On of our most frequent requests for coverage on the podcast is Deleuze, a name I don’t even recall hearing in my grad school days. PEL proper will cover him in 2013, but our listeners were impatient and formed a Not School study group to get a jump on the effort. More concrete and flavorful than either Derrida or Heidegger, Continue Reading …
How Brief is Too Brief? (Not School Discussion of Searle Now Posted)
[Editor’s Note: Here’s a guest post from Evan Gould, who was good enough to record the second discussion of the Not School Philosophy of Mind group for your pleasure. Go sign up to be a PEL Citizen so you can listen to the discussion now.] Within roughly the first half of his 2004 book Mind: A Brief Introduction, John Searle Continue Reading …
Not School Proposals for January
Merleau-Ponty! Buber! Lacan! Physics! Aesthetics! The Residents! Derrida! Deleuze! Searle! Pynchon! DeLillo! The holidays have definitely made it more difficult for me at least to be on top of my Not School activities, but nonetheless the new month is immanent, and I thought I should convey to those not currently monitoring the Citizens’ Forum what new groups look to be Continue Reading …
A Discussion of PW Anderson’s “More is Different”
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of discussing P.W. Anderson’s famous 1972 article More is Different as part of a PEL Not School study group on emergence with Not Schoolers Bill Burgess, Casey Fitzpatrick, Ernie Prabhakar, and Evan Gould. Anderson argues that the sciences don’t form a reductive whole — that chemistry isn’t applied physics and psychology isn’t applied biology — taking Continue Reading …
One Subject, Many Subjects? (Gorging on Not School)
Just wanted to kick out a question to you folks: do you most enjoy academic research when you’re focusing on just one thing, or pursuing multiple lines at once? I at some points in grad school thought that I would much more enjoy it if I only had to take one class at a time. I like immersing myself in Continue Reading …
Not School Digest Nov-Dec 2012: A Bonus Quasisode
Excerpts of discussions about David Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, and Paul Auster’s City of Glass.
A Discussion of Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos
Today I had the pleasure of discussing Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False as part of a PEL Not School study group on the book. Joining me were Not Schoolers Neil Earnshaw and Jon Turner. We discussed our dissatisfaction with with Nagel’s argument that evolutionary naturalism fails to explain consciousness and therefore must Continue Reading …
Not School Group Report: Paul Auster’s Novella, “City of Glass”
Editor’s Note: PEL listener Paul Harris has written up this report on a great Not School discussion available for member download. Whether or not you want to join, it’s still a fricking great book, recommended for anyone with an interest in modern and/or philosophical literature. Last Sunday, the Not School group ‘Worlds of Wordcraft’ – a group created to read Continue Reading …
Not-School Group on Emergence
There’s lots of cool things going on in the PEL Not School discussion groups. To entice those of you that are interested in emergence to come check things out, I’ve proposed reading and discussing a short, interesting essay by the physicist P. W. Anderson called “More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Hierarchical Nature of Science”. The essay itself is Continue Reading …
Logicomix on Not School
As mentioned on the Quine episode, I’m proposing a Not School reading group on Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Christos H. Papadimitriou, Apostolos Doxiadis, and some fine illustrators, which is about Russell and Wittgenstein, with some cameos by Frege, Gödel, and other names dropped during our analytic episodes. It’s a graphic novel, running 300+ pages, and seems comfortably Continue Reading …
Halloween Not-Scholarships: One Free Month for up to 10 Newbies
November starts tomorrow, which means the Not School groups need to get all sorted out ASAP. The proposed “What Is Philosophy?” group (reading a bit of Plato, Locke, and Bertrand Russell) is ideal for new-to-philosophy readers–or anyone who has been out of the game for a while and wants an easy and fun way to get back in. Right now, Continue Reading …
Film Review: Examined Life
As my first Not School group, I led some folks in discussing two Netflix philosophy documentaries, i.e. things that have been on my instant queue forever, and which I feel culturally, given my position here, I should watch, but always seemed too boring. Examined Life (2008) (Netflix link) was the best of the two that we picked, and the well Continue Reading …
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