Recorded 8/18/26. Chris Sunami, the editor of the PEL book, joins Mark, Wes and Seth as part of the launch of his new book, Free Your Mind, which is a series of PEL-like conversations all coming out of Chris' brain, using the model of Plato's symposium to talk about race, AI, art, religion, and more. Chris then starts us talking about what we all might want to communicate to  Continue Reading …

Recorded 6/9/26. Mark, Wes, and Dylan sign relief in being done with Hegel and talk phobias, metaphors vs. emotions, apperception of the ego, James Talarico (i.e. liberal Christianity), Survivor (Wes appears on the PMP episode, coming next week!), and situational/business ethics. The Donald Melzer book Wes mentions is The Claustrum. Here's a discussion Mark read about John  Continue Reading …

Recorded on Feb. 24, featuring Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan. Wes updates us about his many-part (sub)TEXT Julius Caesar treatment, Mark plugs thew new season/co-host of Philosophy vs. Improv (we just released one with recurring PEL guest Jenny Hansen), and we settle in for some afterthoughts on our Graham Haman engagement. That all wraps up before the 16-minute mark. Then  Continue Reading …

Recorded 10/23/25. Mark, Wes, and Seth talk about recently dead philosophers and the related issue of how someone (like John Searle) can get un-cancelled. We announce our future plans to cover more Hegel and Freud, anticipate Josiah Royce, and mention a few other bucket list topics. How should we cover philosophical issues with AI on the show? Relatedly, we talk about a few  Continue Reading …

Recorded 9/7/25, featuring Mark, Seth, and Dylan. We re-litigate the utility of Irigaray's feminist insights and relate this to the overall contrast between political and philosophical argumentation: One can approve of the political upshot of an argument without finding it philosophically interesting. If one is ready to grant entirely the practical point that women should be  Continue Reading …

Recorded 6/24/25. Yes, it is surely pleasurable to hang with Mark, Wes, Seth and Dylan trying to make sense of our recent episodes, but is it obligatory? Just because it will make you a smarter, cooler, happier person, is it something you can safely ignore without censure? Well, given that you pay for PEL, and this Nightcap is part of the experience, not just in the usual  Continue Reading …

Mark, Wes, and Dylan put our recent episodes on moral phenomenology into perspective, anticipating our upcoming Hume discussion and going through some other options (e.g. Hume's predecessors, Thomas Reid, W.D. Ross) to enrich this study of sentiment vs. rational intuition. We also talk through some more potential author/guests or other podcasters. Should we cover more  Continue Reading …

Recorded 2/28/25. We reflect on the current political situation, Chat GPT, what celebrities might write a new forward to our re-issued book (maybe YOU?), and then settle on dwelling in the aftermath of our Marx series. Is Marxism (or any other utopian philosophy) inexorably tied to totalitarianism? When might revolution--or war more generally--be justified? Finally, can  Continue Reading …

Recorded on 12/21/24, Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan reflect on our past year of PEL recording, catch you up on our habits and interests, and talk about what might come next. Happy Holidays and thanks for your support! Our strategy here was just to look through our list of episodes starting in January when we were finishing up Kierkegaard, then worked our way through Aristotle,  Continue Reading …

Recorded 8/9/24 (so before the Democratic convention), Mark, Wes, and Dylan again talk politics, including conspiracy theorist psychology, whether post-modernism is responsible for current "post-truth" discourse on the Right (see the PvI David Shields episode), our previous guest John Ganz who now has a bestselling book, and finally the relief at actually having some  Continue Reading …

In this time of vacations and election anxiety, Mark, Wes, and Seth joined up on July 3 to talk about: Here's the Simpsons clip Mark refers to at the end. Transcript 0:00 Mark: Hey, this is your nightcap for July 3rd. We are recording this on, and I hope to post this tomorrow very soon, sometime before the end of the weekend so we can be very up to date in this exact  Continue Reading …

Mark, Seth, and Dylan are joined by the editor of our new book (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/book) to talk a bit about his background, meeting celebrities (or being met qua celebrity) and more generally how a writer or performer's real personality relates to their work, various things we're reading and watching, scientists' attitudes towards philosophy, and the usual musings  Continue Reading …

Recorded 1/24/24. First, we anticipate our first Aristotle Metaphysics reading by talking about translations, ancient philosophy students, and whether this text is timeless, or is really a text intended for publication at all. Second, we respond to some viewers who pointed us to the Books That Kill podcast's discussion of Mounk's Identity book, which we covered in our ep.  Continue Reading …

Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan set ourselves as part of our ongoing Kierkegaard reading to re-listen to our 2010 episode 29 on The Sickness Unto Death. This leads us to our personal histories regarding faith and how the idea of faith intersects with our philosophy studies. Does a thinker like Kierkegaard defy treatment via our format? Given that we cover typically one short work  Continue Reading …

Mark, Wes, and eventually Seth get more into bullshit, considering G. A. Cohen's specifically anti-Continental philosophy response to Frankfurt to the effect that bullshit is a matter of qualities of the product, not of the speaker's state of mind. We compare bullshit with hypocrisy. This leads us to talk about Derrida, whom we're planning a future episode on, and why  Continue Reading …

Recorded 4/3/23 as we prepped for our live show, Mark, Wes and Dylan talk about The Last of Us and possible future episodes on animal ethics and/or animal consciousness, the death drive, plus the already tentatively scheduled episodes about the Romantics and Kierkegaard. In the course of this, we consider the relationship between philosophy and scientific fact. The Martha  Continue Reading …