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Episode 23: Rousseau: Human Nature vs. Culture (Citizens Only)

July 29, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer 3 Comments

Discussing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse in Inequality (1754) and book 1 of The Social Contract (1762). What’s the relationship between culture and nature? Rousseau engages in some wild speculation about the development of humanity from the savage to the modern, miserable wretch.

End song: “Love Is the Problem” by New People from The Easy Thing (2009).

Episode 22: More James’s Pragmatism: Is Faith Justified? What is Truth? (Citizens Only)

July 18, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

On William James’s “The Will to Believe,” and continuing our discussion on James’s conception of truth as described in his books Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. Does pragmatism give ground for religious belief, like if it feels good for me to believe in God, can that justify belief? Is belief in science or rationality itself a form of faith?

End song: “Who Cares What You Believe?” by Madison Lint (2001).

Episode 21: What Is the Mind? (Turing, et al) (Citizens Only)

June 28, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer 8 Comments

Alan Turing

Discussing articles by Alan Turing, Gilbert Ryle, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and Dan Dennett. What is this mind stuff, and how can it “be” the brain? Can computers think? What is it like to be a bat? With guest Marco Wise.

End Song: “No Mind” by Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio (1998)

Episode 20: Pragmatism – Peirce and James (Citizens Only)

June 9, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

C.S. Peirce

On Pragmatism (1907) by William James and “The Fixation of Belief” (1877) and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878) by Charles Sanders Peirce. Is truth a primitive relation between our representations and things objectively in the world, or is it an analyzable process by which propositions “prove their worth” by being useful in some way, like by fitting well with other portions of our experience or being delicious?

End Song: “Friend” by Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio (1998)

Episode 19: Kant: What Can We Know? (Citizens Only)

May 14, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer 4 Comments

Discussing Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783). Do we have any business doing metaphysics, which is by definition about things that we could not possibly experience? With guest Azzurra Crispino.

End song: “Subjectivity” by The MayTricks, from Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994)

Episode 18: Plato: What Is Knowledge? (Citizens Only)

April 20, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Discussing Plato’s Theatetus and Meno. In the Theaetetus, Plato considers and rejects a series of mostly very lame conceptions of knowledge and replaces them at the end with… NOTHING. In the Meno, knowledge is “remembrance” (maybe).”

End song: “Obvious Boy,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from So Whaddaya Think? (2000).

Episode 17: Hume’s Empiricism: What Can We Know? (Citizens Only)

March 29, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer 4 Comments

David Hume

On David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Hume thinks that all we can know are our own impressions, but that no experience shows us one event causing another event. So, causality must just be regular patterns of conjoined events.

End song: “Twitch” by The MayTricks, from Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994).

Episode 16: Danto on Art (Citizens Only)

March 4, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

Discussing three essays by Arthur Danto from The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986): the title essay, “The Appreciation and Interpretation of Works of Art,” and “The End of Art.” I understand you may not have heard of Danto, and you may think modern art is goofy, but you’ll definitely enjoy this discussion and the reading anyway. Note that Danto listened to this episode and liked it.

End song: “This Night Before the End” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra.

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About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

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