Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Concluding from part one on Susanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key (ch. 8-10). We continue discussion whether and how music is symbolic, contrasting Langer's take with Scruton's on Eduard Hanslick: you can't just consider music as "intransitively referential" or referring only to itself,  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing our discussion from part one on the symbolic value of religion and its antecedents, primary at this point discussing Susanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key, ch. 7. We start out connecting this to psychoanalysis, and how what Langer calls "fantasies," i.e. symbolic visual  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing from part one on Philosophy in a New Key (1942), ch. 1-5. We start off by considering whether the hardware-software distinction with regard to our minds can help make sense of what Langer has proposed in saying that symbol-making is basic to us. Is she saying that we're more  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing from part one, we get into more detail on David Hume's "The Standard of Taste" (1760). Hume starts out with a paradox: On the one hand, we believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; it's not a property of objects but of the interaction between an object and an observer.  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Concluding our treatment of Roger's Scruton's Beauty (2009), ch. 5-9, from part one. We consider why we'd really be attracted to something that according to Scruton's account takes a lot of work. Dylan brings in architecture, which Scruton also wrote about, leading us to wonder about the  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing from part one on Beauty (2009), ch. 1-4. We critically examine Scruton's claim that apprehending beauty is cognitive and never merely sensory, which would rule out, e.g. there being beautiful smells or tastes. In the full episode, we also go into points from Scruton's chapters  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 3 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. We're concluding our treatment of Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688) with a full discussion on a different day from parts 1 and 2. In this preview, we focus on dialogue 6 where M. says why a proof of the existence of the external world isn't possible, yet we should believe it  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing from part one on Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), dialogue 7 where he gets into his occasionalist theory of causality. We talk about how this theory relates to mind-body interaction and the student character Aristes argues that there's nothing more intimate than  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing from part one on Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), ch. 1-4. We talk about the character of the intelligible world: It resists certain thoughts, like you can't make 2+2=5. It has the intelligible idea of extension in it, which is what substance in the physical world  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing from part one on "What Is Man" (1905). We work through Twain's metaphors for human nature: We're like engines made out of various materials, and these materials can be refined (through education, which acts to root out prejudice), though the type of material will limit its maximum  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing from part one on "What Is Love?" (1992). We go through Badiou's account of love as the resolution of the paradox that on the one hand, Truth is trans-positional, which means there's no separate "man's truth" and "woman's truth" (or any other division like that), yet the positions  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing from part one on Conditions (1992), Ch. 1 "The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself." What makes philosophy possible? Well, there are truths, and these come out of the four "conditions," i.e. mathematics (and science more generally), politics, art, and love. This precludes skepticism  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing from Part One on Against Method (1975). Given that according to F., epistemological conformity (getting with the scientific program) can't proceed by an unambiguous appeal to reason, how does it proceed? Through indoctrination, propaganda, and coercion. Even when we want a free,  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing from Part One on "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes" (1970). We try to clarify the difference between dogmatic falsificationism, the view commonly attributed to Karl Popper whereby a disconfirming experiment is taken to definitively refute a  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing on the Categories, in this preview we finish up our discussion of substance by talking about artifacts: Only "genuine unities" are substances, and hammers and cups, for Aristotle, don't count as such unities. Should being a cup be considered instead a property like being white?  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing from part one our close reading of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), ch. 3, "Force and the Understanding." We start off with the dynamic between the expressed and merely stored up aspects of force and how this relates to the forcing and the forced entities in the  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing from part one on The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), focusing on ch. 2 "Perception" after we quickly conclude our treatment of ch. 1 "Sense Certainty." Does Hegel's claim about the inadequacy of perceptual knowledge also indicate an incoherence in traditional metaphysical  Continue Reading …