In PEL’s foray last year into the understanding and discussing Indian thought vis a vis The Bhagavad Gita, the PEL team and their guest Shaam Amin did a great service in bringing forth the Indian system of thought to PEL listeners. As someone who has a strong background in both Western Philosophy and Indian Philosophy and founder of a podcast and blog on Indian philosophy Continue Reading …
A Glimpse into Philosophy: Pilot Episodes of a Short-Form Podcast for Your Consideration
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 …
Hume on Religion: A Video Introduction to PEL Ep. 167
Here's the topic announcement/summary introduction (i.e. a precognition) for our next episode, introducing Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Watch on YouTube. The text here is the introduction I'll actually lead off the episode recording itself with, just as Wes just did on #166 on Spinoza. We're interested in hearing from you, both regarding whether you Continue Reading …
What Epictetus Really Thinks Is in Our Power
The distinction between what is "up to us"—"under our control", "in our power," or if you prefer, "our business" (ep'humin in Greek)—and what is not up to us (ouk ep'humin), eventually becomes a central doctrine of the Stoic school and tradition of philosophy. This particularly so in the thought of the late Stoic Epictetus, where the presently much-discussed "dichotomy of Continue Reading …
Many Forms of Doing: A Surprising Source for Pluralism about Agency
[Editor's note: This is an excerpt from The Expansion of Autonomy: Hegel's Pluralistic Philosophy of Action by Christopher Yeomans of Purdue University, who was featured on our Aftershow on Hegel's Logic, which you can watch here.] Since roughly the middle of the last century, there has been a thriving philosophical debate about the nature of action. What is it that makes Continue Reading …
The Incoherence of Michael Sandel’s Critique of Liberalism
Subscribe to more of my writing at https://www.wesalwan.com Follow me on Twitter Introduction Michael Sandel is one of America’s best-known political philosophers, and helped establish his reputation with a widely respected and widely taught book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. He was also kind enough to make an appearance on The Partially Examined Life. Continue Reading …
Moral Sentiments and Moral Responsibility: An Interview with David Shoemaker (Part 1)
David Shoemaker is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University in New Orleans and on the faculty of the Murphy Institute Center for Ethics and Public Affairs. He is the editor of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility and founder and co-editor of the Pea Soup blog. I recently interviewed him via e-mail about his new book, Responsibility from the Margins (Oxford Continue Reading …
Science, Technology, and Society XIV: Ian Hacking
This post in the fourteenth and last in a series on Science, Technology, and Society. The previous post in the series is here. All posts in the series have previously appeared on the Partially Examined Life group page on Facebook. When someone speaks of the social construction of X, you have to ask, X = what? Ian Hacking (1936 – ) is a Canadian philosopher, historian of Continue Reading …
Science, Technology, and Society XIII: The Sokal Hoax
This post in the thirteenth in a series on Science, Technology, and Society. The previous post in the series is here, and the next one is here. All posts in the series have previously appeared on the Partially Examined Life group page on Facebook. Nobody is a social constructionist at 10,000 feet. –Richard Dawkins In order to ridicule the claims of humanist upstarts, Sokal Continue Reading …
Parables as a Guide to Jesus the Philosopher, Part 4: Imprudence?
The Unjust Judge In a certain city there was a judge... [and] In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, "Grant me justice against my opponent." For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, "Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out Continue Reading …
Parables as a Guide to Jesus the Philosopher, Part 3: Shocking Images
In the previous part dedicated to prudence, one of the parables I analyzed was "the Assassin" from the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. The question of why this parable is not in the biblical canon is an intriguing one. It may simply have been invented by the authors of Thomas, but it does not sound unlike Jesus to me. Now, as well as it being the only noncanonical parable of the Continue Reading …
Science, Technology, and Society XI: Constructive Empiricism
This post in the eleventh in a series on Science, Technology, and Society. The previous post in the series is here, and the following post is here. All posts in the series have previously appeared on the Partially Examined Life group page on Facebook. "What we represent to ourselves behind experiences exists only in our understanding." Bas van Fraassen (1941 - ) is a Continue Reading …
Camus’ Great Blasphemy and the Ethics that Followed
Albert Camus often gets lumped in with twentieth-century French existentialists, a crew known for its hardline atheistic membership. But Camus was something different, something much more blasphemous: an agnostic who wouldn’t revere God even if He did exist. Camus’s primary concern with God centered on the notion of divine justice. Could an otherworldly justice redeem this Continue Reading …
Parables as a Guide to Jesus the Philosopher, Part 2: Prudence
Part 1 of this series ended with my arguments that because Jesus was not a systematic philosopher, it would be helpful to elaborate his moral teachings in the framework of an ethical system, and that virtue ethics is the system best suited to this purpose, as many Christians have traditionally thought. Taking up this approach, in Parts 2 to 4 I discuss several of Jesus's Continue Reading …
Citizen Interview with Nicholas Humphrey, a Leading Figure in Mind and Consciousness
On May 1st I had the pleasure of conducting an interview with Nicholas Humphrey, one of the world’s leading minds in the fields of evolutionary psychology and the study of consciousness. The interview is a followup to an article in The Partially Examined Life blog titled “Soul Dust: A Well Supported Stab At The Why of Consciousness.” Our conversation focuses mainly on Continue Reading …
Epicurus’ Four Cures
As the annals of history have it, in the sixth century Emperor Justinian had all the schools of philosophy that competed with Christianity finally closed. This was the last we heard of the Epicurean School, whose tradition had remained culturally vibrant for seven centuries. Epicurus had been among the first to propose the atom (2,300 years ago), the social contract as a Continue Reading …
Science, Technology and Society X: Weimar Culture and Quantum Mechanics
This post in the tenth in a series on Science, Technology, and Society. The previous post in the series is here, and the next post is here. All posts in the series have previously appeared on the Partially Examined Life group page on Facebook. "Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are Continue Reading …
Parables as a Guide to Jesus the Philosopher, Part 1: Introduction
Jesus was a philosopher. If you doubt this, I'd like to persuade you by way of his parables, which imply a certain kind of ethical system with several key values. These include, principally, prudence, nonpossessiveness, nonjudgmentalism, humility, inclusion, and forgiveness. This is post is the first of several parts. In future parts, I'll address parables themselves. In Continue Reading …
Science, Technology and Society IX: Malthus, Darwin, and “Social Darwinism”
This post in the ninth in a series on Science, Technology, and Society. The previous post in the series is here,and the next post is here. All posts in the series have previously appeared on the Partially Examined Life group page on Facebook. “I came to the conclusion that selection was the principle of change from the study of domesticated productions; and then, reading Continue Reading …
Schopenhauer’s Idealism: How Time Began with the First Eye Opening
On the Schopenhauer discussion (ep #114), I referred to his view qua idealist that, really, there was no world per se before the first perceiver, but also that science is correct in investigating ancient history, i.e. the world before perceivers. How could both of these claims be true? This is a general problem that idealism must address, summed up adequately by the old Continue Reading …