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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. 287: Roger Scruton on Beauty (Part One)

February 14, 2022 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On Beauty (2009), ch. 1-4, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. Scruton just died in Dec. 2020; he had taught aesthetics for more than 30 years, and this book provides an overview of issues in the philosophy of art. The chapters we read this time include an overview chapter, then  Continue Reading …

REISSUE-Ep 16: Arthur Danto on Art (w/ New Intro)

February 7, 2022 by Mark Linsenmayer 4 Comments

To anticipate our imminent return to studying aesthetics, Mark, Seth and Dylan newly introduce our very first episode in this area from way back in March 2010, featuring Mark, Seth and Wes discussing three chapters of Danto's The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986): the title essay, "The Appreciation and Interpretation of Works of Art," and "The End of Art." What  Continue Reading …

Ep. 286: Malebranche on Causality and Theology (Part One)

January 23, 2022 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Subscribe to get Parts 2 and 3 of this episode. You can hear previews of parts two and three. Hear this part ad-free. On Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), dialogues 5-7, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. Continuing from ep. 285, we've gathered more of the pieces of Malebranche's picture of epistemology, metaphysics, and science to explain his most famous  Continue Reading …

Ep. 285: Nicolas Malebranche on Knowledge (Part One)

January 9, 2022 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. 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 provided some  Continue Reading …

PEL Special: Nightcap New Year’s Party to Welcome 2022

January 3, 2022 by Mark Linsenmayer 5 Comments

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)

December 20, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. 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 literary works. Twain was  Continue Reading …

Ep. 283: Alain Badiou on Love (Part One)

December 5, 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 "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)

November 21, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer 11 Comments

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. Badiou is arguing against contemporary post-structuralist French philosophers like Derrida and Foucault whom he characterizes as denying the existence of truth. Philosophy as a  Continue Reading …

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

November 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 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)

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 …

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