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

February 14, 2022 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. 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  Continue Reading …

Phi Fic #19 “Death in Venice” by Thomas Mann

November 17, 2017 by Nathan Hanks Leave a Comment

In 1911, the great writer Thomas Mann (1875–1955) went on vacation with his family to a seaside resort in Venice, Italy. There, he came across a beautiful 14-year-old boy and it inspired his great novella Death in Venice. This experience sets up the central struggle in the story: where eros—or erotic love as seen in Plato’s dialogue Symposium—can lead one to recognize beauty in  Continue Reading …

How Plato’s “Phaedrus” Influenced Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”

July 3, 2016 by Ana Sandoiu 1 Comment

Death in Venice is one complex piece of writing. Besides dealing with homoeroticism (in 1911) and approaching complex questions of ethics, psychology, and aesthetics, the novella also manages to reference Nietzsche and Plato while making us empathize with someone who some might (crudely) just call a pedophile. Gustave Von Aschenbach, the protagonist, is an aging, famous  Continue Reading …

Art and Beauty: A Marital History

June 3, 2015 by Billie Pritchett 15 Comments

Art and beauty have a peculiar kind of relationship and have been uneasily coupled since perhaps the beginning of human history. This close relationship received its most formal expression with the 18th century aestheticians. But art and beauty have always been separable, as the 20th century demonstrated, even if the extent of their separability has been exaggerated. Art always  Continue Reading …

The Aesthetics of Football

June 1, 2015 by Chris Sunami 7 Comments

I was a painfully unathletic child, more likely to be found in a ballet class than on a baseball diamond. I could neither dribble nor shoot a basketball, an especially excruciating deficiency for a black kid growing up in the inner city. Football (the American version) was my particular nemesis. Not was the game itself frightening and dangerous, but the rules and scoring were  Continue Reading …

Soul Dust: A Well Supported Stab At The “Why” Of Consciousness.

March 30, 2015 by John Ludders 13 Comments

Nicholas Humphrey, professor of psychology at The London School Of Economics, is a leading investigator of  what philosopher David Chalmers dubbed the “hard problem” of consciousness.   His Recent book Soul Dust approaches the second part of the Hard Problem: why human beings have consciousness, and why consciousness should have evolved at all. It is an excellent read for  Continue Reading …

Episode 105: Kant: What Is Beauty? (Citizen Edition)

November 15, 2014 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

On Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), Pt. 1, Book 1. Kant thinks that finding something beautiful is different than merely liking it. It's a certain kind of liking, not dependent on your idiosyncratic tastes (like your preference for one color or flavor or tone over another) or on your moral opinions. He wants these judgments to be subjective in the sense that  Continue Reading …

Episode 105: Kant: What Is Beauty?

November 15, 2014 by Mark Linsenmayer 34 Comments

On Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), Pt. 1, Book 1. Kant thinks that finding something beautiful is different than merely liking it. It's a certain kind of liking, not dependent on your idiosyncratic tastes (like your preference for one color or flavor or tone over another) or on your moral opinions. He wants these judgments to be subjective in the sense that  Continue Reading …

Episode 77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty (Citizens Only)

June 9, 2013 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

On George Santayana's The Sense of Beauty (1896). What are we saying when we call something "beautiful?" Are we pointing out an objective quality that other people (anyone?) can ferret out, or just essentially saying "yay!" without any logic necessarily behind our exclamation? The poet and philosopher Santayana thought that while aesthetic appreciation is an immediate  Continue Reading …

PREVIEW-Episode 77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty

June 9, 2013 by Mark Linsenmayer 21 Comments

This is a short preview of the full episode. Buy Now Purchase this episode for $2.99. Or become a PEL Citizen for $5 a month, and get access to this and all other paywalled episodes, including 68 back catalogue episodes; exclusive Part 2's for episodes published after September, 2020; and our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and chat more  Continue Reading …

Topic for #77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty

May 20, 2013 by Mark Linsenmayer 7 Comments

On 5/16 the regular foursome recorded a discussion of The Sense of Beauty (1896) by George Santayana. What is "the beautiful?" Do we have a "sense" by which we grasp it comparable to what Hume describes as the moral sense? Listen to the episode. Where most pre-Humean philosophers considered beauty an objective quality in objects that people then can grasp (think about  Continue Reading …

Science Determines Beauty

June 5, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 5 Comments

This Reuters video (and I'm sorry about the 30 second commercial that you have to sit through to get to it) depicts "Britain's Most Natural Beauty," where the contest "wasn't just a matter of subjective beauty, but settled with science. Researchers said that the distance between facial features, and the width and length of the face are deciding factors for perfection." Some of  Continue Reading …

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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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