On Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978). With guest painter Jay Bailey. What’s the relationship between art and science? Does understanding works of art constitute “knowledge,” and if so, how does this relate to other kinds of knowledge?
PREVIEW-Episode 28: Nelson Goodman on Art as Epistemology
PREVIEW-Episode 27: Nagarjuna on Buddhist “Emptiness”
Primarily discussing “Reasoning: The Sixty Stanzas” and “Emptiness: The Seventy Stanzas,” by the 2nd century Indian Buddhist Nagarjuna. Is the world of our experience ultimately real? If not, does it have something metaphysically basic underlying it? For Nagarjuna, the answers are “no” and “no… well… not that we can talk about.” With guest Erik Douglas.
PREVIEW-Episode 26: Freud on the Human Condition
Discussing Civilization and its Discontents (1930). How can we live happily in society when happiness as a matter of fulfillment of pent-up desires?
PREVIEW-Episode 25: Spinoza on Human Nature
Discussing Books II through V of the Ethics. What is the relation between mind and body? How do we know things? What are the emotions? Is there an ethical ideal for us to shoot for? What is our relationship to God?
PREVIEW-Episode 24: Spinoza on God and Metaphysics
Discussing Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), books 1 and 2. God is everything, therefore the world is God as apprehended through some particular attributes, namely insofar as one of his aspects is infinite space (extension, i.e. matter) and insofar as one of his aspects is mind (our minds being chunks or “modes” of the big God mind).
PREVIEW-Episode 23: Rousseau: Human Nature vs. Culture
Discussing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse in Inequality (1754) and book 1 of The Social Contract (1762). What’s the relationship between culture and nature? Rousseau engages in some wild speculation about the development of humanity from the savage to the modern, miserable wretch.
PREVIEW-Episode 22: More James’s Pragmatism: Is Faith Justified? What is Truth?
On William James’s “The Will to Believe,” and continuing our discussion on James’s conception of truth as described in his books Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. Does pragmatism give ground for religious belief, like if it feels good for me to believe in God, can that justify belief? Is belief in science or rationality itself a form of faith?
PREVIEW-Episode 21: What Is the Mind? (Turing, et al)
Discussing articles by Alan Turing, Gilbert Ryle, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and Dan Dennett. What is this mind stuff, and how can it “be” the brain? Can computers think? What is it like to be a bat? With guest Marco Wise.
PREVIEW-Episode 20: Pragmatism – Peirce and James
On Pragmatism (1907) by William James and “The Fixation of Belief” (1877) and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878) by Charles Sanders Peirce. Is truth a primitive relation between our representations and things objectively in the world, or is it an analyzable process by which propositions “prove their worth” by being useful in some way, like by fitting well with other portions of our experience or being delicious?
PREVIEW-Episode 19: Kant: What Can We Know?
Discussing Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783). Do we have any business doing metaphysics, which is by definition about things that we could not possibly experience? With guest Azzurra Crispino.
PREVIEW-Episode 18: Plato: What Is Knowledge?
Discussing Plato’s Theatetus and Meno. In the Theaetetus, Plato considers and rejects a series of mostly very lame conceptions of knowledge and replaces them at the end with… NOTHING. In the Meno, knowledge is “remembrance” (maybe).”
PREVIEW-Episode 17: Hume’s Empiricism: What Can We Know?
On David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Hume thinks that all we can know are our own impressions, but that no experience shows us one event causing another event. So, causality must just be regular patterns of conjoined events.
PREVIEW-Episode 16: Danto on Art
Discussing three essays by Arthur Danto from The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986): the title essay, “The Appreciation and Interpretation of Works of Art,” and “The End of Art.” I understand you may not have heard of Danto, and you may think modern art is goofy, but you’ll definitely enjoy this discussion and the reading anyway. Note that Danto listened to this episode and liked it.
Episode 15: Hegel on History
Discussing G.W.F Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History.
Episode 14: Machiavelli on Politics
Discussing Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince and Ch. 1-20 of The Discourse on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy
Episode 13: What Are the Metaphysical Implications of Quantum Physics?
On Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy. Dylan Casey’s first appearance (as a guest).
Episode 12: Chuang Tzu’s Taoism: What Is Wisdom?
On the “Chuang Tzu,” Chapters 2, 3, 6, 18, and 19. With guest Erik Douglas.
Episode 11: Nietzsche’s Immoralism: What Is Ethics, Anyway?
Discussing The Genealogy of Morals (mostly the first two essays) and Beyond Good and Evil Ch. 1 (The Prejudices of Philosophers), 5 (Natural History of Morals), and 9 (What is Noble?).
Episode 10: Kantian Ethics: What Should We Do?
Discussing Fundamental Principles (aka Groundwork) of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785).
Episode 9: Utilitarian Ethics: What Should We Do?
Discussing Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation chapters 1-5, John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, and Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”
Episode 8: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (and Carnap): What Can We Legitimately Talk About?
Continuing last ep’s discussion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with some Rudolph Carnap from his 1935 book Philosophy and Logical Syntax.
Episode 7: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: What Is There and Can We Talk About It?
Discussing the beginning (through around 3.1) of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Episode 6: Leibniz’s Monadology: What Is There?
Discussing Liebniz’s Monadology.
Episode 5: Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics
Discussing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Books I and II.
Episode 4: Camus and the Absurd
Discussing Camus’s “An Absurd Reasoning” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942).
Episode 3: Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Social Contract
Discussing Hobbes’s Leviathan, Chapters 13-15.
Episode 2: Descartes’s Meditations: What Can We Know?
On Descartes’s Meditations 1 and 2.
Part 2 of Episode 1: “The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living.”
More discussion of Plato’s “Apology.”
Part 1 of Episode 1: “The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living.”
Discussing Plato’s “Apology.” Does studying philosophy make you a better person? No.
Episode 0: Introduction to the Podcast
What are we trying to do here? Why should you bother to listen to us?
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