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Episode 63: Existentialist Heroes in Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” (Citizens Only)

September 21, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

On philosophical issues in McCarthy's 2005 novel about guys running around with drug money and shooting each other, and about fiction as a form for exploring philosophical ideas. What can morality mean for people who have witnessed the "death of God," i.e. a loss in faith in light of the horrors of war? For both the protagonist and antagonist in "No Country for Old Men,"  Continue Reading …

Episode 62: Voltaire’s Novel “Candide” (Citizens Only)

September 5, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

On Candide: or, Optimism, the novel by Voltaire (1759). Is life good? Popular Enlightenment philosopher Leibniz argued that it's good by definition. God is perfectly good and all-powerful, so whatever he created must have been as good as it can be; we live in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire loads this satirical adventure story up with horrific violence to  Continue Reading …

Episode 61: Nietzsche on Truth and Skepticism (Citizens Only)

August 15, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

Friedrich Niezsche

On Friedrich Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (1873). For Wes Alwan's summary of this essay, go here). What is truth? This essay, written early in Nietzsche's career but unpublished during his lifetime, is taken by many to make the extreme claim that there is no truth, that all of the "truths" we tell each other are just agreements by social  Continue Reading …

Episode 60: Aristotle: What’s the Best Form of Government? (Citizens Only)

July 22, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

Aristotle

On Aristotle's Politics (350 BCE), books 1 (ch 1-2), 3, 4 (ch 1-3), 5 (ch 1-2), 6 (ch 1-6), and 7 (ch. 1-3, 13-15). Aristotle provides both a taxonomy of the types of government, based on observations of numerous constitutions of the states of his time, and prescriptions on how to best order a state. These are meant to be practical; though he does spend some time on the  Continue Reading …

Episode 59: Alasdair MacIntyre on Moral Justifications (Citizens Only)

July 5, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

Alasdair MacIntyre

On Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981), mostly ch. 3-7 and 14-17. What justifies ethical claims? MacIntyre claims that no modern attempt to ground ethics has worked, and that's because we've abandoned Aristotle. We see facts and values as fundamentally different: the things science discovers vs. these weird things that have nothing to do with  Continue Reading …

Episode 58: What Grounds Ethical Claims? (Moore, Stevenson, MacIntyre) (Citizens Only)

June 20, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

On G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, ch. 1 (1903); Charles Leslie Stevenson's "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms" (1937), and Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, ch. 1-2. Is there such a thing as moral intuition? Is "good" a simple property that we all recognize but can't explain like yellow? G.E. Moore thinks that any attempt to define good in terms of properties like  Continue Reading …

Episode 57: Henri Bergson on Humor (Citizens Only)

May 31, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

On Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900). What is humor? Bergson says that, fundamentally, we laugh as a form of social corrective when others are slow to adapt to society's demands. Other types of humor are derivative from this: just as the clown falls on his face because of a (pretended) physical flaw, as if he's a machine that doesn't work and so  Continue Reading …

Episode 56: More Wittgenstein on Language (Citizens Only)

May 14, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Continuing discussion of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Part I, sections 1-33 and 191-360. Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Philosophy Bro talk about "family resemblances" in concepts, including the concept "game" as used by Wittgenstein: is there really no theory that can capture all and only instances of games, e.g. do all games have rules? Also, what does  Continue Reading …

Episode 55: Wittgenstein on Language (Citizens Only)

May 2, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

Ludwig Wittgenstein

On Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Part I, sections 1-33 and 191-360 (written around 1946). What is linguistic meaning? Wittgenstein argues that it's not some mysterious entity in the mind, but that it is a public matter: you understand a word if you can use it appropriately, and you know the context in which it's appropriate to use it and how to react  Continue Reading …

Episode 54: More Buddhism and Naturalism (Citizens Only)

April 6, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

The Buddha

Continuing our discussion of Owen Flanagan's The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011). Are the basic tenets of Buddhism compatible with a respect for science? In episode 53, Owen Flanagan outlined a science-friendly project of comparative ethics, and touched on Buddhism's empiricist theory of knowledge and its metaphysics of impermanence. If that was the lecture,  Continue Reading …

Episode 53: Buddhism and Naturalism with Guest Owen Flanagan (Citizens Only)

March 26, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

Owen Flanagan

Discussing The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011) with Owen Flanagan. What philosophical insights can we modern folks with our science and naturalism (i.e. inclination against super-natural explanations) glean from Buddhisim? Flanagan says plenty: Buddhism is founded on common human experience (not faith), and we can profitably put Buddhist ethics in dialogue  Continue Reading …

Episode 52: Philosophy and Race (DuBois, Martin Luther King, Cornel West) (Citizens Only)

March 17, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

W.E.B. DuBois

On W.E.B. DuBois's "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" (1903), Cornel West's "A Genealogy of Modern Racism" (1982), and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963) and "The Black Power Defined" (1967), plus Malcolm X's "The Black Revolution" (1963). What kind of philosophical lessons come out of the history of black oppression in America? Historian and  Continue Reading …

Episode 51: Semiotics and Structuralism (Saussure, et al) (Citizens Only)

February 24, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

On Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) (Part I and Part II, Ch. 4), Claude Levi-Strauss's "The Structural Study of Myth" (1955), and Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1966). What is language? What is the relation between language and reality? Saussure argued that a language at a given time has a  Continue Reading …

Episode 50: Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (Citizens Only)

February 3, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

Robert M. Pirsig

On Robert M. Pirsig's philosophical, autobiographical novel from 1974. What's the relationship between science and values? Pirsig thinks that modern rationality, by insisting on the fundamental distinction between objects (matter) and subjects (people), labels value judgments as irrational. Society therefore largely ignores aesthetic considerations in the buildings and  Continue Reading …

Episode 49: Foucault on Power and Punishment (Citizens Only)

January 11, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 5 Comments

Michel Foucault

Discussing Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975), parts 1, 2 and section 3 of part 3. Are we really free? Kings no longer exert absolute and arbitrary power over us, but Foucault's picture of the evolution from torture and public executions to rehabilitative, medical-style incarceration is not so much a triumph of liberty but a shift to more subtle but more  Continue Reading …

Episode 48: Merleau-Ponty on Perception and Knowledge (Citizens Only)

December 17, 2011 by Mark Linsenmayer 3 Comments

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Discussing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "Primacy of Perception" (1946) and The World of Perception (1948). What is the relation of perception to knowledge? In M-P's phenomenology, perception is primary: even our knowledge of mathematical truths is in some way conditioned by and dependent on the fact that we are creatures with bodies and senses that work the way they do. Science  Continue Reading …

Episode 47: Sartre on Consciousness and the Self (Citizens Only)

November 30, 2011 by Mark Linsenmayer 4 Comments

Discussing Jean-Paul Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego (written in 1934). What is consciousness, and does it necessarily involve an "I" who is conscious of things? Sartre says no: typical experience is consciousness of some object and doesn't involve the experience of myself as someone having this consciousness. It's only when we reflect on our own conscious experiences  Continue Reading …

Episode 46: Plato on Ethics & Religion (Citizens Only)

November 16, 2011 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

Discussing Plato's Euthyphro. Does morality have to be based on religion? Are good things good just because God says so, or (if there is a God) does God choose to approve of the things He does because he recognizes those things to be already good? Plato thinks the latter: if morality is to be truly non-arbitrary, then, like the laws of logic, it can't just be a contingent  Continue Reading …

Episode 45: Moral Sense Theory: Hume and Smith (Citizens Only)

October 29, 2011 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Discussing parts of David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1740) and Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Where do we get our moral ideas? Hume and Smith both thought that we get them by reflecting on our own moral judgments and on how we and others (including imaginary, hypothesized others) in turn judge those judgments. Mark, Wes, Seth, and guest Getty  Continue Reading …

Episode 44: New Atheist Critiques of Religion (Citizens Only)

October 11, 2011 by Mark Linsenmayer 3 Comments

Discussing selections from Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel C. Dennett. Should we be religious, or is religion just a bunch of superstitious nonsense that it's past time for us to outgrow? Does faith lead to ceding to authority and potential violence? Can a reasonable person be religious? We say lots of rude things about these authors, and at  Continue Reading …

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