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
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
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
What’s the connection between existentialism and feminism in Simone de Beauvoir’s work?
Mark on the Gig Gab Podcast
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?
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
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
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
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”
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?
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
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
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
[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
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
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
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)
[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
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 …
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Luke Muehlhauser on Modern Rationalism (Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot)
I’m generally skeptical when someone proclaims that “rationality” itself should get us to throw out 90%+ of philosophy. So I was a bit puzzled when someone on our Facebook group pointed at some articles by Luke Muehlhauser (specifically “Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline” and “Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant”), host of the excellent Conversations from the Continue Reading …
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