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A Glimpse into Philosophy: Pilot Episodes of a Short-Form Podcast for Your Consideration

April 24, 2019 by Mark Linsenmayer 27 Comments

Three short episodes (on Sartre, Nietzsche, and Machiavelli) by Mark Linsenmayer of a new potential podcast for the PEL network. We’d like your feedback, and even more importantly, the feedback of your friends for whom the long-form PEL discussions are or would be just TOO MUCH.

“Mind Games” and “Word Games”: Practical Philosophers, Give Philosophy a Chance!

August 30, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 3 Comments

Can philosophy avoid theoretical speculation to focus solely on pursuit of the good life, or is that goal inherently problematic? Confining oneself to a particular branch of philosophy is something one should outgrow.

The Panpsycast Christmas Special

December 26, 2017 by Jack Symes Leave a Comment

Mark joins the folks at the Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast for a two-part holiday special on everyone’s favorite yuletide character, Friedrich Nietzsche!

The Fate of Slavoj Zizek

January 24, 2017 by Douglas Lain 16 Comments

Friend of PEL Doug Lain has been trying to score an interview with Slavoj Žižek on his Zero Squared podcast for years. Now, some think that Žižek’s stock is in decline, among other reasons because he said he’d vote for Trump if he could. Could he really have been only pretending to be some sort of radical leftist all along? Doug’s got the full story; find out how it all went down here.

Beauvoir, Freedom, and Feminism

June 6, 2016 by Ana Sandoiu Leave a Comment

What’s the connection between existentialism and feminism in Simone de Beauvoir’s work?

Mark on the Gig Gab Podcast

November 20, 2015 by Mark Linsenmayer 3 Comments

I got a chance to sit down and chat with my old bandmate Dave Hamilton to talk about my musical “career.” Listen to the episode. Also some news about my new album and a request for you to help me come up with artists that my stuff sounds like.

Descartes’s Horror?

August 18, 2015 by Douglas Lain 2 Comments

Examining Descartes’s Cogito, one can find that rather than philosophy and reason being a shield from horror and madness, the truth might be the opposite.

The Philosofa Podcast

April 15, 2015 by Charley Saffrey Leave a Comment

The premise of the show is to take two stand-up comedians as hosts, and let them chat with philosophers and other intellectuals about a philosophical topic. This is a good idea. Philosophers spend years – decades, even – on a single thought; comedians are quick, sharp, and keen to learn. When it works well, a good comedian can process and summarize philosophical arguments into crystals of intelligence that make for perfect podcast material.

The Nietzschean Comedian

March 5, 2015 by David Buchanan 3 Comments

We all need to talk about death especially our own. “I’m talking about something that everyone NEEDS to start talking about, which is death. That is my work as a comedian now, fortunately or unfortunately,” says T. J. Miller. This Nietzschean comedian is starting to put fairly serious philosophy into his stand-up act

“Modern Day Philosophers”: Reading Wikipedia with Comedians

April 12, 2014 by Mark Linsenmayer 6 Comments

I was recently alerted to the existence of an up-and-coming podcast that just started last summer called Modern Day Philosophers. Hmmmm, is that like the New Books in Philosophy podcast, bringing to light the work of under-appreciated academics? No, as you can see by the guest list: These are for the most parts established comedians like Artie Lang, or Bill Continue Reading …

Berkeley Discussed on BBC’s “In Our Time”

March 26, 2014 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

A few listeners have pointed us at Melvyn Bragg’s recent podcast on Berkeley (listen to it here). It starts off with the oft-cited anecdote about Samuel Johnson claiming to have refuted Berkeley by kicking a stone: obviously, such a stone that I can kick is not an “idea in my head.” As should have been clear from our episode (and Continue Reading …

What Can Regular Words Do?

November 19, 2013 by David Crohn Leave a Comment

Question: What do Ludwig Wittgenstein, this sentence, and shooting your neighbor’s donkey have in common? Well, not much really—unless you listen to In Our Time’s excellent (not PEL-excellent, but pretty close) introduction to Ordinary Language Philosophy.

Robert Skidelsky on Work

September 23, 2013 by Mark Linsenmayer 10 Comments

Robert Skidelsky in How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life (2012) uses a 1930 essay from John Maynard Keynes (which you can read here) as a jumping-off point to argue, like Bergmann, that productivity gains enabled by past technological advances make it totally reasonable that we now should be working fewer hours than we are. However, Skidelsky’s range Continue Reading …

“Very Bad Wizards” Podcast on Free Will

July 3, 2013 by Mark Linsenmayer 5 Comments

A point neglected in the moral discussion in our recent episode is free will. She-who-will-not-be-named (read her view here) on the one hand insists on the supremacy of empirical science but on the other hand insists that our freedom and hence moral responsibility is obvious and inescapable. So that should make her a compatibilist, but as usual, she doesn’t really Continue Reading …

On Daniel Coffeen, Rhetoric, Deleuze and Such

May 17, 2013 by Daniel Coffeen 32 Comments

[editors note:  Daniel was our guest on the Deleuze episode recently and will be posting a bit in our blog over the next couple of weeks] Since I discovered Deleuze in grad school, he has pervaded in various ways my teaching, writing and thinking. My dissertation proffered a model of rhetoric and specifically the trope; its final chapter focused on Continue Reading …

Mark Pitches Philosophy to Clergy

March 22, 2013 by Mark Linsenmayer 10 Comments

In our “Why Do Philosophy?” episode, we give a sales pitch for philosophy: for being interested in reading this stuff (and what makes it appeal to us more than popular science or history or literature, though those are all great too). I recently got the chance to make this pitch to an audience of liberal clergy-folk; I was interviewed on Continue Reading …

Other Podcasts on Buber

February 20, 2013 by Mark Linsenmayer 39 Comments

Here’s my report on what I listened to in preparation for our episode. -Rabbi Joshua Haberman held a retreat in 2008, seemingly for a bunch of other Rabbis, but I’m not clear on this, and so gave four interactive lectures on Buber that provided a lot of the background I was drawing on. (Itunes link; scroll down to the oldest Continue Reading …

Iván Szelényi Lectures on Marx & Alienation

February 5, 2013 by Mark Linsenmayer 5 Comments

I referred in the episode to a number of lectures on Marx that helped me to put the German Ideology into perspective with Marx’s other texts and filled me in on few of the Young Hegelians that he criticized. These were from Yale’s Foundations of Modern Social Theory course by Iván Szelényi. (Get them from iTunes U.) Lectures 9-13 are Continue Reading …

More on Marx? (on Diet Soap and Elsewhere)

February 2, 2013 by Douglas Lain 6 Comments

[Editor’s Note: Thanks for Doug Lain of the Diet Soap Podcast for weighing in here with his extensive experience with Marxism.] Mark, Seth and Wes finally arrived at the philosopher who matters most over at the pinko podcast Diet Soap.  While I plan on writing a response to their comments, and most especially to respond to the problem of this Continue Reading …

Jeffrie G. Murphy (Cruel & Unusual Podcast) on Rationales for Punishment

January 28, 2013 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Our Gorgias episode, included Plato’s claim that the purpose of punishment is reformative, i.e. to build character, either in the punished (reformation) or in observers (deterrence). That someone who does injustice should not then be rewarded for it is on Plato’s account the natural order of things, true by definition, as it were, and is in itself a reason (much Continue Reading …

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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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