On the podcast both Derick and I made some references to Paul Fry’s literary theory course, which includes lectures on Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and Derrida. It’s a much longer course, of course, so you can get ahead of us to get a handle on the dreaded Lacan, or see what Fry has to say on feminism and African-American criticism. The individual Continue Reading …
The Digested Read on ZAMM (and Other Works)
In looking for other podcasts on Pirsig, I ran across The Digested Read podcast by John Crace, which is sort of a literary humor thing, where Crace retells the gist of famous books using snarky oversimplifications. In his episode on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he’s none too sympathetic towards Pirsig’s philosophy, which he seems to see as Continue Reading …
Mark Richardson (via Marketplace of Ideas) on His Book on ZAMM
One of the books I checked out in support of our Pirsig episode was Mark Richardson’s Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.I determined pretty quickly that this book was focused on the travelogue aspect of ZAMM and seemed to avoid the philosophy, so I didn’t read much of it. However, this Continue Reading …
Peter Kail’s Hume Overview on the Elucidations Podcast
Folks looking for a clear, concise Hume review with some nice additional details after our epistemology and ethics episodes on him would benefit from this Elucidations episode featuring Oxford Lecturer Peter Kail. Kail gives a more comprehensive biography than we did, covers induction (note that we also discussed this issue a bit on our Nelson Goodman epsiode), reason, motivation (which Continue Reading …
Historyish Podcast Profile of Foucault
In looking for Foucault supplementary audio, I ran across a fairly new podcast, “Historyish,” which appears to be run by people involved with the University of Warwick and the Postgraduate Forum for the History of Medicine. Their October 2011 episode on Foucault can be found here; the page itself includes some of the biographical information read on the episode. The Continue Reading …
Thomas Sheehan (on Entitled Opinions) on Phenomenology
If you’re still confused about what phenomenology is, what Husserl was about, and how he relates to Heidegger, this October 2011 episode of the Entitled Opinions podcast may help clear things up. Interviewer Robert Harrison starts the discussion expressing the excitement of applied, humanistic phenomenology, i.e. as it was used by existentialists like Sartre. Sheehan says that while there’s not Continue Reading …
Diet Soap (C. Dereck Varn and Doug Lain) on Epistemology
I’ve been talking to Dereck (aka Skepoet) about coming on as a guest with us (on Saussure), and I noticed this new episode of Diet Soap features he and Doug Lain in a wide-ranging conversation on skepticism and its relation to phenomenology. One interesting point to add to the PEL deliberations on the growth of the self is from the Continue Reading …
Poetry v Philosophy, Round 2
Still listening to Essential American Poets put out by The Poetry Foundation. I just listened to the latest episode on Charles Simic. He ends the episode by reciting his “The Friends of Heraclitus”. It is about the loss of beloved friend and companion with whom the referenced subject has had many philosophical discourses, walking around and getting lost, both literally Continue Reading …
PEL Gets Reviewed by Podthoughts (Colin Marshall)
One of the better-written reviews of our podcast can be found here. I quote: At least three hosts at a time trying to interpret, in their own natural and thus imprecise language, a philosophical text itself composed in its own natural and thus imprecise language, opens up infinite opportunity for purely semantic argument. The show’s discussions, as with so many Continue Reading …
Brian Leiter’s New Philosophical Categories
A really good interview with Nietzsche scholar and opinionator Brian Leiter appears in 3:AM Magazine, where he drops pithy quotes on Obama, Nietzsche, Marx, and Foucault. But he also appears to have a new argument to sell. Leiter advocates a new way to divide the philosophical canon, not into “contintentals” or “analytics,” but rather into “naturalists” and “anti-naturalists”. You can also Continue Reading …
Ed Creeley on Phenomenology and Theater Performance
It’s a strange but established fact that a number of strains in continental philosophy are most readily found in university departments other than philosophy: post-modernism, critical theory, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, etc. I’d not previously thought, though, that this extended to phenomenology. Here is at least one example of this happening: It’s a podcast (not sure why it isn’t under iTunes Continue Reading …
Sebastian Gardner (via Philosophy Bites) on Sartre and Bad Faith
This Philosophy Bites episode focuses on concisely focuses on a key practical implication of Sartre’s picture of the self as a fiction as described on our episode: bad faith, which is a matter of identifying one’s free consciousness as that fiction, or more precisely, denying that the self is a fiction, that we each have a fixed nature that constrains Continue Reading …
Daniel Coffeen on Bergson’s Matter and Memory
One of the name-drops on the Sartre episode is Henri Bergson, a philosopher who was in vogue in France at the time Sartre wrote, famous among other things for promoting and anti-atomic epistemology. Kant, for instance, thought that we get our idea of number out of time, meaning that time is essentially something we can count. For Bergson, time is Continue Reading …
Quassim Cassam (via Elucidations) on Skepticism
I’ve been listening of late to more Elucidations (which we’ve written about before), which features Matt Teichman from our Frege episode. Their episode 23, “Quassim Cassam discusses transcendental arguments,” serves as a nice point of re-engagement with epistemology in light of our touching on that in our Sartre episode (and moreso in my Close Reading). Sartre, following Heidegger and possibly Continue Reading …
The Personal Philosophy of (i.e. for) Chris Hardwick in Early 2010
Ah, success. Fame. Money. A little of it whets our appetite for more, twists our priorities, and like your clothes in a public dryer that you have to sit there and watch lest they get stolen, it’s a source of stress. When we started this podcast, it was just a leisure time activity, something primarily for us, the podcasters, but Continue Reading …
I’m declaring a moratorium on Nazi examples in moral philosophy
OK, I was listening to the latest episode of Philosophy Bites, where Nigel “Daddy Warbucks” Warburton is interviewing Sean Kelly about Homer and Philosophy. I have documented elsewhere my love and admiration of Warburton and the podcast, so this is not in any way to be construed as a criticism. But a couple of things pushed my buttons. At the Continue Reading …
Paul Boghossian (via Philosophy Bites) on Moral Relativism
We’ve discussed Paul Boghossian and his book against relativism a bit in our Nelson Goodman episode. See my blog post on this from last year. In this interview on the Philosophy Bites podcast, Boghossian talks about moral relativism, giving some shades of the view: e.g. you could be a relativist about manners but not really about the underlying principles girding Continue Reading …
Buddhism Naturalized?
Given our recent exploration of moral theory, the excitement around our announcement of a Euthyphro episode and my own current interest in Buddhist thought, I guess it was inevitable that I would stumble across and then buy this book. Or perhaps it was that Mark mentioned it in an email which I had overlooked. In any case, the author, Owen Continue Reading …
Poetry Fights Back
If you’ve listened to our Danto episode, our Republic episode or read any Plato yourself you know that the Big P didn’t have a high regard for poetry. If you’ve listened to anything we’ve done over the last year, you know Mark doesn’t have a high regard for my blog posting efforts. I do start posts, but often times find Continue Reading …
Rationally Deferring to Bob Price on Empirical Christianity
I’d promised myself I was going to move on to ethics and stop posting about religious issues, but due diligence requires me to relay this follow-up to my discussion of Mike Licona claiming empirical support for the Resurrection. As I alluded to in my exchange with Ernie P. about empirically grounding Christianity, arguing about historical evidence is, at least when Continue Reading …