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You can also see them organized by topic. For episodes marked "Preview," you can access the full episode at our store, or you could become a PEL Citizen and get them from our Free Stuff for Citizens page.

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

October 24, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

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? To understand the state of the debate by Lakatos' time, let's run quickly through some history of the philosophy of  Continue Reading …

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

October 10, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

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)

September 27, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

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

September 20, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

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)

September 13, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

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)

August 29, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. 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? For Hegel, force is a way of talking about the metaphysical relation that one object  Continue Reading …

Ep. 276: Hegel on Perception (Part One)

August 16, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. 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. The first of these is direct  Continue Reading …

Ep. 275: Hegel’s Project in “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (Part One)

August 1, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 4 Comments

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. 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 Introduction (X pages) even  Continue Reading …

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

July 19, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 3 Comments

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. 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. If you're an idealist, and so think that all existence is somehow in our minds, then the key to any knowledge whatsoever would have to be an  Continue Reading …

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

July 5, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 3 Comments

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. 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 perceiver-world dichotomy  Continue Reading …

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

June 21, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. 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 solipsists and hence  Continue Reading …

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

June 7, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

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)

May 24, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

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)

May 10, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 9 Comments

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. 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 end-point of Germany under  Continue Reading …

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

April 25, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 4 Comments

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. On Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), featuring Mark, Seth, Dylan, Wes, and guest Brian Hirt, the co-host of Pretty Much Pop with degrees in linguistics and science education. Sponsors: Save 20% on an annual membership of at TheGreatCoursesPlus.com/PEL. See  Continue Reading …

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

April 12, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. On selections and commentary about Avicenna's argument from around 1020 C.E. for the existence of God (including 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  Continue Reading …

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

March 29, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 5 Comments

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. On essays from Lear's Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (1988), featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. How does Plato's philosophy hold together, and is it still something we can make use of in the modern age? Our recent explorations of Plato's Timaeus and Phaedo showed us how humanity is supposed to  Continue Reading …

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

March 15, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. On Plato's middle dialogue depicting the death of Socrates from around 390 BCE, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. Should we fear death? Plato's dialogue shows Socrates conversing with his followers immediately before his execution about the philosophical life and the immortality of the soul. Philosophy as  Continue Reading …

Ep. 264: Plato’s “Timaeus” on Cosmology (Part One)

March 1, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

Plato

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. On the later Platonic dialogue from around 360 BCE, with Mark, Wes, and Dylan. How is nature put together? Plato, speaking this time through the fictional character instead of Socrates (who is present, but only Timaeus talks after the first part of the dialogue), paints a picture of the creation of the cosmos and  Continue Reading …

Ep. 263: Lise Van Boxel’s “Warspeak” on Strategies for Valuing (Part One)

February 15, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Lise was one of the hosts of PEL network podcast Combat & Classics and a St. John's Santa Fe tutor. She passed away last year, but not before finishing her life's work, Warspeak, which evolved over many years out of her dissertation on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. Dylan and Seth are joined by guests  Continue Reading …

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