The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

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Available only to PEL Citizens: All of our paywalled and ad-free regular episodes in a single feed. That includes paywalled full episodes from the back catalogue, Nightcap and (Starting in September 2020) Part 2 of all episodes.  You can add this feed to the podcast app of your choice by following the instructions here. You can download them, listen to them here, or get them on the podcast app of your choice by following the instructions here. Not a Citizen? Join here.

Ep. 294: Quine on Science vs. Epistemology (Part Two for Supporters)

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Continuing from part one on "Epistemology Naturalized" (1969), we work further through the text, getting into what this new psychology-rooted epistemology might look like. Quine remains an empiricist in that he agrees that whatever evidence there is for science must be sensory, and that we learn language through the medium of our senses (i.e. no innate knowledge). However, this  Continue Reading …

Ep. 294: Quine on Science vs. Epistemology (Part One for Supporters)

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On W.V.O. Quine's "Epistemology Naturalized" (1969), featuring Mark, Wes, and Seth. What justifies scientific theory? The classical epistemological project found in figures like Descartes and Locke seeks to find basic, indubitable premises that serve to ground the rest of our theorizing. Quine begins by considering Hume's attempt to do this by claiming that all we ever  Continue Reading …

Ep. 293: Donna Haraway on Feminist Science (Tiny Part Three for Supporters)

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What? More Haraway? Yes! More Lynda? No, this is Mark, Seth, and Dylan on a later day, returning to the Haraway's "Situated Knowledges" with some second thoughts... at least for 20 minutes until Dylan's network crapped out, so we wrapped up. We try our best to make her actual argument clear and give you a better sense of her language. How does an "agenda" in Haraway's sense  Continue Reading …

Ep. 293: Donna Haraway on Feminist Science (Part Two for Supporters)

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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, feminist sci-fi, how causal and networking language fits into all this, and more. There's  Continue Reading …

Ep. 293: Donna Haraway on Feminist Science (Part One for Supporters)

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On "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" (1988), "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (1985), "A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies" (1994), and "Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin" (2015).  Continue Reading …

PEL Nightcap May 2022

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Recorded 4-15-22. We are old, and we talk about Seth's back, Wes' e-bike, and Dylan's kettle bells. Dylan talks Station Eleven (the book). He has posted this comic to Slack about liberal arts education. We then re-visit how to understand meaning in music given our completion of Langer. Does the blues as played on a certain occasion have to "mean" something? After a  Continue Reading …

Ep. 292: Langer on Symbolic Music (Part One for Supporters)

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On Susanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key (1942), ch. 8-10 ("On Significance in Music," "The Genesis of Artistic Import," and "The Fabric of Meaning), plus ch. 7, "The Image of Time," from her Form and Feeling (1953). Is music a language? If it's "expressive," what exactly does it express? Langer focuses on music to get at the sorts of symbolism associated specifically  Continue Reading …

Ep. 291: Cassirer and Langer on Myth and Ritual (Part Two for Supporters)

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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 images, serve to schematize our experiences. Langer's account may give us a route to say how  Continue Reading …

Ep. 291: Cassirer and Langer on Myth and Ritual (Part One for Supporters)

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On Ernst Cassirer's his An Essay on Man (1944), ch. 6-7, and Susanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key (1942), ch. 6-7. This discussion featuring Mark, Wes, and Seth follows the introduction of these books and the argument that we are primarily symbolic creatures in ep. 290. Why do people produce ritual, mythology, and religion? According to Cassirer and his follower Langer,  Continue Reading …

PEL Nightcap April 2022

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Recorded 3/11/22. We have the war on our minds, and so are looking to cover Kant's Perpetual Peace soon, and maybe something on "just war theory" (feel free to share your recommendations). Perhaps we'll also look at Cassirer's The Myth of the State. Wes talks about conspiracy theories, and Seth brings up more books about fascism that we will not read. We talk some more about  Continue Reading …

Ep. 290: Susanne Langer on Our Symbol-Making Nature (Part Two for Supporters)

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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 flexible (software-driven) than evolutionary biology would suggest, or does her claim that  Continue Reading …

Ep. 290: Susanne Langer on Our Symbol-Making Nature (Part One for Supporters)

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On Philosophy in a New Key (1942), ch. 1-5, plus as background most of us looked at Langer's main influence Ernst Cassirer via his An Essay on Man (1944), ch. 1-5. Featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. What is human nature, and why does natural science have such trouble studying it? Cassirer's massive, three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-1929) provides the  Continue Reading …

Ep. 289: Aesthetic Sense Theory: Hume (Part Two for Supporters)

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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. On the other hand, some works are obviously, objectively more beautiful than others,  Continue Reading …

Ep. 289: Aesthetic Sense Theory: Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume (Part One for Supporters)

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On David Hume's "The Standard of Taste" (1760) and its two main influences: The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody (1709) by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, aka the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Part III section 2 "Beauty," and An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design (1725) by Francis Hutcheson. Featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. How do we know what opinions about  Continue Reading …

PEL Nightcap Early March 2022

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Recorded 2/11/22. We give some brief psychoanalytic follow-up to our Scruton eps, anticipate Langer (which we are doing soon!), read a very nice letter, then talk way too long about ratings/reviews. When Dylan finally joins us, he talks about his stay now in Santa Fe where he's talking to someone St. John's Eastern Classics program (he's actually now talked to a few people)  Continue Reading …

Ep. 288: Scruton on Ethical Art (Part Two for Supporters)

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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 form/function distinction and whether that standard in architecture (the fact that a  Continue Reading …

Ep. 288: Scruton on Ethical Art (Part One for Supporters)

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On Roger Scruton's Beauty (2009), ch. 5-9, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. The latter half of the book completes the survey of types of beauty that we discussed last episode by considering issues in our appreciation of artworks, and then develops a moral and political argument for why relativism about taste, i.e. the "democracy of tastes" that says that all aesthetic  Continue Reading …

Ep. 287: Roger Scruton on Beauty (Part Two for Supporters)

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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. We also go into points from Scruton's chapters on natural beauty, human beauty, and everyday beauty. Appreciation of natural beauty seems to be something  Continue Reading …

Ep. 287: Roger Scruton on Beauty (Part One for Supporters)

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On Beauty (2009), ch. 1-4, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. Scruton just died in Dec. 2020; he had taught aesthetics for more than 30 years, and this book provides an overview of issues in the philosophy of art. The chapters we read this time include an overview chapter, then treatments of human beauty, beauty in nature, and everyday beauty (e.g. decorations, fashion,  Continue Reading …

Ep. 286: Malebranche on Causality and Theology (Part Three for Supporters)

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We're concluding our treatment of Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), focusing on dialogue 6 where M. says why a proof of the existence of the external world isn't possible, yet we should believe it anyway on the basis of "revelation," which means both Biblical (the Bible talks about things created) but also the "natural revelation" that sensation itself  Continue Reading …

Ep. 286: Malebranche on Causality and Theology (Part Two for Supporters)

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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 the relation of mind to body and how the teacher character Theodore smacks that claim  Continue Reading …

Ep. 286: Malebranche on Causality and Theology (Part One for Supporters)

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On Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), dialogues 5-7, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. Continuing from ep. 285, we've gathered more of the pieces of Malebranche's picture of epistemology, metaphysics, and science to explain his most famous view: Occasionalism, which is a theory of causality that says that God jumps in at every moment of causality. Is this view  Continue Reading …

Ep. 285: Nicolas Malebranche on Knowledge (Part Two for Supporters)

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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 is modeled after. This is an idea that is given to us as infinite: Space is infinitely  Continue Reading …

Ep. 285: Nicolas Malebranche on Knowledge (Part One for Supporters)

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On Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), dialogues 1-4, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. Malebranche presents a rationalist epistemology that is more like an early modern version of Plato than anyone else we've read. He comes chronologically between Descartes and Leibniz, and provided some foundational insights for Hume's take on causality, Berkeley's idealism, and  Continue Reading …

PEL Nightcap New Year’s Party to Welcome 2022

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Welcome to an extra special, intentionally public edition of Nightcap to catch you up on what Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan are all up to personally and intellectually and hash out what we want to potentially cover on the show over the next year. Thanks so much for being a PEL supporter. We really appreciate you and hope that your 2022 makes you happier and wiser. The next  Continue Reading …

PEL Nightcap Late December 2021

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Recorded 12/3/21. We announce the new Discord server, which has been out for a few weeks now for supporters like you to chat with each other (and occasionally us). Join it. We reflect back on Thanksgiving (yes, timely, I know... back in the old days before Omicron scared us so) and talk about not drinking any more. Follow us on Instagram! Does anyone want to volunteer to  Continue Reading …

Ep. 284: Mark Twain’s Philosophy of Human Nature (Part Two for Supporters)

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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 capabilities even with refinement. We also get Twain's concept of instinct:  Continue Reading …

Ep. 284: Mark Twain’s Philosophy of Human Nature (Part One for Supporters)

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On "What Is Man" (1905) by Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan and Seth. This rare bit of philosophy wasn't published until after Twain's death (maybe because it was too bleak?), but apparently reflects the mechanistic, cynical take on humanity that informed his literary works. Twain was a tech guy; he was interested in the machines of his age, and he  Continue Reading …

PEL Nightcap Mid December 2021

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Recorded 11/19/21. Mark, Wes, and Dylan discuss the effort by our previous guest, the now-former president of St. John's College, Pano Kanelos, to create a "free speech" college in Austin. This includes discussion of the literary canon as a concept. Also, future Kant episodes? Watch a video interview with Pano. Here's the pugilistic article about this by Niall  Continue Reading …

Ep. 283: Alain Badiou on Love (Part Two for Supporters)

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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 of man and woman are "entirely disjunct." Badiou puts this in terms of a "humanity  Continue Reading …

Ep. 283: Alain Badiou on Love (Part One for Supporters)

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On "What Is Love," which is ch. 11 of Conditions (1992), supplemented by In Praise of Love (2009 with Nicolas Truong), with Mark, Wes, Dylan and Seth. In our episode introducing Badiou, we said that love is a "truth procedure," and here we see (sort of) what this means. Love is about gaining a new vantagepoint the world: seeing it through the eyes of the Two. It is not a  Continue Reading …

PEL Nightcap Late November 2021

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Recorded 11/5/21. Between our Badiou episodes, we talk about potential future philosophy of science episodes (Polanyi? Hempel? Maxwell? Pickering's Constructing Quarks? Hawking?) and philosophy of mathematics episodes. A bit on Badiou's "On Subtraction," that was suggested for our coverage but isn't going in either of our episodes. Then we talk sobriety, things our sponsors  Continue Reading …

Ep. 282: Alain Badiou: What Is Philosophy? (Part Two for Supporters)

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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 about truth. Because there are many truths, Badiou's philosophy is pluralistic, but these  Continue Reading …

PEL Nightcap Mid November 2021

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Recorded 10/22/21. Post-Feyerabend, Mark opines on the reading whose episode he missed. Wes wants to learn new languages as an adult, and we all convey what we've done in that respect. Should we do more philosophy of science? Maybe Donna Haraway, i.e. feminist philosophy of science? We anticipate our next episode on Badiou and why we're not having a guest for it. Seth  Continue Reading …

Ep. 281: Paul Feyerabend’s Anarchist Philosophy of Science (Part Two for Supporters)

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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, rational society, we don't get this through reasoning with children and then citizens,  Continue Reading …

Ep. 281: Paul Feyerabend’s Anarchist Philosophy of Science (Part One for Supporters)

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On Against Method (1975), the introduction through ch. 5 and ch. 15-16, featuring Dylan, Wes, and Seth. This book that began as a joint call-and-response project with our last author Imre Lakatos, but then Lakatos died and couldn't respond to what Feyerabend explicitly wrote roughly in the form of a series of letters to a friend. Feyerabend agreed with much of Lakatos'  Continue Reading …

PEL Nightcap Early November 2021

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Despite our now having released both Aristotle and Lakatos, this is an aftershow to our Bell episode, specifically talking more about the essay we discussed in part two,  "The Rules of Racial Standing." What kind of discourse is Bell's recitation of these "rules" that he's observed in whose speech tends to make a political impact? In that discussion, John McWhorter came  Continue Reading …

Ep. 280: Imre Lakatos on Scientific Progress (Part Two for Supporters)

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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 scientific theory, with methodological falsificationism, which is what Lakatos attributes  Continue Reading …

Ep. 280: Imre Lakatos on Scientific Progress (Part One for Supporters)

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On "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes" (1970), featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. In what way is scientific progress rational? To understand the state of the debate by Lakatos' time, let's run quickly through some history of the philosophy of science: Early scientists like Francis Bacon saw science as providing certainty in the  Continue Reading …

PEL Nightcap Mid October 2021

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In the aftermath of Aristotle, Seth (who did the reading but missed the discussion) gives his impressions, and we look over the wide and strange range of texts attributed to Aristotle. We look forward to philosophy of science and more Aristotle (and Badiou) and think about our next potential celebrity philosopher and circle around yet again how many modern vs. historical  Continue Reading …

Ep. 279: Aristotle’s “Categories” of Being (Part Two for Supporters)

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Continuing from part one on the Categories, 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? Can properties be complex? We're actually not sure about natural objects like rivers,  Continue Reading …

Ep. 279: Aristotle’s “Categories” of Being (Part One for Supporters)

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On the Categories (ca. 350 BCE), which purports to describe all the types of entities that exist. The participants are Mark, Wes, and Dylan. The most important of these Categories is substance, a term which primarily picks out individual natural things (a particular person, animal, plant, or material) and secondarily picks out the kinds that group those things (e.g. the  Continue Reading …

Ep. 278: Derrick Bell on the Dynamics of Racism (Part Two for Supporters)

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Continuing from part one on Faces At the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992), with guest Lawrence Ware. We discuss mainly "The Racial Preference Licensing Act" (ch. 3), "Divining a Racial Realism Theory" (ch. 5), and "The Rules of Racial Standing" (ch. 6). The first of these essays plays with an idea (attributed to his fictional alter ego Geneva Crenshaw)  Continue Reading …

Ep. 278: Derrick Bell on the Dynamics of Racism (Part One for Supporters)

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On Faces At the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992), a foundational text in critical race theory that presents stories and essays related chiefly to the philosophy of law. Lawrence Ware returns to talk with Mark, Seth, and Dylan about "The Space Traders." What is racism, and how can we measure its acuity? Bell thinks that an argument that racism in America  Continue Reading …

PEL Nightcap Late September 2021

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Recorded 9/2/21. We talk about drugs: psychedelic experiences, microdosing, CBD, plus the drug of reading fiction (literary vs. popular). Then we talk about Alien (that Wes just recorded on for subText). Mackie on moral error theory. We anticipate our Aristotle's Categories episode. Plus vaccination and sorryantivaxxer.com.  Continue Reading …

REISSUE-Ep 35: Hegel on Self-Consciousness (Ad Free w/ New Intro)

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Seth, Wes and Dylan re-introduce this episode from ten years ago on G.F.W. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Ch. 4A "Self-Consciousness," which features guest Tom McDonald. We've removed the "review" section of the old episode (the first half), because it's duplicative of our recent three-episode run on this book. The old discussion thus picks up in the book right where ep.  Continue Reading …

PEL Nightcap Early September 2021

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Recorded 8/16/21. Seth thinks about how to continue reading Hegel and some initial political ranting about Texas and gerrymandering ensues. We think about what to read in aesthetics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of sport. (Update: the sport episode is not happening soon.) For the main event, we try to see what we can remember about the philosophy of emotions.  Continue Reading …

About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

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