Featuring Evan Gould, Steve Lindsay, and Michael Burgess. About “embodied cognition,” which rejects the folk understanding of rationality as disembodied. Recorded 8/2/13.
Not School: Frithjof Bergmann’s “New Work, New Culture”
Featuring Mark Linsenmayer, Jason Durso, Khary Robertson, Leland Gregory, Andrew Miles, Michael Burgess, and Tammy Gottschling. Recorded July 28, 2013.
On the first 50 pages of the (still not published in full) work, a few months prior to our podcast interview with the author, about our sad social conditions re. jobs and what to do about them.
Not School: Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”
Featuring Seth Paskin, Rian Mitch, Daniel McKay, Marilynn Lawrence, Alyson Jones. Recorded March 14, 2013.
Recorded some months prior to our episode on this text, this discussion works through Heidegger’s idea that Humanism as a concept was inextricably tied to the history of Western metaphysics that sees man as a animal rationale, language as techne and understands Being only through beings.
Not School: Derrida’s “Writing and Difference”
Rian Mitch and Paul Harris discuss the third essay in the book. Recorded on 2/19/13. Does anything lie beyond a text? Can we understand being outside of writing?
Not School Fiction Group: Italo Calvino’s “Cosmicomics” (Phi-Fi #2)
Featuring Nathan Shaine Hanks, Jordan Payne, and Nick Story. Discussing the themes of science, love, beauty, loss, and existence from some of the book’s twelve stories. Recorded 1/6/13.
Check out the Philosophical Fiction group.
Not School: Giles Deleuze’s “A Thousand Plateaus”
On Chapters 1-3 of the 1980 book by Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Featuring Mark Linsenmayer, Daniel McKay, Dom Romani, Paul Harris, and Rian Mitch.
The book presents a large-scale picture of cosmology; we hashed through a set of difficult concepts.
Not School: John Searle’s “Mind: A Brief Introduction” (Second Discussion)
Continuing on 1/17/13 the discussion begun in part 1, by which time the group had read the whole book.
Not School: John Searle’s “Mind: A Brief Introduction” (First Discussion)
Featuring Evan Gould, Bill Burgess, Alan Cook, Steven Lindsay, Daniel Cole. Recorded 1/2/13. On biological naturalism, which sees mind as a sort of “surface feature” which manifests itself in the brain only macroscopically, though its existence and activity are completely causally explained by neurobiological activity.
Not School: Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos”
Featuring Wes Alwan, Neil Earnshaw, and Jon Turner. Recorded on 12/9/12.We discuss our dissatisfaction with Nagel’s argument that evolutionary naturalism fails to explain consciousness and therefore must be supplemented by teleology.
Not School Fiction Group: Paul Auster’s “City of Glass” (Phi-Fi #1)
On Auster’s 1985 novella. The book presents itself as a work of detective fiction. However, it soon becomes clear that it is far from conventional in its structure. The work has been cited as an example of ‘postmodern detective fiction’ where the mystery contained within the narrative is itself surrounded by the mystery of the novella’s construction.
Not School Philosophy of Mind Group: David Chalmers
On The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1997). Featuring Mark Linsenmayer, Alan Cook, Evan Gould, Russ Baker, Steve Lindsay, and Marilyn Lawrence. Recorded 11/17/12.
He argues for a form of property dualism in which consciousness, or more likely something like “proto-consciousness” is best conceived as a fundamental feature of the world.