Subscribe to get Part 3 of this episode in its entirety. On The Concept of Law (1961), ch. 6, "Foundations of a Legal System." This chapter goes into detail about Hart's "rule of recognition," which is what is supposed to foundationally make something legitimately a law in a given society. How can we identify something as a law? In Britain, Hart says it's when the Queen in  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 3 of this episode in its entirety. Mark and Wes recap The Praise of Folly. At the end of the book, Erasmus seems to reverse himself and praises the asceticism (preference of the spiritual over the bodily) that he's been otherwise making fun of. After all, he is a Christian, so his Nietzschean critique of pretention and stolidity can't be entirely  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 3 of this episode in its entirety. Concluding on “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1874), featuring Mark, Wes, and Dylan. Begin with part one. We talk more about Nietzsche's warning against information overload, where history (including artistic history and philosophic history) can overwhelm current creative capabilities.  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 3 of this episode in its entirety. Mark, Wes, and Dylan conclude our discussion of Shakespeare's play. We talk about the exchanges about art in the play: How does art relate to life and to commerce? In the full discussion, this leads us to consider more generally Shakespeare's language and how we moderns can be good spectators of these plays. Are  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get this recording in its entirety. In this hybrid discussion between Mark and Wes (is it a part three or a Nightcap?), we spent the majority of our time going through some more passages from Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love. Listen to our discussion with Peter Adamson first. This preview presents more thinking about love as reproduction and  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 3 of this episode in its entirety. Concluding our close reading for the moment of Heidegger's Being and Time, now up to chapter 3, sections 15 and 16. These sections are entirely focused on H's primordial ontological category of Being: "ready to hand," or equipment. Since we are primarily action-oriented beings, then, the world is not a set of  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 3 of this episode in its entirety. Concluding on W.V.O. Quine's "Epistemology Naturalized" (1969), featuring Mark, Wes, and Seth. Start with part one. We consider more implications about Quine's attempt to turn epistemology into psychology. In the full episode, we take one more stab at making sense of the indeterminacy of translation that is  Continue Reading …

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here. Continuing from part one on "Situated Knowledges" and other essays with guest Lynda Olman. We try to get at the practical import of Olman's scheme and get further into her use of metaphors and what those mean for her critical stance. We also touch on how metaphors relate to myths,  Continue Reading …

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 …