So PEL episodes are swell and all, but are quite long, and if you send them to your friends, they might just shrug and say they have no idea what's going on, and maybe you say "well, you just have to go listen from episode 1 and maybe do some web searching whenever anyone brings up a term you don't understand" and maybe they shake their heads at what a loser you are who would Continue Reading …
“Mind Games” and “Word Games”: Practical Philosophers, Give Philosophy a Chance!
In preparation for our episode #201 with Ryan Holiday about Marcus Aurelius, our third bout with Stoicism, I have been listening to many episodes of The Practical Stoic podcast, which features among other things, very good interviews with Ryan, with our previous guest Massimo, and with friend-of-our-podcast Gregory B. Sadler. If you're looking for a quick historical overview of Continue Reading …
The Panpsycast Christmas Special
The Panpsycast (pan-psy-cast) Philosophy Podcast describes itself as “an ‘informal and informative’ philosophy podcast that aims to inspire and support students, teachers, academics, and free-thinkers worldwide.” Panpsycast episodes span a range of subjects including political philosophy, ancient philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, and existentialism, and Continue Reading …
The Fate of Slavoj Zizek
I’ve been wanting to interview the famous Slovenian philosopher for the last seven years and now I finally have. I discovered Slavoj Žižek’s work quite by accident when, wanting to check out Loren Singer’s novel The Parallax View from my local library I put Žižek’s book with the same title on hold instead. Looking back on this incident now, after having finally gotten the Continue Reading …
Beauvoir, Freedom, and Feminism
Simone de Beauvoir is probably best known as a writer and feminist, but there’s a strong existentialist foundation for her views on women, and we’ve started exploring that in our recent episode on Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity. Her take on the human condition, the tension between our freedom and that of others, as well as her concern for the ensuing ethical implications Continue Reading …
Mark on the Gig Gab Podcast
I got a chance to sit down and chat with my old bandmate (he played drums in The Fake) Dave Hamilton (who hosts three different podcasts!) to talk about my ill-fated musical "career" and my relationship to the many great musicians I've played with, most of whom were able to play out more and make more money with their other projects, leaving me in a few cases the last man Continue Reading …
Descartes’s Horror?
At Zero Books, we aim to be unconventional. We aim, as Tariq Goddard wrote in the founding manifesto, to be "intellectual without being academic," to be critically engaged and theoretical without being boring, and to resist the "blandly consensual culture in which we live," but it's always a challenge. At the beginning of the year, during my second month as publisher and Continue Reading …
The Philosofa Podcast
So, you love PEL, and it just doesn't come out often enough for you. Your hunger for more philosophy podcasting is still stronger than a Nietzschean ubermensch. What do you do? Well, as readers of this blog are no doubt aware, there's an increasingly generous buffet of other philosophical podcasts to try. So how does a new podcast like 'The Philosofa' compete? The premise Continue Reading …
The Nietzschean Comedian
"Comedians are the new philosophers. That's the responsibility we have now." T.J. Miller I feel very fortunate to live in Denver, a city with a thriving comedy scene. It also happens to be the hometown of comedian T.J. Miller. Miller moved away years ago, honed his improv skills in Chicago for a while and now he has fully embraced Hollywood. Apparently, Hollywood has Continue Reading …
“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 Burr, or Lewis 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 my recent post), this is an elementary Continue Reading …
What Can Regular Words Do?
[From David Crohn, Friend of the Podcast] Question: How are Ludwig Wittgenstein, this sentence, and shooting your neighbor’s donkey related? I had no idea—until I listened to In Our Time's excellent (not PEL-excellent, but pretty close) introduction to Ordinary Language Philosophy. OLP was the effort on behalf of a group of post-Wittgenstein philosophers to clarify the Continue Reading …
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 of suggested 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 know what 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 Deleuze. And so when I 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 God Complex Radio. Listen to the 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 four episodes listed, currenctly items 89-92). In 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 all on Marx, and the series starts off with 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 split between base and 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 like Kant's Continue Reading …