Nietzsche (and his predecessor Rousseau) through Freud and Weber. Listen to ep. 192 first. Plus Seth on Lysistrata, since he missed that discussion.

Episode 191: Conceptual Schemes: Donald Davidson & Rudolf Carnap (Citizen Edition)

May 28, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 6 Comments

On Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974) and Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” (1950).

What does it mean to say that we grasp the world through a conceptual scheme? Are schemes different between cultures or even individuals, such that we can’t really understand each other? Davidson thinks that this doesn’t make sense. Carnap gives us a picture of multiple, domain-specific vocabularies and doesn’t see a problem with the concepts of one not being translatable into concepts of another.

End Song: “Shut Up” by Chandler Travis, as heard on Nakedly Examined Music #46.

Bonus Discussion: Identity Politics Preliminaries (Citizens Only)

May 24, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 10 Comments

Wes and Mark try to figure out whether anyone wants us to have a full episode on identity politics, maybe reading some Francis Fukuyama or some Ta-Nehisi Coates. We’ve already talked about white privilege, Orwellian “nationalism,” free speech, electoral strategy, James Baldwin, etc. What’s left?

Episode 190: Film Analysis: “mother!” (Citizen Edition)

May 21, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

On Darren Aronofsky’s philosophical 2017 film about humanity’s relationship to nature. We discuss the philosophical content of the film (Gnosticism, anyone?) and explore the relation between meaning and the sensuous aspects of an artwork. Can a work be both allegorical and yet have fully fleshed out characters and the other elements that make a film feel real? This was a very polarizing film; how do the circumstances of viewing affect reception? With guest Tim Nicholas.

End song: “The Day of Wrath, That Day,” by Sarah McQuaid, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #72.

Episode 189 Follow-Up: Authorial Intent (Citizens Only)

May 7, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

A bonus discussion between Mark and Wes for supporters! We give some philosophy of language context for the issues of meaning brought up in ep 189. Plus, some discussion of the critic James Wood, and analyzing T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”