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Is Capitalism Moral? (Reactions to a Video by Walter Williams)

October 12, 2017 by Mark Linsenmayer 7 Comments

Our upcoming episode #174 will be on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and we've scheduled a follow-up (#176) with Russ Roberts of EconTalk, so I again have economics on the brain, and am trying to figure out exactly what rubs me the wrong way about pro-capitalist cheerleading apart from its obvious association with some pretty despicable elements in politics, given that I agree  Continue Reading …

Penn Jillette’s Deceptively Simple Rhetoric of Libertarianism

July 25, 2017 by Mark Linsenmayer 28 Comments

One of our intermittent tasks here on The Partially Examined Life is to try to engage with current rhetoric in popular intellectualism. Our recent episode on white privilege attempted to separate the facts involved (race disparities) from the concepts used to characterize those facts ("privilege") and from what concrete actions could be used to address the actual problems  Continue Reading …

Hume on Religion: A Video Introduction to PEL Ep. 167

June 29, 2017 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

Here's the topic announcement/summary introduction (i.e. a precognition) for our next episode, introducing Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Watch on YouTube. The text here is the introduction I'll actually lead off the episode recording itself with, just as Wes just did on #166 on Spinoza. We're interested in hearing from you, both regarding whether you  Continue Reading …

Bojack Horseman and Aristotelian Self-Love

November 1, 2016 by Ana Sandoiu 1 Comment

The latest Wisecrack philosophy video takes on one of my favorite shows of all time: Bojack Horseman. Under the pretext of comedy, colorful animation, and talking animals, the Netflix original sneaks in heartbreaking moments of raw human vulnerability. Its main character—the eponymous Bojack Horseman—is a charismatic, depressed, washed-out actor who in his chaotic search for  Continue Reading …

What Is It Like to Be Ourselves? A Debate on Consciousness and the Mind

October 25, 2016 by Ana Sandoiu 22 Comments

“Consciousness is that annoying thing that happens between naps.” This is how world-renowned philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers defines the quintessentially human state in this debate, although his facetiousness is quite easy to detect: Chalmers famously formulated the “hard problem of consciousness” and built an immensely successful career around it. His  Continue Reading …

Rhythm 0, Marina Abramović, and Freudian Ambivalence

October 4, 2016 by Ana Sandoiu 3 Comments

As 21st-century humans, we like to think of ourselves as highly intelligent and morally developed beings. But every so often comes an artist who holds up a mirror so close to our face that we can see the fragile veneer of civilization crackle and slowly come off. Marina Abramović is one such artist, and in her 1974 performance Rhythm 0 she exposed humanity in all its primordial  Continue Reading …

Facing the Other: Performance Art and Emmanuel Levinas

September 21, 2016 by Ana Sandoiu 2 Comments

In one of our recent episodes, while trying to figure out what’s so special about the face-to-face encounter in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Seth mentioned the work of performance artist Marina Abramović. In 2010, the self-dubbed “grandmother of performance art” performed a piece entitled The Artist Is Present, which crowned her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art  Continue Reading …

The Hubris of Transhumanism

August 23, 2016 by Ana Sandoiu 23 Comments

The debates around futurist tech, biotechnology, and human enhancements are usually very polarized, with one side embracing it uncritically and the other rejecting it irrationally. Geeky technophiles who see science as the be-all and end-all of thinking want to push the progress farther and faster, sometimes leaving ethics behind, whereas the more romantically minded embrace  Continue Reading …

Song Self-Exam (Pilot and How-To): “Write Me Off” by Mark Lint

March 5, 2016 by Mark Linsenmayer 5 Comments

As an accompaniment to the Nakedly Examined Music podcast, I'm launching a project to collect song explanations from our musician listeners: Song Self-Exams. Now, I've long been doing something like this intermittently through my Nakedly Self-Examined Music posts on this blog, but video, where the song and the explanation are on the same video, is better, I think. Here's my  Continue Reading …

Topic for #125: Hannah Arendt on the Political, Private, and Social

September 26, 2015 by Mark Linsenmayer 7 Comments

You can watch the streams from the 9/25-9/26 Pittsburgh 2015 Continental Philosophy Conference on their YouTube Page, including our 9/26 episode discussion on Hannah Arendt. We have a separate (better) audio recording that will be released as a PEL episode in two installments on Oct. 12 and Oct. 19, and most likely combined with a different video to post our our YouTube  Continue Reading …

And now for something completely serious

March 23, 2015 by Alan Cook 2 Comments

Humor seems to be the Flavor of the Month here at PEL. We've had a couple of excellent posts about comedy recently (here and here), and another one is coming very soon. But in the midst of this, we shouldn't entirely lose sight of the inherent seriousness of philosophy; with that goal, I want to call attention in this post to a neglected classic, one of the foundational texts  Continue Reading …

Historical File 12-1

March 21, 2015 by John Ludders 5 Comments

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.” - Romans 12:1 It’s not news that The Matrix is littered with biblical references.  It’s also not news that the second and third movies are terrible. But, there is a Matrix supplement that is the best  Continue Reading …

New Work Entrepreneurs (and a Now-Bountiful YouTube Channel)

April 23, 2014 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Folks that were interested in our Frithjof Bergmann episodes last fall about New Work should subscribe to the New Work YouTube channel, of which I am the proprietor, with Frithjof's encouragement and cooperation. All of the videos previously created on this topic for bloggingheads have been reedited and put in a playlist here, and I have continued in recent months doing  Continue Reading …

A Heap of David Brin Links

March 30, 2014 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

If you wanted to hear or read more from David, the place to start is his blog Contrary Brin. Here also is a collection of articles, nicely categorized, which in turn links to this collection of interviews. A couple of the topics he touched on with us include the "disputation arenas" and self-righteousness as an addiction.  Continue Reading …

Not School Group Proposal: Zizek!

March 3, 2014 by Michael Burgess 2 Comments

PEL Not School

For March I'm proposing a Not School reading group on Zizek. The group will read a 25-page transcript of a talk he gave at the International Journal of Zizek Studies 2012 conference. It is, I think, a very nice summary of some of his key philosophical positions and where his current theoretical interests lie. The added advantage of this reading is that a recording of Zizek  Continue Reading …

Mark and Frithjof on Community Production at Bloggingheads.tv

December 17, 2013 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Watch at Bloggingheads.TV In this follow-up to our first video, Frithjof Bergmann discusses the concept of community production in more depth. To what extent is this actually happening now? Is it actually cheaper to produce goods in this setting than via mass production? Who pays for all of this? Some lingering questions get answered. -Mark Linsenmayer  Continue Reading …

Mark and Frithjof on Bloggingheads.tv

December 4, 2013 by Mark Linsenmayer 3 Comments

In light of our podcast discussions here and here, I'm helping Frithjof Bergmann launch what will hopefully be a series of shorter video discussions on New Work at bloggingheads.tv. We made our first recording yesterday, and it has already been posted: Watch at Bloggingheads.tv There shouldn't be much new here for PEL listeners who've already sat through our two  Continue Reading …

Robert Skidelsky on Work

September 23, 2013 by Mark Linsenmayer 10 Comments

Robert Skidelsky in How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life (2012) uses a 1930 essay from John Maynard Keynes (which you can read here) as a jumping-off point to argue, like Bergmann, that productivity gains enabled by past technological advances make it totally reasonable that we now should be working fewer hours than we are. However, Skidelsky's range of suggested  Continue Reading …

Topic for #83: Frithjof Bergmann on the Job System

September 12, 2013 by Mark Linsenmayer 20 Comments

Listen to Mark's introduction to this topic via our Precognition mini-episode. On Saturday, 9/21, we're scheduled to interview Frithjof Bergmann, Professor Emeritus from the University of Michigan, about his book New Work, New Culture (published in German in 2004 and due for English-language release this year). I've written on this topic several times on this blog already,  Continue Reading …

‘Don’t Act. Just Think’: A short comment on Slavoj Zizek’s critique of Activism

August 26, 2013 by Sotiris Triantis 39 Comments

[From Sotiris Triantis]   Slavoj Zizek - in a video titled ‘Don’t Act. Just Think’ - suggests that in the social and political realm we should not act but think. It's an odd, somewhat counter-revolutionary thesis.  Historical change has always been brought about by collective action. A more useful model might be: ‘First Think, Then Act’.  When Noam Chomsky was asked by  Continue Reading …

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