Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), dialogues 1-4, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. Malebranche presents a rationalist epistemology that is more like an early modern version of Plato than anyone else we've read. He comes chronologically between Descartes and Leibniz, and Continue Reading …
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PEL Special: Nightcap New Year’s Party to Welcome 2022
Welcome to an extra special, intentionally public edition of Nightcap to catch you up on what Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan are all up to personally and intellectually and hash out what we want to potentially cover on the show over the next year. The next full episode (on Malebranche) will be released next week. Listen to this episode ad free. Image by Solomon Continue Reading …
Ep. 284: Mark Twain’s Philosophy of Human Nature (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On "What Is Man" (1905) by Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan and Seth. This rare bit of philosophy wasn't published until after Twain's death (maybe because it was too bleak?), but apparently reflects the mechanistic, cynical take on humanity that informed his Continue Reading …
Ep. 283: Alain Badiou on Love (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On "What Is Love," which is ch. 11 of Conditions (1992), supplemented by In Praise of Love (2009 with Nicolas Truong), with Mark, Wes, Dylan and Seth. In our episode introducing Badiou, we said that love is a "truth procedure," and here we see (sort of) what this means. Love is about Continue Reading …
Ep. 282: Alain Badiou: What Is Philosophy? (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On Conditions (1992), Ch. 1 "The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself," featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. Sponsors: Get connected with a licensed therapist at betterhelp.com/partially. Get 20% off your first box off cool stuff from at boxofawesome.com (code pel). Learn about St. John's Continue Reading …
Ep. 281: Paul Feyerabend’s Anarchist Philosophy of Science (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On Against Method (1975), the introduction through ch. 5 and ch. 15-16, featuring Dylan, Wes, and Seth. This book that began as a joint call-and-response project with our last author Imre Lakatos, but then Lakatos died and couldn't respond to what Feyerabend explicitly wrote roughly in Continue Reading …
Ep. 280: Imre Lakatos on Scientific Progress (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes" (1970), featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. In what way is scientific progress rational? Sponsors: Get connected with a licensed therapist at betterhelp.com/partially. Get 20% off your first box off cool stuff Continue Reading …
Ep. 279: Aristotle’s “Categories” of Being (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On the Categories (ca. 350 BCE), which purports to describe all the types of entities that exist. The participants are Mark, Wes, and Dylan. Sponsors: Get a free month of Great Courses lectures and lots of other great content at Wondrium.com/PEL. Get a free month's access to a vast Continue Reading …
Ep. 278: Derrick Bell on the Dynamics of Racism (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On Faces At the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992), a foundational text in critical race theory that presents stories and essays related chiefly to the philosophy of law. Lawrence Ware returns to talk with Mark, Seth, and Dylan about "The Space Traders." What is Continue Reading …
REISSUE-Ep 36: Hegel on the Social Dimension of Self-Consciousness
For our final 2021 installment on G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, we give you a second episode originally posted in 2011, where Mark and Seth continue from ep. 35 with guest Tom McDonald to cover the rest of chapter 4, focusing on sections 178-230. First, Hegel's famous "master and slave" parable, whereby we only become fully self-conscious by meeting up with another Continue Reading …
REISSUE-Ep 35: Hegel on Self-Consciousness (w/ New Intro)
Seth, Wes and Dylan newly introduce an episode from ten years ago on G.F.W. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Ch. 4A "Self-Consciousness," which features Mark, Seth, Wes, and guest Tom McDonald. Sponsors: Get a free month of Great Courses lectures and lots of other great content at Wondrium.com/PEL. Get a free month's access to a vast library of guided meditations at Continue Reading …
Ep. 277: Hegel on Our Understanding of Physics (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), ch. 3, "Force and the Understanding." What is "force" as physics describes it? And scientific law? Do these terms denote objects in the world, or models for how we describe the world? Sponsors: Get life insurance quickly and easily at Continue Reading …
Ep. 276: Hegel on Perception (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), ch. 1 "Sense Certainty" and ch. 2 "Perception." After introducing Hegel's project in ep. 275, we now walk through the first two steps of his dialectic where he presents some basic theories of knowledge and shows why they're inaccurate. Sponsors: Continue Reading …
Ep. 275: Hegel’s Project in “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On the Introduction to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's early opus (1807), featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. This is the first of three episodes on this very challenging book. It's a book that demands slow, close reading, and in fact we only had time to talk about just the Continue Reading …
Ep. 274: Schelling on Self-Consciousness (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), Parts 1 and 2. This continues from Ep. 273 and features Mark, Wes, and Seth. Sponsors: Visit Wondrium.com/PEL for a free month's access to the full Great Courses Plus library and more. Get free 30-day Continue Reading …
Ep. 273: Friedrich Schelling’s Foundationalist Idealism (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), introduction, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan and Seth. What's the relationship between mind and world? Schelling, as a young acolyte of Fichte, thought that our minds produce the world, but also that the Continue Reading …
Ep. 272: Fichte’s Idealist Theology (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. Continuing from ep. 271 to cover the rest (Books II and III) of The Vocation of Man (1799), featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan and Seth. What does idealism, the idea that what we take to be the external world is really just a part of the mind, entail that we do? It seems like we should just be Continue Reading …
Ep. 271: Johan Gottlieb Fichte’s Transcendental Idealism (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On The Vocation of Man (1799), Books I and II, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan and Seth. What is reality? Fichte is known as a key interpreter of Immanuel Kant who removed the idea of the "thing-in-itself," i.e. reality apart from how we interpret it, from Kant's system. Kant had described how Continue Reading …
Ep. 270: Classical Indian (Vedanta and Nyaya) Design Arguments for God (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On the new book God and the World’s Arrangement: Readings from Vedanta and Nyaya Philosophy of Religion, which presents two takes on the argument that God must exist because the world is a "product." The first is excerpted from the Brahma-sūtra (a.k.a. the Vedānta-sutra, compiled ca. the 2nd Continue Reading …
Ep. 269: Arendt on Totalitarianism (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On “On the Nature of Totalitarianism” (1953) and On the Origins of Totalitarianism, ch. 13 (added in 1953), featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. Totalitarianism was epitomized in fiction by 1984 but enacted in the real world in Russia under Stalin and what would have likely been the Continue Reading …