The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
A Philosophy Podcast and Philosophy Blog
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On Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), Parts 1 and 2.
What is self-consciousness, and how did Schelling think that it grounds all of knowledge?
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On Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800).
What’s the relationship between mind and world? Schelling thought that our minds produce the world, but also that the perceiver-world dichotomy comes to us as a single piece. “Transcendental philosophy” is an exploration of the internal logic of that revelation.
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Our second full discussion on The Vocation of Man (1799).
What are the ethical implications of believing that the world is all in our minds? You could be a solipsistic nihilist, but Fichte thinks the path of faith is unavoidable for a reasonable person: faith that the world is real and matters, that other people have moral status, and yes, he’s going to argue for God and heaven, though unconventionally.
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On The Vocation of Man (1799), Books I and II. What is reality?
Fichte’s armchair journey starts him considering nature and thus himself as determined, but then he backtracks to say that actually, experience doesn’t tell us whether we’re determined or free. In Book II, he argues that since our experience is always of something going on in ourselves, then causality, the external world, the self, etc. must be our own mental creations. So we’re free after all, yet everything is drained of significance!
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On God and the World’s Arrangement: Readings from Vedanta and Nyaya Philosophy of Religion with one of its translators, Stephen Phillips. Does nature require an intelligent designer? Śaṅkara (710 CE) and Vācaspati Miśra (960 CE), commenting on the Brahma-sūtra (ca. 200 CE) and Nyāya-sūtra (ca. 200 BCE), argue that it does against atheistic Buddhists, Sāṃkhya believers in a primordial matter that acts on its own, and the Mīmāṃsā conservatives who so venerated scripture that they ruled out a God who created it. But if we’re all Brahman (God), just trying to discover that we are and so escape the cycle of rebirth, then where is there room for a particular deity who created us?
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On “On the Nature of Totalitarianism” and On the Origins of Totalitarianism ch. 13 (both from 1953).
Is totalitarianism just an especially virulent form of tyranny, or something unique to the modern age? Arendt says that unlike other forms of government, totalitarianism is not animated by an active psychological principle that motivates its participants. Instead terror makes citizens incapable of agency altogether.
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On Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) with guest Brian Hirt.
How does the form in which we receive media affect how we think? Education theorist Postman (building on Marshall McLuhan) claimed that television has eroded our capacity to reason and given us the expectation that everything in the world must entertain. Is this a viable piece of social construction theory? How does the critique apply to the Internet age?
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On selections and commentary about Avicenna’s argument from around 1020 C.E. for the existence of God as a necessary being, plus arguments to prove that God has the person-like properties that Islam imputes to him, and his “flying man” argument for the soul’s essential independence from matter. Featuring Mark, Dylan, and our guest Peter Adamson from the History of Philosophy podcast.
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On essays from Lear’s Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (1988): “Inside and Outside the Republic,” “Eros and Unknowing: The Psychoanalytic Significance of Plato’s Symposium,” and “An Interpretation of Transference,” which compares Socrates’ questioning with psychotherapy.
Is Plato’s analogy between mind and state in The Republic a good one? What can we learn from it about what makes for a stable, healthy character? How does eros (desire) fit into this picture? Lear gives a creative, helpful reading of Plato informed by psychoanalysis.
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On Plato’s middle dialogue depicting the death of Socrates (390 BCE) depicting the death of Socrates. Should philosophers fear death?
In the course of giving arguments for the immortality of the soul, we get an elaboration of the recollection theory of knowledge (from the Meno) into Plato’s first full account of Forms. But how literally are we supposed to take the words of Socrates as he comforts himself facing mortality?
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On the later Platonic dialogue from around 360 BCE.
How is nature put together? Plato speaks through the fictional Timaeus (not Socrates) to give a “likely story” about the universe, physics, and biology involving a Craftsman (Demi-Urge) who created everything based on a pre-existing perfect model (the Forms!).
Timaeus derives his whole story from the principle that the world is good, and so the Craftsman must necessarily optimize creation, with any imperfections being introduced only by the necessity involved when a perfect blueprint gets embodied to create ever-shifting, impermanent matter.
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On Warspeak: Nietzsche’s Victory Over Nihilism (2020) with Dylan, Seth, and guests Michael Grenke and Jeff Black.
What’s a viable counter-ideal to the asceticism that Nietzsche thought is so pervasive? Lise’s book works out strategies for re-valuing that emphasize Nietzsche’s positive comments about the feminine and the power of words.
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On Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals (1887), “Third essay: what do ascetic ideals mean?”
Self-denial is necessary for disciplined action but can clearly go too far. N uses this concept of asceticism to analyze both geniuses and the masses. It’s a chief tool of the will to power, dangerous to human flourishing but also helping us to evolve. Does N’s picture of motivation and greatness make sense?
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On Reasons and Persons (1984), ch. 10-13. What makes a person persist over time?
After using various sci-fi examples to test the Lockean (personhood=psychological continuity), physicalist (same brain=same person), and Cartesian (same soul=same person) theories, Parfit concludes that the whole notion is incoherent and isn’t actually what we care about when wondering “will I die?”
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One last take on John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), covering Book II, ch. 21 and 28.
What makes a moral claim true? Do we have free will? What makes us choose the good, or not? In this coda to our long treatment of Locke’s opus, we bring together all he has to say about morality, which is strangely modern yet also just strange.
More on Book II (ch. 22-33) of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
On relations, then personal identity, with more on substances (spiritual and material), the various ways in which ideas can go wrong, and how mental association can entrench irrationality that disrupts clear thinking.
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On Book II (ch. 22-33) of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).
Simple ideas get complex quickly when you put them into words, and can give rise to various philosophical problems that are either easily cleared up when you figure out how the complex idea is built out of simple ideas, or if they can’t be so broken down, then we really don’t know what we’re talking about and should just shut up.
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Join the office party, where Mark holds mini conversations on philosophy, art, and life with all PEL and PMP co-hosts, plus Ken Stringfellow, Jenny Hansen, and the members of Mark Lint’s Dry Folk, whose 12 tunes are presented in succession with nary a partridge in sight. Will these 12 spirits turn you (or Mark) from errant ways? BYOB!
A 2011 episode on John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government (1690), with a fresh introduction connecting it to the present.
What makes political power legitimate? Like Hobbes, Locke thought that things are less than ideal without a society to keep people from killing us, so we implicitly sign a social contract giving power to the state. But on Locke’s view, nature’s not as bad, so the state is given less power. But how much less? And what does Locke think about tea partying, kids, women, acorns, foreign travelers, and calling dibs? Featuring guest Sabrina Weiss.
Hear the full, new reconsideration of this episode by Mark, Wes, and Dylan on the latest Nightcap available via partiallyexaminedlife.com/support.
End song: “Lock Them Away,” by Mark Lint (2003).
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Continuing on Book II (through ch. 20) of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).
How do we acquire our ideas of pain and pleasure, duration and motion? We talk primary (shape, size) and secondary (color, sound) qualities, the former of which are supposed to be actually in objects, and the latter just in our mind. Plus, is Locke really an atomist about experience?
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