The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
A Philosophy Podcast and Philosophy Blog
Let’s get into the weeds! Your PEL hosts Mark Linsenmayer and Wes Alwan read and discuss tricky texts line by line for your amusement… on video or audio, just for supporters.
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Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. On "First Person Authority" (1984). What warrants our superior knowledge of our own mental states, as oppose to those of others? Why is this not obvious? Read along with us. You can choose to watch this on video: Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. How shall we break down the universe into basic types of things? Peirce has an idiosyncratic way of thinking about this problem and coming up with his division, revolving around the steps and presuppositions involved in predicating something. the latter Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. On "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism" (2008). Strawson argues that physicalism should not just be taken as matter in motion. Instead, the physical is a broader category that includes not just chairs and molecules, but also "my experience Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. Why are there two audio players in this post? Because the 1st one is the ad-free Citizen version. On Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, sec. 551-559. This is part of the reading assigned for PEL ep. 394 (see parts one and two), but we didn't get to Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. We read part of The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), specifically the parts about Homer's epic as an allegory for the merely apparent triumph of modernism (capitalism, instrumental reason) over myth (savagery, magical thinking). Homer is odd for H&A Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. On Ch. 2 "The Honest Soul and the Disintegrated Consciousness" in Sincerity and Authenticity (1972). This chapter focuses on a reading of Diderot's Rameau's Nephew and what Hegel made of it in the Phenomenology, so it's essentially for us a second opinion re. Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. On "Against Narrativity" (2004), where Galen (son of P.F.) argues that the prevalent philosophical and cultural camp is wrong. This objectionable camp (the Narratives) says that we understand our lives by telling ourselves a story about ourselves. Moreover, Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. On an excerpt from Soren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) that critiques Hegel's idea of logic (dialectic) and then argues for his own conception of "truth as subjectivity." In this first part, he's mostly focusing on Hegel. First Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. We're within the Self-Consciousness chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit, specifically starting at sec. 206, which is the transition between two sections we've already considered on this podcast: Stoicism (and Skepticism) and Reason. The more famous part Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get all previous and future installments of this podcast. Mark and Wes read and discuss the short 2007 article, "Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?" Here Bruno Latour complains that materialism as modern common sense conceives of it is actually idealist: It is a social construction. Instead, a "thick" Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get all previous and future installments of this podcast. On Franz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, ch. 7, B. "The Negro and Hegel." Hegel describes the abstract attainment of self-consciousness through recognition, but is this actually how it works in real slavery and its aftermath? Read along with us, p. Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get parts 2 and 3 of this reading, as well as our previous and future installments of this new podcast. While we modern folks have a generally clear distinction between law as in descriptive laws of nature and law as in ethical or civil commandments, these Medieval philosophers saw these as very much related if Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. On "The Problem of Christianity," vol. 2, lecture 12, ch. 9, "The Will to Interpret." The point is to help explain Royce's idea of a community of interpretation, and the idea is that in the very act of interpreting a single individual, I'm bringing in some Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. On Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Part C (AA) Reason, V. The Certainty and Truth of Reason. This section comes right after the self-consciousness sections, and so its big puzzle is why? Why is full recognition by another self-consciousness necessary for Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. In this famous, impossibly ancient (ca. 1900 BCE) Egyptian text, a man negotiations with the part of his soul that's supposed to help him in the afterlife. Can he kill himself now and still get all the benefits of an honorable death? His ba says no. Is this Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. Why are there two audio players? Because PEL supporters get this ad-free! From Disputed Questions in De Anima (1269) as presented in Thomas Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings (Oxford 1993), "Passage 18: Soul in Human Beings." The question is how Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. On Leviathan (1651), ch. 21, "On the Liberty of Subjects." Thomas Hobbes is known for defending absolute monarchy, so as you'd predict, he's not going to say we have a lot of "natural" liberties. We do always have the right to self-defense, but that Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. On Aristotle's Physics, book 2, ch. 8 on "final causation," i.e. purposiveness as a natural explanation. Modern science doesn't much like this kind of explanation, but Aristotle found it essential, and here's his argument for it. Read along with us. You Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. On "The Concept of Enlightenment" (1944), the first essay in this Frankfurt School book of critical theory, The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Our authors lay out what they take The Enlightenment to consist of, including some quotes from Francis Bacon, and Continue Reading …
Sign up for Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy to get previous and future installments of this podcast. Discussing the section on Stoicism in Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit," which is under "Freedom of Self-Consciousness," "Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness." This comes right after his famous lordship and bondage chapter, and explains how Continue Reading …
