The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

A Philosophy Podcast and Philosophy Blog

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Ep. 282: Alain Badiou: What Is Philosophy? (Part One)

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On Conditions (1992), Ch. 1 “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself.”

Against post-structuralists who deny Truth, Badiou argues that truths are generated by the truth conditions (politics, art, love, and science/math) which philosophy then thinks into a unified vision.

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Ep. 281: Paul Feyerabend’s Anarchist Philosophy of Science (Part One)

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On Against Method (1975). In dialogue with Lakatos, Feyerabend claimed that scientific progress can not be explained rationally, so how does it progress? Is F. just arguing against the possibility of any philosophy of science?

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Ep. 280: Imre Lakatos on Scientific Progress (Part One)

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On “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes” (1970).

In what way is scientific progress rational? Lakatos splits the difference between Popper and Kuhn to argue that some scientific research programs are more progressive than others, meaning that they make dramatic, unexpected predictions.

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Ep. 279: Aristotle’s “Categories” of Being (Part One)

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On the Categories (ca. 350 BCE), which purports to describe all the types of entities that exist. We mostly talk about substances, as A’s presentation raises interesting questions about, e.g. the status of the species of substance, and the rest of the categories (e.g. quality, quantity, relative) rely on substances existing. So how exactly do these other categories relate to substances, and why does A divide the world the way he does?

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REISSUE-Ep 36: Hegel on the Social Dimension of Self-Consciousness

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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.

We cover the famous “master and slave” parable, plus stoicism, skepticism, and the “unhappy consciousness” (i.e. Christianity).

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REISSUE-Ep 35: Hegel on Self-Consciousness (w/ New Intro)

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We re-introduce an episode from ten years ago that’s long been behind our paywall on G.F.W. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Ch. 4A, “Self-Consciousness,” which features guest Tom McDonald.

We’ve removed the “review” section of the old episode (the first half), because it’s duplicative of our recent three-episode run on this book. The discussion thus picks up in the book right where ep. 277 leaves off.

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Ep. 277: Hegel on Our Understanding of Physics (Part One)

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On The Phenomenology of Spirit, 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?

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Ep. 276: Hegel on Perception (Part One)

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On The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), ch. 1 “Sense Certainty” and ch. 2 “Perception.”

We walk through the first step in considering Hegel’s dialectical analysis of theories of knowledge. Sense-certainty claims that we have direct access to sensory particulars which can act as foundational. But can we really refer or point to a particular thing without bringing some universal concepts to bear, like “this” (which can refer to any number of things), as well as “here”, “now” and even “I”?

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Ep. 274: Schelling on Self-Consciousness (Part One)

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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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Ep. 273: Friedrich Schelling’s Foundationalist Idealism (Part One)

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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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Ep. 272: Fichte’s Idealist Theology (Part One)

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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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Ep. 271: Johan Gottlieb Fichte’s Transcendental Idealism (Part One)

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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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Ep. 270: Classical Indian (Vedanta and Nyaya) Design Arguments for God (Part One)

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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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Ep. 269: Arendt on Totalitarianism (Part One)

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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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Ep. 268: Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (Part One)

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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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Ep. 267: Avicenna on God and Soul w/ Peter Adamson (Part One)

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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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Ep. 266: Jonathan Lear’s Plato: Psyche and Society (Part One)

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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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Ep. 265: Plato’s “Phaedo”: Philosophy as Training for Death (Part One)

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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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About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

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